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| Hearsay: |
WTF? I know it’s been a half-decade since I submitted unsolicited work to lit journals, but this makes me feel like Buck Rogers waking up in the 25thC — lamentably without the cool leather jacket and midget speech-challenged robot to greet me. (Diggadiggadigga, Hey Buck! God, could I use a midget robot butler.)
Proponents of online submissions say the process saves money on postage and paper and cuts down on response times, since it curtails much of the administrative work involved in logging, assigning, and distributing manuscripts once they are received by a magazine. It also reduces the chances of submissions being lost. Online submission systems usually notify writers once their work is received. After setting up accounts, writers can also log on to the journal’s Web site, determine whether their work is still under consideration, or review what they have previously submitted.
Last August, the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP) unveiled Submission Manager, an online software system that makes submitting manuscripts a cheaper, less protracted process for writers, while offering greater efficiency to literary journal staffs. Designed by One Story webmaster Devin Emke, the software allows writers to submit electronic manuscripts and enter their own contact information directly into a journal’s database—in effect, logging their own submissions. A number of magazines, such as A Public Space, Fence, jubilat, and Ploughshares, are using the software. Others, like Glimmer Train Stories, use customized online systems.
Ow. My Time Travel bone hurts. Is Atwood behind this? (Is it just me or does anyone else out there suspect that those of us who make it to 2075 are going to find a 25-year-old Margaret Atwood there, stepping out of her time machine and laughing at us geezers.)
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December 31st, 2006 at 12:25 pm
i love online submissions. i love not paying for postage for the inevitable rejection letter.
seriously, what is more soul-crushing than coming home at the end of a long day, and seeing an evelope with your name written in your own handwriting, and knowing without opening it that it’s a xeroxed slip of a rejection?!
bluh. i prefer to get my disappointment, like my news, mail, billing, and sexlife (um just kidding on that last one) online.
January 1st, 2007 at 1:15 pm
I like hard-copy submissions. Because I save the replies. In a file marked REJECTION.
Maybe Amy has a point about electronic submissions being easier on the ego. Unless you started printing them. Now that would be a problem.
April 11th, 2007 at 8:03 am
i used to prefer on line submission, until spam and spam filters made e-mail so unreliable. i still like it,
as long as the publisher sends some kind of acknowledgement; for bywords.ca and the bywords quarterly journal,we have automated
acknowledgements and a poetry management system so the poets can proof their work on line.
i wouldn’t mind snail mail pubs if they didn’t take so long to send any kind of acknowledgement. how many times have writers
sent in their work, only to wait for a year and then get a rejection letter back unsigned by an intern? yeesh.
seems to me that snail mail entails more work for a publication than e-mail.
April 11th, 2007 at 11:24 am
Trouble is, for the readers, who have to go through, say, eighty to a hundred submitted prose pieces a month (I don’t know numbers for poetry submissions), it’s a difficult job on screen. You need to be able to curl up on the couch with a sheaf of stories.