Guest post by Womagwriter Jane Ayres

Today's guest is Jane Ayres

Tenacity pays (eventually!)

For the past forty years, I have been a writer of books for children and teenagers – mostly about horses and ponies. I’ve been traditionally published, and also republished my out of print backlist using Amazon’s KDP, so I suppose I would be termed a hybrid author.

But I always wanted to get my stories for adults published in women’s magazines. I think far too many other writers radically underestimate the skills involved in producing work for this very particular market. It’s a skill I have struggled to master. I’ve lost count of the hundreds of rejections I’ve had over many years, and my admiration and respect for those who are successful in this field has grown and grown.

I did have a glimmer of success in 2002, when Bella magazine took a racy short story called Yes Please – but then wrote saying they thought it was too risqué for them, paid me the fee anyway, and wished me luck in placing it elsewhere. I sent it to Chat, who published it and I got paid again. I was elated. However, try as I might, I could not get any more stories published in women’s magazines. I never managed to crack the Woman’s Weekly or Fiction Feast markets and when they closed submissions to writers they hadn’t already published, I gave up. It was not to be and I had to accept that.

But The People’s Friend, another magazine I had been sending stories to on and off for nearly 20 years, still encouraged submissions from new writers and in 2018, aged 56, I felt more connected to the magazine than when I was younger. I could draw on personal experience, really writing from the heart. My partner is visually impaired, and often returns from his runs telling me about the problems he encounters in the local park, and what goes through his mind, and this gave me the inspiration for the story I sent to The People’s Friend in April 2018. In July 2018, when we were setting off for Heathrow Airport for a short break, an email came through from People’s Friend saying they had enjoyed my story but could I make a few tweaks by adding more dialogue to the first few pages? Of course I could! I wanted to leap up and down with joy, but then got anxious because I couldn’t do anything about the edits until we returned. So I quickly sent off an email explaining this, and as soon as I got back home, I immediately did the edits, and emailed these back.

August came and went. Perhaps they didn’t like the edits. Had I blown it? I was reluctant to chase, but I sent an email gently enquiring about the story. Nothing. So I phoned and was informed it was probably somewhere in the system and that it took time to go through all the stages of the editorial process. I just had to be patient. Then it was November, and December.

“They don’t want it,” my partner said. “Just forget it.”

But I couldn’t. I had got too close to give up. I rang the week before Christmas and to my surprise, Shirley Blair herself answered. She was lovely, and it turned out they had never received my email with the amends! For some reason, my emails weren’t getting through, so I re-sent a hard copy, which Shirley kindly acknowledged, and then I had to be patient again. Finally, in January 2019, the story was accepted, and soon after, the paperwork arrived, and I was paid. Staying on Track (renamed Back on Track) was scheduled to appear at the end of May 2019. I am so glad I was tenacious!

I’d had another little success in December 2018. A Christmas story I really believed in had been rejected by all the womags the previous year, and I thought it might work well for Your Cat, so in March 2018, I’d rewritten, sent it off and was delighted that it was accepted in September 2019, with a request to cut it from 2600 to 1500 words, which I happily did, and which improved it, and it appeared in their December issue with a beautiful illustration. Again, I received payment before publication, which was a lovely surprise.

My first port of call if I want to find out about submission guidelines is always the Womagblog, which has been invaluable. Without it, I would never have known about That’s Life Fast Fiction in Australia, never sent off a thriller/revenge story to them, (which had been rejected by UK womags) and never have been published in their 2019 Summer Special. What a buzz that gave me! Spurred on by this, I have since sent a further 11 stories to FF, but none have yet hit the mark, and recently sent off stories for the first time to Ireland’s Own.

I’ve checked my records notebook, and since March 2018, I have sent off a total of 38 stories, of which 3 were accepted, and the rest either rejected, or not yet heard from. Since People’s Friend took my story, I have submitted a further 6 stories to them, all of which have been rejected. I have sent 7 to Allas – 2 were rejected, the rest I haven’t yet heard about.

The only way to combat the feeling of disappointment at rejection is to keep writing and keep sending work out. I try to make sure that the same day a story is rejected, I revisit it, see if I can edit to make improvements, and then send it off to another magazine. Luckily, I enjoy the editing process, and a story undergoes many edits before I am ready to send it out into the world to find a home.

Most of the success I have had getting published has been with

magazines I enjoy reading myself. I have never lost the thrill of seeing my work in print, and am sure I never will. And that’s what keeps me trying. Tenacity is paying off – albeit slowly!

You can find all Jane's books here. The royalties from Matty Horse and Pony Adventures got to Redwings Horse Sanctuary and for Coming Home they go to Cats Protection. 

Jane will supply pdf copies of her books in exchange for honest reviews.