This really isn't advice about publishing, so much as it is a story about how my first chapbook of poetry,
Transient, came about. Just after graduate school, I started writing quite a few poems about driving. I don't know, maybe it's because I was a part-time college instructor driving 500 miles a week between three different Michigan colleges. After about three years, I realized that I had about 30 poems dealing with driving -- the perfect size for a chapbook. As I went through my records, I noticed that six of the driving poems had been published in Parting Gifts magazine. With a little more research, I discovered that Parting Gifts was just one product of a bigger operation called March Street Press, all of which was under one editor. I contacted the editor of March Street, thanked him for his interest in my driving poems, and let him know that I had a complete chapbook manuscript of poems about driving. Long story short, I sent him the manuscript, and a few weeks later I was looking at a galley proof.
What's the point? Well, if you have a chapbook manuscript, it's in your best interest to send individual poems from the manuscript out to magazines. Most presses won't read a manuscript if at least a few of the poems haven't been previously published. It's probably also in your best interest to send your work to magazines that are in some way attached to a small press. If they take a few of your poems, you know in advance that they like your work, so you can then use that connection to try to work out a chapbook deal. Though it wasn't necessarily my plan going in, it ended up working for me.
If you are going to send to a small press, it also behooves you to buy a few books from the press. Not to butter them up, because most of these editors can't be buttered, but instead to help financially support them. The small presses are publishing the work that people will be reading fifty years from now. In fact, you can order a book from March Street's catalog by clicking
here.
