Finding a Home for Your Work
WHEN Leslie Jamison first heard about the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize, in 2011, the discovery changed the trajectory of her career. Her first novel, The Gin Closet, had come out with the Free Press, a now-shuttered imprint of Simon & Schuster, a year earlier; she was writing essays but not yet thinking in terms of a book. “I loved Graywolf’s poetry books and felt a sense of kinship with the work they were putting into the world,” she says, “and somehow the idea of this contest got me thinking about what might happen if I assembled my essays into a collection.”
Three years later Jamison’s essay collection The Empathy Exams had won the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize and become a New York Times best-seller. Jamison credits the prize itself—“the possibility of a book that wouldn’t have to get past all the traditional gatekeepers”—with allowing her the freedom to assemble this blend of reported, personal, and critical essays into a single collection. “Something about the forum of the contest made it feel more possible to dream of a book that didn’t look like other books that were out there.”
Finding a home for a book—or for a single essay, story, or poem—isn’t always this straightforward, of course. There are four main ways that books and individual pieces get picked up and published—through agented submissions, solicitations, contests, and open reading periods—and the savvy writer must weigh the pros and cons of each approach. If you don’t yet have an agent or an established reputation or platform, or if you prefer to manage your own submissions, you’ll likely be choosing between one of the latter two options. But which makes the most sense for you and your work: contests or open reading periods? Every year hundreds of writing contests administered by presses, magazines, literary nonprofits, universities, and other sponsoring organizations offer publication to one or more winning submissions. And most magazines and many indie presses run
