Hello everyone! I have a few general questions regarding submitting work to a publisher, and some answers would be very much appreciated! 1.Would submitting work from a school course or class to a publisher be allowable? (For example, if I wrote a short story, essay, etc for a class that I ended up really liking, and maybe wanted to submit it to a publisher on my own.) Or how about if I wanted to submit that work from class to a sort of online publisher or just any online sites in general? 2. If my work gets rejected after submitting it to one publisher, could I send it to other publishers or publish it on my own if I wished to? These questions seem to be related to things such as copyright and or plagiarism along with publishing in general. Sorry if they seem like very obvious questions! Thank You!
This is probably fine. I believe there are some situations where the school or university would own the right to publish it, but if you write something as homework I can't see it being a problem. Dissertations or entries to a school publication might be a problem. Yes. For short stories, many publishers won't allow simultaneous submissions, which means they want you to wait until they respond before you can send it to anyone else. Note that this isn't a legal requirement but a courtesy. Publishers don't care if the story has been rejected elsewhere--and in any case, you wouldn't tell them that they weren't your first choice! At any time, you can withdraw your story from submission if you want to send it elsewhere or self-publish it. Just beware that once you've self-published, the vast majority of good publishers won't be interested in publishing it again. If you would rather be traditionally published, exhaust your options there before you publish it yourself. Good luck!
