[New-Poetry] Electronic Submissions

[TheOldMole]

I wonder if the carloads of irrelevant submissions are any worse for 
online journals than print journals. The major print journals generally 
say that they accept -- what? one to three percent of what's submitted 
to them. Or less. Georgia Review, for example, says it accepts less than 
one half of one percent. North American Review says it gets more than 
10.000 submissions a year. If you put those two figures together, which 
is reasonable, you get a magazine receiving over 10,000 poems a year and 
accepting maybe 50. So there has to be a lot of inappropriate stuff..

I wonder how much more of a breakdown one could get. You're reading an 
average of 200 poems a week. Out of those, how many make the first cut? 
How many receive more than the "less than then seconds" that most of the 
visitors to my blog give me? I'm guessing the cowboy poetry, etc., that 
Amy got would need no more than that -- and even that is a lot, given 
that editing a poetry magazine is basically a labor of love, and rarely 
a full time job. So of the 200 a week that you're reading, out of which 
you'll be selecting one, how many do you look at for more than a few 
seconds? Ten? Twenty? Fifty? If Vince Gotera sends you a little note 
along with your rejection slip, the rejection slip means you're one out 
of 199 for that week. The note means you're one out of...50? 20? 10?

Here are some arbitrary numbers, for which I'd be delighted if someone 
would plug in some more accurate numbers.

In a given week

Received: 200.

Scanned for less than ten seconds: 150.

Read all the way through once: 50

Read all the way through twice: 10.

Kept in the "strong maybe" pile: 5.

What am I trying to prove here? I have absolutely no idea. The point I 
started out trying to make was that it's probably just as bad for snail 
submission mags as it is for e-submission mags. But I digressed 
somewhere along the way. .

Johnathon Williams wrote:
> I edit an online poetry journal at Linebreak.org, and we only accept 
> electronic submissions. The benefits are many:
>
> 1. Our staff can work from anywhere
> Electronic submissions allow myself and my two co-editors to 
> collaborate remotely without the cost of photocopying and mailing. Our 
> publication doesn't have an office or a mailing address — only an URL.
>
> 2. Organization
> Electronic submissions eliminate the clutter of being inundated with 
> reams of paper. There are no SASEs to track or manuscripts to return. 
> We read, track, vote on, and accept/reject submissions through a 
> shared Gmail account. All correspondence is archived online, which 
> creates an instant record of everything we do.
>
> 3. Speed
> This is a byproduct of organization, I think. The delay between making 
> the decision to reject or accept a poem and notifying the author of 
> the decision is a matter of seconds. And because we can all access 
> submissions at the same time, we make most decisions quickly.
>
>> Open electronic submissions can be debilitating, if one is not 
>> careful.  MiPOesias allowed these for awhile; I became overwhelmed.  
>> I had to get assistants, and what began as a labor of love became a 
>> labor.  I found that many people did not read the magazine before 
>> submitting.  I rec'd a range that included poetry I wouldn't look at 
>> cross-eyed, even some cowboy poetry.  If many of the submitters had 
>> read even two or three poets I was publishing at the time of open 
>> submissions, it would have likely cut my submissions in half.
>
>
> Amy's point above is true in our experience, too: some people who 
> submit electronically obviously haven't read our archives. In our 
> experience, though, the benefits of electronic subs far outweigh this 
> one drawback. In our case, inappropriate submissions haven't been 
> debilitating so much as slightly annoying.
>
> Aside from submissions, we manage all of our internal documents (style 
> guide, production schedule, etc) online as well using Google Docs. I'd 
> recommend a similar setup for anyone doing an online publication.
>
> By the way, we're a relatively new publication, and submissions are 
> always welcome. You can check us out here:
>
> http://linebreak.org
>
> -----------------------------------------------------
> Johnathon Williams
> Co-editor and webmaster
> http://linebreak.org
> http://madething.org
> me at johnathonwilliams.com
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> New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
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>

-- 
Tad Richards
http://www.opus40.org/tadrichards/
http://opusforty.blogspot.com/

The moral is this: in American verse,
The better you are, the pay is worse.
  --Corey Ford