Finalist for the 2011 St. Lawrence Book Award
Finalist for the 2011 Flannery O’Connor Book Award
Finalist for the 2009 Bread Loaf Bakeless Literary Prize
Finalist for the 2009 Iowa Prize in Fiction
That’s the list of finalist-lists that my collection, Some Kinds of Love: Stories racked up before it broke its maiden and finally won the 2012 Juniper Prize from the University of Massachusetts Press last week.
And actually I’m pretty sure that I am missing one finalist declaration from Dzanc Books. I did not keep super accurate track of this finalist phenomenon. Here’s some of why:
Finalist lists remind me of place horse syndrome. Reading a racing form of thoroughbreds’ past performances, the handicapper may have her interest aroused by a horse recently finishing second. Then, unwinding more previous race data, she discovers the horse is GREAT at finishing second, in fact does so reliably. Horses are herd animals, and some have “place horse syndrome,” in that it feels intensely fulfilling and natural to run directly behind the fastest, dominant horse in the herd. To human perspective, the horse finishes second, a lot. Now to more seasoned gamblers, that sounds like another sure bet, not a win wager, but a place.
Sure, sure it does. Optimism reigns supreme when among punters at the track, publishers at the pub, and prospective fiction contest entrants at the post office!
That’s a little what the above felt like marketing Some Kinds of Love to the many fiction contests running in America. Second, second, second; a place horse if ever there was one. And short story contests rarely have publishing slots available for win and place and show. Some publish finalists, but not many.
Understandable why… If 257 manuscripts enter a contest at $25.00, that’s $6,425.00 in the win pool. That’s enough to pay out the winning wager at roughly 60-1 odds (in this case the $25.00 bet pays $1,500.00, and yes there is a kind of IRS window at this track). That leaves the house $4,925.00. Okay, enough parimutuel take for a paperback printing of a book, just the print costs.
I will admit to being a regular at the track for Some Kinds of Love. Scanning tickets for all my losing bets I see 38 to claim against this year’s winning. That’s right, since November of 2008, Some Kinds of Love (born and bred in Missouri; trained in Arkansas and Mississippi) entered 38 separate races all across America, often anually at some of the same tracks. It had even entered the Juniper Prize race before with no discernible result. (Tired, Lacked Finish? Outrun? Best of the rest? Stumbled at start?)
But the horse seemed a natural. Why not bet the copying, postage, and entry fee? (Punters, let’s say a cheer and encourage ALL tracks to adopt submishmash.com, which eliminates both the postage and the dead tree copy fees!) Why not gamble on Some Kinds of Love: Stories? Every story, all twelve in the collection had been published in a solid if not major American literary journal; one story had won a national fiction contest; one story was nominated for the Pushcart; and another had been shortlisted in Best American Short Stories 2010.
Of course, even the most rational gambler, after a long, strange race card, is susceptible to irrational superstitions and suspicions. Some contests name a HUGE field of finalists, with the natural and hopeful result that it sows optimism. After all, if the horse was a finalist last year, enter again! You are so close to winning with this nag! And there is no way to avoid the drunken gambler’s suspicion that it’s all rigged. Though now contests really have gone to great pains to make judges blind judges, both to the entrants submitting in that the judge may not be publicized in the contest’s call for entries, and in the judging in that judges have just the stories in front of them, all of which Juniper did, double blind so to speak.
After all these place horse finishes, here’s an odd joy to admit. I found on several of the above finalist-lists, writers with horses in the same races, placing as finalists again and again. Through the happy miracle of facebook, I reached out to a few of them, found kindred gamblers with horses in the same predicament.
In fact, if I were marketing at Press 53, or Dzanc Books, or Black Lawrence Press—three literary presses that stun me all the time with their innovations, their community building, their savvy—and since all these finalists are announced out loud in public on websites, I would have the race secretary design an invitational only allowance race. Sweep up two or three years worth of great short story manuscript finalists, and run them in an ultra-publicized contest of their own; get all the ink you could off this match race. After all, in crowd source speak, every finalist in one of these races has made it through a huge pack of runners, exploded from the final quarter pole having been read and judged, approved and at the last passed to a final judge, who at the wire deemed some other horse winner by a nose. I’ll bet there’s some serious overlay, literary value in every one of the horses finishing second this year.
Thanks for posting this. It gave me some insight into what goes on in the world of fiction contests, and it also made me want to cheer your tenacity. What I found astonishing was that fact that you had entered this manuscript in the same contest twice before winning! Congratulations once again. I look forward to picking up a copy.
Thanks a bunch, Bruce. Do you rep for UMass?
Excellent, Steve. Have you considered sending this to P&W every year? 🙂
[…] I do not remember much else about what he said, other than his expressing his amazement that someone who worked as hard as we must work could ever get anything written let alone published. In fact I do not remember much about the rest of that afternoon, though I was thankful he called very late in the day. Euphoria and university press publishing taken in combination do not lead to productivity. You see, despite all of the dozen stories in the collection being published in quality literary journals, such as Southwest Review, TriQuarterly, The Missouri Review, I was beginning to think after 38 failed entries to contests, that my dream of publishing a short story collection was a place horse. […]
I’m getting my collection ready to send out to contests, and I gotta say this post leaves me feeling blue. I’ve not had a short story published. I’ve gotten lots of handwritten letters about my stories from great publications, all filled with flattery and encouragement to keep writing and submitting. But no publication at all. Am I wasting my money to enter? Of course, I’ll enter anyway, just in case. But I feel really hopeless now. Editors like my stories, but say my writing is “different.”
Dear Jinx Marlowe,
First, thanks for reading this blog, and thanks for being moved to reply. I must say that the words
discouraged
and
writer
or
blue
and
writer
go together as naturally as a response and its ink blot in a Rorschach test. So you are not alone.
Since it costs fee money to enter contests, and many times postage and photocopying costs, too, I would advise this: Research the publishers sponsoring the contests. After all, you will be giving them your money! Do they make good looking books that are cool to read? Get some of the contest books and read them. If the fiction is good, and the book is handsome, that’s encouraging. If the fiction is awful and the book looks cheap, forget it. Most important: What is the marketing like? Have you ever heard about the publisher running the contest outside of the contest? Have you ever heard anything about the writers who have won the publisher’s contest? Look the publisher up online. Does it have a clunky website and no outreach, no other news about its content and authors? If this research turns up negative answers, think twice.
Marketing and commitment are really critical, unless you want to return speedily to the state of “discouraged writer.” One press that never published my collection, but that I think creates handsome books inside and out, markets superbly, dotes on its writers, follows their careers, blasts news out that manages to make anyone receiving the news feel like a community insider is Black Lawrence Press. I learned about them admittedly by seeing a call for one of their contests, but here’s what I did to make sure I wasn’t wasting my money: I signed up for Black Lawrence Press’s email newsletter, I visited its website, I went to my independent bookstore and asked the owner and staff if they had ever worked with or heard of Black Lawrence Press, then I had them order a BLP book for me to see how long it took and if it was easy for them.
Marcel Jolley won the St. Lawrence book award from Black Lawrence for his book, Neither Here Nor There. The book has one hell of a cover design. The type inside is handsome, and the stories are really cool, Pacific Northwest setting, varied, capable, funny, sad. This showed me that Black Lawrence was adding something good to the world, deserved my money, and was a publisher I could trust. Over the years it has been really impressive to see how Black Lawrence stood by Jolley, (see http://blacklawrence.homestead.com/jolley.html). That’s a great sign.
After a lot of willy-nilly submitting and wasting my money, I changed. I began to do this investigation described above with every contest I entered. I bought one of the books from the contest to see what it was like, looked at the press’s website and all the marketing I could get from the press, talked with my friends at the independent bookstore, Lemuria, in Jackson to get their impression of the publisher; only then did I feel comfortable committing my cash.
So don’t be so discouraged about not publishing stories in magazines. Many of the collections I acquired in learning about presses revealed that often the contest winner did NOT have an extensive list of magazine and journal publications! Whatever you do, be choosy. Seek a good home for your hard work, a publisher that makes books you would be proud of, and publishes authors who are creating good fiction.
I submitted to BLP’s Hudson Prize and the St. Lawrence Prize contests again and again because of what I saw in BLP. I never won. I still buy Black Lawrence Press books. I still get all their emails, and visit BLP’s website. I’ve even sought out and met some of BLP’s authors. And I still would love to be one of BLP’s authors. But I won’t be blue or discouraged. This is an exploration, a discovery. Spend your money wisely, and I think you’ll come through the experience with some knowledge and light.
Good luck, and onward!
Steve Yates