I have a friend who is an editor, and gets submissions of mostly poetry and short stories.

I have had a glimpse into her slush pile, and let me tell you, the contents were unbelievable and immediately disabused me of the notion that reading through submissions is in any way glamorous. People have the nerve to submit unhinged paranoid ramblings, fetish porn, and a seemingly endless supply of poems about masturbation.

I no longer feel like my fiction is somehow an imposition on the people who read it. It may be forgettable, but at least it isn't typeset to look like sperm.

Do not be afraid to submit your work. Your competition is not only worse than you think, it's worse than you ever imagined.

Do these three things to get to the top of the slush pile:

1. The place has a style sheet. Use it. They say they want your MS in 16.5 point Papyrus italic with 0.8 inch margins all around, guess what you're doing before you send it off? Save As, reformat, send it. In the absence of a specific guide: Courier 12 pt (Times New Roman if you must), double spaced, align left, tab 0.5 at each new paragraph.
2. Check the word count. Don't submit novellas to 2500 word short story venues. BTW, you format the MS in that old style above because the question isn't literal words. Courier 12pt double spaced gives you 250 words per page for typesetting purposes. 2500 words is 10 ms pages, 5000 is 20 pages, etc.
3. Don't send your romance to Analog or your war story to Harlequin. If it's a cross-genre story, be sure there's enough of what the publication is focused on to interest them, but breaking through is hard if that's not something they usually do.

That's basically what every single editors' panel at every con I've ever been to has boiled down to. And invariably, someone tries to get up and argue with them, not realizing it's not a discussion.

Bonus tip: Don't be in any way cute in your cover letter. Just the facts/Luke Skywalker's message to Jabba the Hut in ROTJ.

Enclosed/attached is my story <Title> for your publication <Magazine>. It is x (rounded to the nearest 500) words. I can be reached at <email> (that you check regularly and isn't likely to dump things into spam) and <phone>.

(If submitting a hard copy: The manuscript is disposable. A SASE is enclosed for your response./A SASE is included for return of the manuscript and your response.)

Thank you for your consideration.

If submitting a novella length piece or greater, a brief and complete summary is appropriate.

In the midst of an interstellar revolt against an evil galactic Empire, vital weapon plans fall into the hands of a farm boy on the edges of the galaxy. With the help of an aging warrior from the Old Republic, and a smuggler with a dark past and his imposing alien copilot, the four set out to deliver them to the rebel forces but are instead flung into a rescue mission to save the beautiful princess who stole the plans as worlds are destroyed by the might of the Empire's weapon, the Death Star.

Captured by the Death Star on route to deliver the plans, they manage to escape the base with the princess, the old warrior sacrificing himself to make this possible. As the Death Star approaches the rebel base, they use the captured plans to stage a desperate final stand. In a fierce space battle of single-pilot ships over the surface of the moon-sized weapon, the farm boy manages to make the critical shot with an unexpected assist from the smuggler, destroying it.

Never under any circumstance put a cliffhanger into a query letter summary. There is no faster way to get the entire MS binned than doing that.

Happy writing.

PS "Top of the slush pile" means into the top 25% of manuscripts received. Three quarters of the submissions don't take the trouble to do even those three basic steps.

Now, that still means 25/100 submissions or 250/1000 submissions, but it still improves your odds and forms the basis for starting a relationship with the publisher for the next piece you send them.

PPS This is obviously about prose. Poetry certainly has its own submission rules, and I know none of them. If you're writing poetry, find out what they are.

This goes for query letters to agents as well.

Also, that emphasis on the submission guidelines (or style sheet) and formatting things EXACTLY the way they requested it? Yeah, that's so that they know at a glance whether you have a brain in your head and can fucking read. Didn't follow the guidelines? They can discard your submission in an instant rather than wasting the two minutes it takes to read your cover letter.

FOLLOW THE SUBMISSION GUIDELINES!!!!! THIS IS STEP ONE OF "PROVING YOU'RE A PROFESSIONAL AKA SOMEONE WHO SHOULD BE PAID MONEY FOR THEIR WORK".

FOLLOW! THE! SUBMISSION! GUIDELINES!

Wait hang on there's still a couple of you who are not internalizing Follow The Submission Guidelines. I will tell you a story.

Couple years ago, I taught a college course on Writing & Publishing Scifi/Fantasy. Towards the end of the 8-week workshop, I told the class that they were going to learn what it is like to be a literary agent. I asked them to tell me a few things about what their dream novel would be if they were an agent (genre, themes, etc) and then I went and wrote fake a fake query letter for each of them. Then I scraped together a bunch of other query letters from Queryshark, and then I wrote some unhinged ones. Printed them all out, put them in a box, walked into class on the day, said "The first person to find their Dream Client in the slush pile wins Twenty Real Human Dollars." The air in the room suddenly became *FERAL*. RABID. College students will literally kill a man for $20. I dumped the box on the floor, screamed "GO!" and watched them throw themselves into it.

You know what happened? Almost instantaneously they developed a sense of "UGH FOLLOW THE GUIDELINES." They were ruthlessly throwing things aside simply because it did not include a "Dear [your name]," salutation. They were crying, "NO!" when they got a query letter for a short story instead of a novel. When confronted with a pile of garbage with a couple gems in it, they figured out in nanoseconds that the #1 red flag for garbage is "did not follow the submission guidelines."

FOLLOW THE GUIDELINES!!!!!!

Back in the days when it was all done by snail mail, I had a gift subscription to the magazine Writer's Digest, and there's one thing that has stuck in my memory from an article (which was published probably 35 years ago) about sending unsolicited manuscripts for novels to a publisher: make your envelope or box distinctive anything other than plain, stark, unadorned white. Every publisher, according to the article, had stacks and stacks of manuscripts in undifferentiated white packages and they just sort of all blurred together when you looked at the physical slush pile, so if one was in a colorful box or they'd drawn or written something on the side it'd immediately jump out and get their attention.

Bear in mind that they were also very, very clear to always follow the submission guidelines.

I don't work in publishing and you could not pay me enough to work a slush pile, but I know I'd quickly start looking for the manuscripts that stand out like a hot pink giant document mailer, but that still followed the submission guidelines, because that's the sign that you're someone the venue can work with. When I was doing research for publication in refereed journals, I worked for an organization that had an entire editing and proofreading department dedicated to ensuring that all the researchers' journal submissions would follow the submission guidelines, because otherwise it wouldn't even make it past the first step of submission.

Again, I'm not an editor and you couldn't pay me enough to be one — I'm extremely happy to torture data until the numbers come out for a living — but I do understand how this part works, and I hope that you understand the subtle FOLLOW message THE I'm SUBMISSION sending GUIDELINES here.

FOLLOW THE SUBMISSION GUIDELINES