Submission Tips from a Cantankerous Administrator

There are a lot of fine and helpful cheat sheets for submitting your poems and short stories to magazines. They’re full of advice anyone new to publishing should listen to, like, “You should actually like the magazine you’re submitting to.” When I first started, that one was actually the hardest. I definitely didn’t have money to subscribe to Canadian poetry magazines, so when I had the cash I’d pick up the odd print copy in a magazine store. I didn’t like them and, as I soon discovered, they didn’t like me. Lucky for me, a wave of online lit mags like Joyland, The Rusty Toque, The Mackinac, and The Ex-Puritan were about to spring up everywhere.

We all make stupid mistakes when we’re submitting or pitching to magazines. It’s nothing to be embarrassed about, as long as you learn from them. The problem is, people often don’t tell you when you’ve made a faux pas. The Ex-Puritan now regularly gets around 3000 submissions a year. It’s just not possible to give individualized advice. Since The Ex-Puritan switched over to using Submittable, I’ve also noticed a number of mistakes writers make that either a) take up the administrator’s time (full disclosure, that’s often me) and b) turn off the reader.

So here it is, the best submission tips I can give you for not shooting yourself in the foot, written not from an author who can tell you all the secrets to writing success, but a cantankerous administrator who really does want you to succeed.

1. Don’t Explain Your Work

Unless you’re pitching an essay or a review, let the reader find out what it’s all about. Maybe others disagree with me on this one, but summaries can kill the sense of surprise that comes with opening a new poem or story. Surprise is your best friend. Given a huge pile of work to read through, sometimes readers will only read the first few pages of your short story before they make a decision, especially if it’s a long one. (And you have no right to get mad at these readers unless you too volunteer to read a slush pile.) Don’t spoil the end when you want them to keep reading.

2. Don’t Leave Notes Half-Way through Reading Periods

Unlike mail or online submission forms that came before it, Submittable makes it uniquely easy to leave notes in your submissions after the fact. Don’t. You don’t know who’s going to see them, whether it’s a reader, administrator, or editor. The odds are, they don’t really know what to do with whatever problem you have and will probably ignore it. The other thing is—we’re more generous than you think we are. At least I am. It doesn’t matter if there are typos or formatting errors. I mean, you should comb through your work carefully before submitting, but things happen. Don’t get worked up about it. If the poems are good, we can fix it later.

3. Don’t Give Up Early

I’ve also seen well-meaning notes that come from a place of deep embarrassment. A couple of weeks after submitting, one individual left a note that said, “Will resubmit better, revised version in the future.” I had to ask myself why I would read it at all. Of course you should revise your poetry. But this is why magazines say dumb things like, “Only send us your best work.” It’s fine if this draft is your best work at the time. But if you’d die of shame to see it published, withdraw.

4. Make Sure You Actually Sent in Work Before Asking Why You Never Heard Back

Okay, this one’s just a pet peeve. Submittable makes it really easy to keep track of where you sent your work. We do miss submissions sometimes and sometimes we miss your submission when we send out responses. Don’t be afraid to check in when we’ve said we’ll respond, and we haven’t, just double check that it was really us you sent that poem.

5. A Deadline Is a Deadline

We’ve been asked a couple times if we could give an exception for work to come in after a deadline for submissions. The problem is, we do everything through Submittable, and when that deadline hits, we close the form where all of that season’s submissions wait to be read in one convenient place. This is a big pain if the magazine has long stretches where they don’t accept work, but if there’s year-round reading, cool your heels and get first in line for next season.

6. Use Your Story and Poem Names as Submission Titles

This one was news to me. I always wrote things like “Poetry Submission” or “5 Poems.” Then I saw the other side of Submittable. Imagine staring at 500 entries called “Poetry Submissions” and trying to assign them to readers. Pick the first poem or the one you’re proudest of and enter than in the Title field. In the end, it won’t affect how likely it is you’ll be selected. Readers are pretty methodical. But it helps us, and we like that.

Never forget that administrators and readers are your friends. We wouldn’t spend hours doing this if we didn’t love finding great work and making sure it finds its way out of obscurity. It can be difficult to stay positive when you keep getting rejected time and time again, but believe me, if you help us out, we’ll do everything we can to help you.