How to Get Your Personal Essay Published in Open Secrets Magazine
Writing tips and submission advice from Open Secrets Magazine editor Rachel Kramer Bussel
Open Secrets Magazine editor Rachel Kramer Bussel here. Since we’re in a new year, have published over 70 personal essays, along with memoir excerpts, will be celebrating two years of publishing Open Secrets Magazine in April 2025 (here’s our very first essay), and are hosting our first event, personal storytelling summit Open Secrets Live on May 3 in New York City, I decided to launch several new columns this year, in addition to our Dear Daddy advice column.
This one will feature essay writing tips and advice, as well as general guidance about how to go about the business of being an essay writer, by rotating authors. This post will be free, but future posts in this category will be for paid subscribers only.
I decided to open this column with my tips on getting published in Open Secrets Magazine, to try to save my limited time as a new mom, and to save writers time so they aren’t submitting the kind of writing that’s unlikely to get accepted. Currently, we are only accepting personal essay submissions for our new Climate vertical. Here are the Climate section essay writing guidelines. If we get enough paid subscribers, donations, and/or grants or other funding, I hope to issue a new general call for essays later in the spring. To all who you submitted to our previous calls for essays, thank you, whether or not we were able to publish your work.
My biggest writing tip, which applies to submitting essays to Open Secrets Magazine or anywhere else, is to closely read the publication you plan to submit work to. I tend to write highly detailed writing guidelines, a practice I developed after editing dozens of anthologies, in order to cut back on receiving work that doesn’t fit what I’m looking for.
After our first Open Secrets Magazine call for submissions, I realized that many writers submitting their work were unfamiliar with what we publish, which was reflected in their submissions, so I changed our guidelines to require submitters to be subscribers. Yes, that also helps us build a following, but the main reason was to try to ensure that those sending me their work were aware of the types of writing we publish. Also, since these are personal essays, write them yourself. Don’t use AI and think it can replicate your voice.
My next writing tip is: Be unique! I sometimes receive multiple essays on a given subject that, when read back to back, tend to blend together in my mind, even if they’re well written. I can’t speak for other editors, but I can say I’m looking for memorable, emotionally resonant essays, the kind that make readers think and feel, that make them feel less alone, that make them return to that essay or cite it when talking to friends.
I believe that part of why Rob Hart’s essay “After a Splashy Book Deal, I Got Dropped By My Publisher, But I Kept On Writing” has been our most-read essay in the history of Open Secrets Magazine by far, and resonated deeply with so many readers, is that while he’s describing his personal journey navigating the highs and lows of publishing, he’s also reflecting back other people’s experiences to them. I would imagine that almost any writer who’s sent out their work has experienced rejection in some form, and likely a degree of envy over the perceived success of other writers in their genre or field.
Hart shows via his personal story that even if from the outside a writer (and, by extension, anyone in a creative career, or perhaps anyone more broadly) looks successful (a subjective term), what’s happening behind the scenes may not reflect that, or they may not feel successful. His story also shows that one success is usually not enough to live off of indefinitely, unless you’re one of the extremely rare writers who hit it so big that that’s not the case. But readers may have only seen the external markers of one aspect of success and made assumptions based on that.
I’m not sure exactly what I’m looking for when I tell you, write an essay that resonates widely like this one did, but I knew when reading that essay it would likely be one readers gravitated toward because Hart was vulnerable in his telling of it. He took emotional and professional risks by revealing aspects of his path through book publishing that are often hidden because writers rightly want to project an image of upward momentum.
I know I tend not to write too often about the downsides and rejections I face, partly because of that desire to look like I’m more in control of my career than I am, and partly because I want to focus on the projects I’m hopeful about, rather than those that are floundering. So for me as a reader and editor, I thought Hart’s approach was brave and bold.
Writing about work and career can be so fraught, especially if we are still in a specific job or career, which is why, in a similar way, Katrina Jackson’s essay, “This Job Will Kill Me If I Let It,” about the lack of work-life balance in academia and the physical and mental toll that’s taken on her, is one whose vulnerability and openness I hope to see more of in my inbox. With both of these essays, you’ll see readers in comments left soon after publication and later on, sharing their own career struggles. That’s how I as an editor tend to know if an essay has landed, and if it covers a topic or approach I should seek out when selecting future essays.
One of the most memorable essays for me, one that I return to when I’m feeling uncertain about some of my own writing and how much to reveal, is Caren Gussoff Sumption’s, “For 42 Years, I’ve Lived with Chronic Suicidal Ideation.” It’s not a topic I’ve seen written about much in such a raw and open way, and it’s a tricky subject to navigate. I struggled as an editor with whether it was ethical to publish this essay, but ultimately did, with resources linked at the bottom, because it speaks to one of the reasons I started Open Secrets Magazine: to make readers feel less alone, to make them feel seen and heard, to let them know that someone else out there (and likely many someones) is struggling in ways that they are or have.
Third, remember you are writing a personal essay. While other outlets accept op-eds or opinion pieces that argue for a particular cause or outcome, Open Secrets Magazine is focused on personal essays, with an emphasis on the personal. This doesn’t mean the essays have to be apolitical, but this isn’t a place for arguing on behalf of laws or changes in policy, though those can be mentioned if relevant to the personal aspects. I receive a good number of essay submissions that read like they’d be more at home in a newspaper’s op-ed section than in Open Secrets Magazine, which goes back to why I require submissions to come from subscribers who have presumably read some of our essays and have easy access to our personal essay archives.
My final essay writing tip is related to the second one: Make sure you’re telling a story with a beginning, middle, and end that has a takeaway. Many of the essay submissions I receive are about something that happened to the author, but they stop there. They’re a relatively straightforward account of what happened, without even an allusion to why it happened and how they author felt about it.
I want to know not just about what the author went through, but how they made sense of it, how it impacted them, how they handled or are handling it. I want to know what it feels like to be them and face that situation or challenge. I want to feel like I know that author, not in a parasocial way, but as one human to another. I want to feel like I was there with the author going through the experience, and gain insights into what they learned from it.
I hope you’ve found this helpful. If you have, please consider sharing this essay and, if you haven’t already, becoming a paid subscriber to access future installments of our essay writing tips column. Your shares, likes, and comments helped us double our subscriber base in 2024. Thank you so much, and I look forward to a 2025 filled with learning from many more writers.
Here again is our call for Climate-related personal essays, with a deadline of May 31, 2025. Attend our personal storytelling summit Open Secrets Live in NYC on May 3, 2025 for our editors panel featuring me along with editors from , Huffington Post, , HarperCollins, and Random House. Early bird tickets are $25 through January 31 or until they sell out.