Mridu Khullar

The first time I heard a successful writer say that simultaneous queries weren’t going to come back to haunt you, I was relieved. The next time, I felt like heading across the oceans and strangling her.

My worst fears came true when after sending out a query to a national magazine and not receiving a response, I decided to try my luck with a smaller market. I was lucky alright. The idea sold immediately, I quickly wrote up the piece, filled it with humorous anecdotes and clever zingers and sent it off to the assigning editor, who loved it. The piece was to be published three months later.

Then I heard from the national magazine. They wanted it, too.

I cursed the writer who’d said that simultaneous submissions rarely got accepted at both places, decided I must be an outstanding one-of-a-kind writer and then freaked out. Big time. There was just no way I was going back to that editor telling her I wasn’t going to come through and killing any future chances with that magazine. I told her I’d do it, and with bated breath waited for the contract to arrive. In the meantime, I pictured the two magazines coming out in the same month, the editors of each red with fury, and me lying by the roadside mourning the death of yet another career choice.

Thankfully for me, the contract came bearing good news. The editors at both magazines wanted completely different things and the article I wrote for the national magazine wound up being half the size of the first, focusing more on expert quotes than my own experiences. It also ran almost a year later. Woo-hoo!

However, you may not always be this lucky. If you’ve been following advice from successful writers so far, you’ve been very specific with your queries. You’ve given names of experts, offered photos, maybe even described a couple of points that you’ll make in the final piece. How can you suddenly decide to change the focus of the article if the editor has liked what you’ve shown her? Nope. Doesn’t work.

So should you stop sending simultaneous submissions? Absolutely not! Just get a little creative with them, so that if two magazines come back with acceptances, you don’t have to think twice before screaming, “Yes!”

This is what you need to keep in mind:

-> Don’t offer the same idea to competing magazines. If both of them like it (which is unlikely, but possible), you’ll be in a very unenviable position. Instead, re-slant your ideas. Sending a cancer-fighting foods query to Woman’s Day while you propose libido-enhancing foods idea to Redbook works for everyone.

-> If you’ve worked with an editor before, it’s only decent that you give her the first right of refusal. So if you’ve written for The Writer, let the editor reject your query before you start asking Writer’s Digest to give it a look. It’s just a matter of building good relationships. Plus, if you’re sending the same idea to both, your editor at The Writer will not be impressed if it has already been picked up by Writer’s Digest before he/she had the time to respond.

-> Send simultaneous submissions to non-competing magazines. For instance, I once sent a “Fun with Digital Pictures” idea to a parenting magazine (“Fun Photo Gifts for Christmas”), a women’s magazine (“Snap it up for Romance”), a technology magazine (“What’s the Fate of your Digital Pictures?”), and a teen magazine (“Picture Perfect for Friendship Day”). Not only is the research the same, the ideas in all the above articles will be very similar too. If I can teach parents how to make a cartoon strip featuring their kids, I can certainly teach a teenager to do it for her best friend, too. Of course, I’ll present the same idea to all editors as perfect for their audience, but if you think about it, such gifts are great for just about anybody!

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 20th, 2006 at 3:47 pm and is filed under Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.