Sarah Kanning

I gave a talk recently at a reading festival on “Finding a Home for Your Writing.” A lot of the content from that talk is relevant here, so I’ll be posting it bit by bit, but one thing that I forgot to include(!!!!) is Bonnie Hearn Hill’s concept of the Rule of Twelve.

This is from her book, The Freelancer’s Rulebook: A Guide to Understanding, Working With, and Winning Over Editors, which is a great for those writing magazine articles on a freelance basis, but also helpful for insight into the minds and attitudes of editors.

Anyway, the Rule of Twelve is basically that, generally speaking, if you are writing high quality work and sending to places that are appropriate, you’ll get one “yes” for every twelve (or eight, or fifteen, or whatever) queries you send out. Magazine freelancers typically send queries rather than the whole article, and if the editor likes the idea, they’ll ask for the completed story. Poets, fiction writers and essayists send out the completed work for a yes or no, but the principle still holds. Even for literary geniuses.

What this means to you: Set your Expectations Appropriately. If you are only sending out three or four submissions a year, you will get published in…a couple of years. (I know, there are exceptions, but chances are, even if your first submission is a “yes,” you’ll then have a long dry spell waiting for the next yes.)

For poets, fiction writers and essayists, this also means: look for magazines and journals that accept (grudgingly or not) simultaneous submissions. With six-month response times, you could be old and gray (or older and grayer) waiting to hear back to send out that particular story or batch of poems to the next place.

Question for you: If you are actively submitting work and are willing to confess, does the “Rule of Twelve” seem correct (and helpful) to you? How do you deal with the “numbers game” part of getting your work published? (The fact that even with good, polished work, not every editor says yes, and sometimes they say no for reasons that do not have to do with the quality of the work you’ve sent.)