[New-Poetry] Electronic Submissions

[James Cervantes]

Well, Tad, my experience varies a bit from the hypothetical
figures/representations in your post, but I'll use your categories for an
approximation of what happens with Salt River Review.
In a given week

Received: 100 during an announced submission period.  Almost the same as
that during the time I'm *not* reading submissions!

Scanned for less than ten seconds:  More like 30 seconds, but it doesn't
take too many lines to discern lack of craft, lack of writing experience,
guileless autobiography, players of pianos with two octaves etc.  But, the
majority fall into this category, maybe 75 of the 100.  Most simply give
evidence they've never read SRR and/or haven't read the guidelines.

Read all the way through once: About 5 of the 100.

Read all the way through twice: 2.

Kept in the "strong maybe" pile: 2.

Then, of course, when deadline is approaching and things are looking bleak,
I send out calls for work from people whose work I admire.  I wish I could
assemble every issue that way but it would put everyone in uncomfortable
positions.

- Jim

On Fri, Mar 28, 2008 at 3:32 PM, TheOldMole <Opus40-01 at opus40.org> wrote:

> 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. .
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