Why You Shouldn't Mass Submit

Why You Shouldn’t Mass Submit Your Writing

Say you’ve got a story or book about a haunted house inhabited by 27 lazy demon cats. Say it’s a good piece, and you have high hopes for it. So you do what seems like a really smart thing: find a whole list of agents or presses who are looking for fiction. You make sure not to leave anybody out, and of course, you don’t worry about word count or any other submission guidelines—after all, you want to have as many people as possible look at your demon cats! Then all you have to do is write a single cover or query letter, and hit send. And look at that, you’re done already! Why don’t more writers mass submit?

I’ll tell you why.

It’s largely useless.

Yes, there are definitely people looking for haunted house pieces in your specific word count. But not everybody in publishing works with horror, let alone the supernatural subgenre in 50k books or 5k stories. Now, you may think that just because someone’s website doesn’t say they don’t want your type of story doesn’t mean they actually don’t. Maybe they’ll read your piece and love it! So why leave them out? Dream big!

Here’s the issue: ‘Maybe they’ll read your piece’. Unfortunately, they won’t. Because this editor or agent has an inbox full of the romcom novels or 1000-word sci-fi stories they asked for. So they’ll take one look at your email, see horror or 6,000 words, and delete it. Your demon cats are not getting read.

You have to remember, these folks are getting paid to work with romcoms or flash sci-fi. That’s their job. If you got off-topic work emails that had nothing to do with your job, would you take the time to read and consider them?

So a huge number of those emails you just sent were useless. You’re trying to sell snow boots on a tropical island. You’re wasting your time and theirs. But you might think, so what? Surely some of the people I emailed do want to read about demon cats in my word count. And you’d be right.

But unfortunately, you’ve now made a big mistake with those folks too.

It’s a bad first impression.

Say your boss gives you a project and a choice of two coworkers. Both are nice people, but one takes the time to read the specs of the project so she can make helpful contributions. The other doesn’t have a good grasp of the project and thinks it’s not worth her time to figure that out. Which person do you want to work with?

When an editor or agent reads a submission email, what they’re really doing is auditioning a coworker. Remember, they’re going to have to work with this writer over weeks or months while they bring the project to completion. And you’ve just written them an email that says “Dear Agent/Editor” and is so generalized that it’s obvious you have no idea where you’ve sent your piece. It’s clearly a mass submission. You don’t know this agent or publisher at all and evidently, you don’t really care. That is not a good look.

If at this point you’re starting to regret mass submitting, there is more bad news, unfortunately:

You can’t fix it.

Because you’ve already emailed everybody you can think of. Which means if you find of a way to improve your query letter, there’s nowhere left to send the better version. And it gets worse than that.

Say an agent’s submission guidelines say “Please address me with my first and last name.” But you already sent them an email that reads “Dear Editor/Agent.” Say a magazine asks that stories be sent as rtf files, but your email already went out with a pdf or docx.

Say you have a personal tidbit to share with someone you’re emailing: you met them at a conference, you loved their client’s book or a story from their magazine, or you recognized some cute quote on their website as coming from a fandom you share. But you didn’t tell them.

The time to figure these things out is before you send the email. If you find out later, it’s too late.

Mass submitting may seem like a really easy way to get published. But publishing is unfortunately a slow process involving a lot more than just writing a good story. It’s safe to say no writer likes carefully researching an agent or publisher’s website as much as they like writing the story in the first place. But you’ve got to do both.

Thanks for reading! You can find lots more posts about publishing on my writing blog.