Managing Editor Lisa Ampleman: In our Submission Trends and Tips series, we’ve featured everything from the practical (how to take an author photo) to the philosophical (how to know when a piece is ready to send out). Assistant Editor Emily Rose Cole even detailed the submission process from start to finish in six simple steps. Until now, these posts have focused mostly on helping writers, but this time, we’ve got a list of things that will help magazines instead, with the chance for you to gain cred by showing us you’re paying attention.
Withdraw work that is accepted elsewhere
In my five years as managing editor, I’ve noticed a subtle change in the field: When I first started in this position, it was rare for us to accept a piece and then find out it was already accepted elsewhere. Now, however, it happens several times an issue, in all three major genres, after several readers have spent time with the piece and the genre editor has weighed it against the others at that level of consideration.
So, as guidelines request, please contact us and other mags if you’ve submitted something and it gets accepted by another magazine. Sure, in some cases, the notices happen close together, before you’ve had time to withdraw the piece everywhere, but much of the time, lately, the writer has just forgotten to do the withdrawal.
(If this happened to you with us recently, this isn’t the blog equivalent of a subtweet! We just wanted to comment on the broader trends we’ve seen. Nothing personal!)
We’re trying to do our part: keeping our records up to date and checking our junk/spam email folders (see below) for your notes about partial-withdrawals of poetry or miCRo submissions. We’re also trying to decrease our response times by shifting submission periods and instituting a cap so that we never have more work in the hopper than we can handle over the next few months.
One way to make your job easier: Make sure you have some sort of method of tracking submissions (see Associate Editor Lisa Low’s post on some best practices for spreadsheets), and don’t withdraw using just your Submittable account as a record, since many magazines use other submission managers or email as a way to organize what they’re reading. And with a wide range of dates for submission periods these days, especially with magazines not tied to the academic year, this kind of record-keeping can help you remember when the next open periods for your favorite mags will be.
Keep an eye on your spam/junk/promotions folders for correspondence
There’s a reason magazines ask you to add their domain to your safe list! We do everything we can on our end to make sure our emails and submission responses arrive in your inbox, but some things are out of our control, including how algorithms for your email service categorize spam/junk or promotions. The same happens on our end, so we’ve made it a habit to check all possible folders for emails headed our way. We recommend you do the same, so you don’t miss an acceptance note or other important communications, like discounts on subscriptions or an interview with a writer you admire.
Follow directions
I know that this credo gets repeated ad nauseam in recommendation lists, but there’s a reason it keeps coming up: people don’t follow directions. For example, we like to have the name, address, and email address on all noncontest submissions. Others might not. Take your time and craft each file for the individual recipient rather than sending out the same thing to several mags without doing a deeper dive.
Same goes for sending in a revision after a piece has been accepted: some mags don’t mind reading those, but it’s extra time and cognitive labor for us, and we chose the piece because we liked it as it was. We do work with writers on copyedits of accepted pieces, but we prefer to start with what we first read. I often say, “We’d like to publish the work as submitted, but feel free to use your version in your manuscript-in-progress!”
In the end, though, we’re glad to have the honor of reading your work. The vast majority (if not all) of the work we publish comes “over the transom,” as the saying goes, or unsolicited. The magazine wouldn’t exist without your labor and ambition, and we’re grateful for your trust in sending us your work.
On to summer submitting! (By the way, other than our summer contest, we won’t be open for print-mag submissions till September, if you want to add that to your spreadsheet . . .)
