The Writing Life: Getting Published

You have written something good. Now what?

That question — now what? — is the one this course exists to answer. It is the question that arrives after the drafting is done and the revising is done, when you are holding a finished story or a finished poem or a finished manuscript and you have no idea what the world expects you to do with it. Where does it go? Who reads it? How do you find them? What do you say when you write to them? What happens when they say no, as they will, again and again?

I have spent my life on both sides of that question. I have been the editor opening the envelope — at Houghton Mifflin in Boston and at Clark Boardman Callaghan in New York — deciding which manuscripts moved forward and which went back with a form letter. And I have been the writer sealing the envelope, sending my own work out into the world, where it has been accepted a few hundred times and rejected many thousands of times more. I know what the desk looks like from the editor’s chair, and I know what the mailbox feels like from the writer’s kitchen. Very few people have sat in both seats, and almost no one in this building has. That is the only reason I am qualified to teach this, and it is the reason I want to.

This is not a course about how to write. We have other courses for that. This is a course about the strange, often unromantic, frequently humbling business of becoming a published writer — the literary magazines, the cover letters, the agents, the small presses, the contests, the residencies, and above all the long, honest, patient work of sending your work out and being told no until, one day, somebody says yes.

I cannot promise you publication. No one honest can. What I can promise you is that you will leave this room knowing exactly how the machine works, where the doors are, how to knock on them, and how to keep knocking after they have been shut in your face. That knowledge is not a substitute for talent or for luck. But it is the thing almost no one teaches, and the lack of it has stopped more good writers than bad writing ever has.

This course is free. It is for you. Let’s get to work.

— James F. Mulhern

The Writing Life: Getting Published meets sixteen times over sixteen weeks in the community room at 2601. It is designed for adult residents who have written something — a story, a group of poems, an essay, a novel, a memoir — and who want to understand, in practical and unsentimental terms, how to send that work into the world and pursue publication.

There is no charge, no grade, no library card required, and nothing to buy. What you will have at the end is a working knowledge of the contemporary publishing landscape and, more concretely, a piece chosen for submission, a cover letter drafted, target venues researched, a tracking system in place, and a six-month plan for the submission year ahead.

This is the eleventh course in the 2601 Salon, and it is in some ways the most practical of all of them. The other courses ask what makes writing good. This one assumes you already have something good, and asks the harder, lonelier question of what to do next.

This is a practical course in the mechanics of literary publishing. Each session pairs a teaching segment — drawn from my years as an editor and as a working submitting writer — with hands-on practical work: drafting cover letters, building a submission spreadsheet, researching real journals, reading real rejection letters, and assembling, week by week, a submission plan you can actually use.

We will cover the four paths to publication and where most working writers actually live. We will survey the literary magazine ecosystem from the top tier to the accessible-but-respected journals where many fine writers begin. We will write the three-sentence cover letter and the two-sentence bio. We will learn the tools — Submittable, Duotrope, Chill Subs, the Submission Grinder — and we will set up a tracking system that survives the realities of three-to-nine-month response times. We will write query letters and synopses for book-length work. We will talk honestly about agents: when you need one, when you don’t, and the red flags that mean you should run. We will tour the strong small presses by genre, the major first-book contests, the residencies, and the MFA question. And throughout, we will treat rejection as what it actually is: not a verdict on your worth, but the ordinary daily weather of a writing life.

I will teach this from authority, because I have done all of it. But I will teach it as a peer, never as a gatekeeper. I am not standing between you and publication. I am standing beside you, pointing at the road.

This is not a guarantee of publication. No course, no teacher, no agent, and no amount of craft can guarantee that your work will be published. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. What this course offers is knowledge of how the process works and the persistence to keep working it — which is the most any honest person can offer.

This is not a marketing course. We will talk briefly and honestly about author platforms, websites, and social media, mostly to help you understand how little of it matters for literary writers and how much of it is a waste of your finite time. If you want to learn book marketing, advertising funnels, and audience-building, this is not that course, and I am not that teacher.

This is not an MFA prep course. We will discuss the MFA honestly — when it is worth it, when it is not, the funded-versus-unfunded distinction — but I will not help you assemble application portfolios or polish a statement of purpose. Many published writers, myself among the skeptics, have done fine without an MFA, and I want you to make that decision with clear eyes.

This is not a sales pitch for any press or service. I run a small press, Silver Current Press, and I will mention it exactly once, in Session 12, as a working example of an author-run imprint and its honest tradeoffs. It is not a service offered to you. I will not solicit your manuscripts. I will not recommend any paid editing service, contest, or publisher in which I have a stake. This room is for your education, not my business.

Each ninety-minute session follows a predictable shape. Predictability lets you focus on the work rather than on wondering what comes next.

25 minutes — Teaching: One Practical Topic I will walk you through one specific piece of the publishing process — the cover letter, the query, the agent search, the contest economics — using real examples wherever possible: real cover letters, real queries, real rejection slips, including my own.

20 minutes — Discussion We talk it through together. You ask questions. I answer honestly, including when the honest answer is “no one knows” or “it depends.” The publishing world runs on rumor and anxiety, and an open, unembarrassed conversation dissolves a surprising amount of both.

35 minutes — Practical Work You do the thing. You draft the cover letter. You research three journals. You set up the spreadsheet. You write the query. The point of this course is not that you understand publishing in the abstract but that you leave each week with a concrete piece of your own submission machinery built.

10 minutes — Take-Home Action & Wrap Each session ends with a specific take-home action to complete before the next meeting. Yes, there is homework. It is not graded. It is the work itself.

I will show you the real evidence. This is the most important promise I make. I will not teach this course in abstractions. I will bring my own real submission history — my actual cover letters, the ones that worked and the ones that embarrass me; my actual query letters; and my actual rejections, of which I have thousands. You will see the form letters, the personal notes, the near-misses, and the long gaps. You will see a piece that was rejected dozens of times before it was accepted, and where it landed. I would rather show you one real rejection than give you ten paragraphs of reassurance.

I will be honest about the economics. Literary fiction and poetry do not, for the overwhelming majority of writers, pay the rent. Most journals pay nothing, or a contributor copy, or a token sum. I will tell you the truth about money so that you can build a writing life on solid ground rather than on fantasy.

I will not romanticize. There is a mythology around publishing — the breakthrough, the discovery, the overnight success — and almost all of it is false or vanishingly rare. I will give you the unromantic version, because the unromantic version is the one you can actually live inside for decades.

I will treat you as a colleague. I have been rejected more times than most of you will submit in a lifetime. I am not above this process. I am still inside it. Whatever I ask you to do, I have done and still do.

Bring writing you have completed. This is not a generative course. Arrive at Session 1 with at least one finished, or nearly finished, piece — a story, a set of poems, an essay, or the opening of a book-length manuscript. The whole course is built around getting your work out the door.

Bring your questions. No question about this process is too basic or too cynical. The thing you are embarrassed to ask is almost certainly the thing five other people in the room are also wondering.

Expect homework. Each week ends with a concrete take-home action. The course works only if you do it. Building a submission practice is like building any other practice: it happens between the sessions, not during them.

Bring patience, and bring it again. Response times are measured in months. A submission year is measured in years. Nothing about this is fast. The writers who succeed are, above all, the ones who do not quit.

Simultaneous Submission Sending the same piece to more than one venue at the same time. Standard and accepted practice at the great majority of journals, because response times are so long that submitting to one venue at a time would mean a piece could circulate for years. When one venue accepts, you promptly withdraw the piece from the others.

Simsub The common shorthand for a simultaneous submission. You will see it constantly in submission guidelines: “Simsubs welcome” or “No simsubs.”

Multiple Submission Sending more than one piece to the same venue at the same time — for example, three separate flash fictions in one submission window. Distinct from simultaneous submission. Some venues welcome it; some forbid it. Always check the guidelines.

Query Letter A one-page letter, used for book-length work, whose only job is to persuade an agent or editor to request the manuscript. It contains a hook, a brief synopsis that includes the ending, and a short bio. It is a sales document, not a summary of themes.

Synopsis A separate document, usually one to two pages, written in the present tense, that lays out the entire plot of a book including the ending. Its purpose is to demonstrate that the book holds together as a whole, not to entice. Frequently requested alongside a query.

Slush Pile The accumulated mass of unsolicited submissions awaiting an editor’s or agent’s attention. Every submitting writer’s work begins here. The term is not an insult; it is simply where the reading starts.

The Slush Shorthand for the slush pile. To “read slush” is to work through unsolicited submissions — often the entry-level task at a journal or agency, and the place where many editorial careers, mine included, begin.

Form Rejection A standardized rejection letter sent to most submitters, identical for everyone. It carries no personal judgment of your specific work — it simply means “not this one, not now.” The overwhelming majority of rejections are form rejections, and they mean far less than they feel like they mean.

Personal Rejection A rejection that includes an individual comment from an editor — a line about what they admired, or an invitation to send other work. This is a genuine signal of encouragement and is worth far more than its brevity suggests. It means a real person engaged with your real work.

Tiered Rejection A rejection whose specific wording (some venues use slightly different form letters at different stages) indicates how far the piece advanced before being declined. A “higher-tier” form rejection signals the work got close. Submission databases sometimes help decode these.

Reading Fee A fee charged to submit, common for contests and increasingly for some journals, typically three to thirty dollars. It helps fund the venue and, often, the prize. Worth paying when the potential reward (publication, a prize) justifies it; a waste when it does not. A literary agent who charges a reading fee, by contrast, is a red flag and should be avoided.

Response Time How long a venue takes to reply to a submission. Three to nine months is normal; a year is not unusual; and some venues never respond at all. Tracking response times — through the Submission Grinder or your own spreadsheet — lets you plan a submission year realistically.

The Gatekeeper A general term for any editor, agent, or reader who stands between a writer and publication. Useful as shorthand, but worth holding lightly: gatekeepers are also, usually, overworked readers trying to find good work in an enormous pile. Understanding them as colleagues rather than adversaries changes how you submit.

The Comp Title A “comparable title” — a recently published book similar to yours in audience or sensibility, cited in a query to help an agent or editor place your work in the market. Good comps are recent, successful but not blockbuster, and genuinely similar. “It’s like [a famous bestseller]” is a beginner’s mistake.

MS / ms Standard abbreviation for “manuscript.” The plural is “MSS” or “mss.” You will see it everywhere in guidelines and correspondence: “We accept unsolicited mss during our spring reading period.”

There is a story the culture tells about writers, and it goes like this. A young person writes a brilliant first book. It is discovered. There is an auction, an advance, a review in the Times, a prize. The writer is, suddenly and permanently, a Writer. The story is told often enough that we come to believe it is the normal shape of a literary life.

It is not. It is the rarest shape a literary life can take, and chasing it has broken more good writers than any failure of talent ever has. I want to offer you a different story, because it is the true one, and because it is the only one you can actually live inside.

The true story is quieter. A person writes. They write for years before anyone reads them. They submit, and they are rejected, and they submit again. A small journal takes a poem. Two years later, another takes a story. The pieces accumulate — slowly, unevenly, with long silences in between. A small press publishes a collection that sells a few hundred copies, most of them to people the writer already knows. The writer keeps writing. They are, by now, in their forties, their fifties. They have a body of work. They have readers — not many, but real ones, who write to say a particular sentence stayed with them. They have the respect of a handful of editors and peers who know exactly how hard the work is. And they have the work itself: the daily practice, the deepening craft, the sentences that are better at sixty than they were at thirty.

That is the long quiet career. It does not photograph well. It will never be the subject of a profile. But it is the life that nearly every writer I admire has actually lived, and it is, I have come to believe, the only writing career worth having — because it is the only one built on something that cannot be taken away from you.

Consider what the breakthrough story depends on. It depends on a verdict rendered by other people: the auction, the prize, the review. You do not control any of it. You can write the best book of your life and watch it disappear without a ripple, while a lesser book by someone with the right connections and the right timing sails past you. If your sense of yourself as a writer depends on that verdict, you have handed your peace of mind to strangers who owe you nothing and are not thinking about you at all.

The long quiet career depends on something else. It depends on the practice — on showing up at the page, on getting a little better, on keeping the work in circulation, on refusing to quit. All of that is within your control. The rejections cannot touch it. I have, as I have told you, received thousands of rejections, and I will receive more, and so will you. They sting for an afternoon and then they are simply weather. What they cannot do is stop me from writing the next thing, and writing it better. That refusal — to let the gatekeepers decide whether you are a writer — is the whole secret. You are a writer because you write. The publication is real, and we will pursue it together, seriously and practically, all sixteen weeks. But it is the consequence of the practice, not the source of it.

I want to be honest with you about the economics, too, because honesty is the only useful gift I have to give. You will almost certainly not make a living from literary fiction or poetry. Almost no one does. The money, when it comes, is small and slow. If you are doing this for money, there are a thousand easier ways to be disappointed. We do this for the other thing — the thing that has no name in the marketplace: the satisfaction of having said something true, in language as good as you could make it, and having sent it out into the world to find the few readers it was meant for.

So here is what I am asking you to do. Take the breakthrough story and set it down. It is not coming, and waiting for it will only make you bitter. Pick up the other story instead — the long, quiet, patient one. Submit your work. Track it. Persist through the rejections. Build a body of work over years and decades. Take the small acceptances as the real victories they are. And measure your life as a writer not by the verdict of any gatekeeper, but by the only thing that was ever truly yours: the work, and your refusal to stop making it.

That is the writing life. It is harder than the myth, and far better. I will see you in the community room.

— James F. Mulhern

I am qualified to teach this course for one specific and unusual reason: I have sat on both sides of the desk.

I have been the editor, opening the envelopes. At Houghton Mifflin in Boston, one of America’s oldest and most distinguished publishing houses, and at Clark Boardman Callaghan in New York, I read manuscripts as editors read them — deciding what moved forward and what went back, learning intimately what makes a busy reader stop reading and what makes one sit up. I have read slush. I have written the form rejections and the personal notes. I know, from the inside, what is actually happening on the other end when you send your work into the world, and I will tell you the truth about it. I have also worked as a manuscript evaluator, helping writers privately see their work clearly before they submit it.

And I have been the writer, sealing the envelopes. I have published novels — Molly Bonamici and Give Them Unquiet Dreams, named a Kirkus Best Book of 2019 — the novella A Prayer for Home, the short story collections Assumptions, Blindfolded, and Mia Bambina and Other Dark Stories (Silver Current Press, 2026), and the 2026 memoir The Weight of Small Mercies. More than 300 of my poems and stories have appeared in literary journals, which means I have done, several thousand times over, the exact thing this course teaches: write it, revise it, send it out, track it, get rejected, send it again. I have the acceptances, and I have many, many more rejections, and I will show you both, because the rejections are the more instructive half.

I run a small press of my own, Silver Current Press, which has taught me what an author-run imprint can and cannot do — knowledge I will share with you honestly, once, as an example and never as a sales pitch. Beyond all of this I am a Professor of English, a former Department Chair, an AP Consultant, and the recipient of a fully funded Writing Fellowship at Exeter College, University of Oxford — but it is the dual experience, editor and submitting writer both, that makes this particular course possible.

No one else in this building can teach this, and the residents asked. The work of becoming a published writer is a craft adjacent to writing itself but genuinely distinct from it — and almost no one is ever taught it. I would like to teach it to you. Not as a gatekeeper. As a neighbor who has walked the whole road and is still walking it.

The Writing Life: Getting Published is offered free of charge to residents of 2601, Philadelphia. No prior publication history is required or expected. To express interest, please email Professor Mulhern at [email protected].

Instructor website: authorjamesmulhern.com