How Publishing in the Right Lit Mag Turned into My Debut Title
Through the 1970’s if you wanted a book published, it was easy. Well, not easy, per se, you still had to write it, but at least publication felt accessible. You wrote a short story, sold it to a literary magazine (note I said “sold,” because back then litmags paid), and waited to be discovered. Literary agents actively read these magazines that miraculously paid and, when they found a story they liked, would ask the editor to connect them.
That’s how Philip Roth got discovered: His short story “The Kind of Person I Am” published in The New Yorker in 1958 (which accepted from slush back then), then in 1959, hello Goodbye, Columbus — big bam, boom. Joyce Carol Oates, Raymond Carver — heck, even as far back as Charles Dickens, the rule was get your work in a “little mag” first, then you hit the big time.
It’s easy to say that was yesterday’s dream, that no one today gets published this way now, but then you’d ask how I sold my debut title and I’d have to say, “Exactly like that.”
Well, let me take that back: not exactly. Sort of.
The practice of being “discovered” pretty much stopped in the 80’s or 90’s, but my high school and college writing teachers didn’t know that. All through my youth, they pushed the publish to be published route, so that’s the way I went. I…
