[New-Poetry] Electronic Submissions

[Anny Ballardini]

I think it is a nightmare for those who have to read all those writings 
without a break, a mental break, something else. There are no human monsters 
who can read all that. In the hectic way it is portrayed.

From: "TheOldMole" <Opus40-01 at opus40.org>
Sent: Friday, March 28, 2008 11:32 PM


>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. .
>
> -- 
> 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
>