This week’s task is short and sweet: Submit something.

Ideally, this means an academic article, essay, review, commentary, chapter proposal, or other appropriate piece of writing, to an actual academic publication venue.

While regular readers of The Prof Is In know that I insist that everyone publish while still in graduate school (for purposes of job market competitiveness), if for some reason you still are not, then for the purposes of this week’s career action submit a blog post, op-ed, newsletter essay, or other piece of public-facing writing.

The point of this week is to put your work into circulation.

If your first reaction to this is “I can’t,” know that you are not alone. Academics are exceptionally good at finding reasons not to submit. Kel’s coaching clients supply an endless variety: the argument needs another pass, you haven’t read everything, someone published something vaguely related last month, your advisor hasn’t looked at it yet, you have to wait for feedback at the conference, you need one more citation….. You know the drill. Feel free to put your own in comments below.

There will always be a reason not to submit your work. At a certain point, “I’m still revising” stops describing an intellectual process and starts describing avoidance.

Publishing, though, does require a different skill from writing. It’s less about your ideas and more about your… chutzpah? The nerve to declare a piece finished enough to leave your hands. That is a skill, and like every other skill, it improves through repetition. Because the truth is, nothing is ever perfect. The thing you send out WILL have flaws. It will!  But you send it anyway.

I feel like I can already hear you freaking out.

But don’t freak out. I’m not saying to submit careless work. It’s ok to revise for awhile, and it’s certainly ok to get comments and edits from your advisor or a trusted reader.

I just want you to recognize that your private standard for “ready” may bear very little relationship to the standard actually required for submission. This is where Imposter Syndrome comes in, especially if you are a woman, or anyone from a marginalized perspective. You are TOO hard on yourself, and TOO ready to believe that you are not ready to swim with the big fish. You are. You are ready.

You are not deciding whether the piece deserves to be engraved on a monument. You are deciding whether it is developed enough for an editor or reviewers to evaluate as a decent contribution to your field.

And remember too, the industry standard here is: revise and resubmit. You WILL get revisions and suggestions. They WILL find fault or take issue with some of your approaches or your writing.

Guess what? You won’t die.

Peer review means smart people read your stuff and engage closely with it. There’s almost no such thing as: “this is brilliant we must publish immediately.” No. They send you pages of close comments. Some positive, a lot less positive. If the reviewers are professionals, all will be couched to make the piece better. I know not all reviewers are professional. The whole “Reviewer 2” meme attests to that. But in general, I think most folks work to maintain a certain standard.

The takeaway here, though, is that you are not required to have anticipated every criticism before anyone is permitted to criticize your work. That is an impossibility. You can only do your best, and your best will have gaps. Because you are human. And humans are not perfect.

Your job is to take up a legible topic in your field, gather sufficient and appropriate sources to analyze it well, make a reasonably original, coherent argument about it, support your argument with evidence (whatever evidence your field acknowledges), write with clear organization and without excessive jargon or redundancies, signal the wider contribution of your topic and argument, then proofread the manuscript, confirm that it follows the publication’s editorial requirements, and send it…. and then let the process do its job.

This week’s exercise requires that you make a careful, methodical choice about where to submit your piece. Look at the journal, magazine, site, newsletter, or publication you want to approach. Read its submission guidelines. Look at what it actually publishes. Ask yourself:

• Does my piece belong here?
• Is it approximately the right length?
• Does it speak to this audience?
• Does it fit the publication’s scope?
• Can I explain in two sentences why this piece belongs there?
• Is this journal sufficiently high status to yield the professional outcomes I want

If yes, proceed.

If no, choose another venue.

In the process of choosing your venue not spend three days constructing a spreadsheet of 47 theoretically possible journals. You need a plausible destination, not a comprehensive taxonomy of publishing. Instead, consider around three. It’s fine to confer with your advisor or a trusted colleague about this list.

Next, give yourself a submission deadline. Preferably, this week. Put a day and time on it, literally in your diary -“Friday at 3:00 p.m., I submit.” A deadline forces you to distinguish between revisions that materially improve the piece and revisions that simply make you feel temporarily safer.

In the final stretch, prioritize the things that matter:

• Make the central claim unmistakable
• Make sure the opening tells readers why they should care
• Cut unnecessary throat-clearing and endless citations to other peoples’ work
• Check that each major section advances the argument
• Strengthen the conclusion
• Signal the wider contribution/significance
• Eradicate jargon and redundancies
• Verify citations and factual claims
• Follow the submission guidelines exactly
• Proofread
• Send.

Please notice what is not on the above list: “Become completely certain that everyone will like it and therefore like you, and you will receive no critiques, ever.”

That option is not available to you.

And yes, sometimes pieces do get rejected! They do! Almost every scholar has a rejection story.

I know it’s hard to believe, but rejection is not evidence that submitting was a mistake or that you are worthless as a scholar, or that your entire PhD was a horrible error.  Especially for early-career academics. When you submit, you may get rejected. This means you closely consider the reasons why (bad match? poor argument? lack of evidence? unclear writing? something else?) revise, redirect, and submit again.

The reason that a rejection does not retroactively turn submission into a bad decision is because the act of submitting created information. Now you know something about the piece, the venue, and the experience of publishing that you did not know while the manuscript was just sitting on your laptop.All of this information makes you a better scholar in the long run, as well as a more experienced academic and colleague.

The scholars who publish consistently are not necessarily people who experience less anxiety about their work. Often, they are simply people who have developed a higher tolerance for letting imperfect work enter a professional process. Trust me when I tell you, this DOES get easier with practice.

If you don’t have an academic article ready, don’t wait until you magically have time to write 8000 words. Write something smaller. While the peer review publishing process is entirely unique, and uniquely valuable in your professional development, any sort of “press publish” can be an exercise in exposure therapy to the act of submitting your writing.

So, if you lack the material for a long peer reviewed piece then take one idea that you know well and turn it into a blog post. You could explain a misconception in your field or respond to a current debate. The job is to translate one piece of your research for a general audience. Then cold-call a blog in your area, and ask if they’re willing to post it!  Trust me, I field requests for guest posts every single day at The Professor Is In. I publish some of them. Just search “guest post” on here and you’ll see how many hundreds of the years.

Public writing is useful for another reason: it makes you practice having a point. Academic prose can provide endless places to hide behind obscure language, whereas short pieces do not You have to decide what you are saying, why it matters, and what you want the reader to understand when they finish, in a short number of words. That discipline will improve your academic writing too.

So, your mission this week:  the end of this week, move one piece of writing from laptop to submitted. Choose the piece, choose the venue, give yourself a deadline, do the necessary revision and then press Submit.

Once you’ve done that, record where and when you submitted it, note when you should follow up if necessary, and move on to the next piece of work. A sustainable writing career is built by developing a practice of finishing, submitting, receiving responses, revising, and submitting again. Don’t wait. And good luck! I’d love to hear how it goes!