Roundup: Thoughts on Publishing

As we look forward to updating the Ploughshares blog for the new year, we’re also looking back at all the great posts since the blog started in 2009.  Our roundups explore the archives and gather past posts around a certain theme to help you jump-start your week.  This week we have posts on different aspects of publishing.

Ultimately, most writers are working towards publication.  We send poems or stories or essays to journals and wait, anxiously, for the response.  If we have a novel manuscript, then we’re probably looking for an agent or a publisher.  However, getting published is notoriously difficult.  Here are blog posts on a variety of subjects, from how work gets selected at Ploughshares to starting a literary journal to the drawbacks of being published.

• This “Behind the Scenes at Ploughshares” post takes you through how we select work from the slush pile for our issues.

• Have you ever wondered how a literary journal is born?  Weston Cutter interviews the founders of Cave Wall.

• Getting published can take years.  Christine Sneed explores the question “Why Is It Taking So Friggin’ Long?”  

• You finally get published, and then what?  Fan Wu discusses being published and what comes next.

• Just in case that post depressed you, Fan Wu followed up with a more positive post about how the internet can help you promote your work.

• Don’t worry, the internet isn’t going to replace physical books, at least for Greg Schutz.  He writes about the differences between online and actual bookstores in “The Book You Didn’t Know You Needed.”

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