It seems like editors at big fancy lit mags (BFLMs) don't know what to do with all their submissions. Look, I read for a BFLM (Ploughshares) for many years, I know the sheer onslaught of mediocre to lousy or even good submissions is pretty tiresome. But there's a really easy way to limit the number of submissions you receive and ease the burden on readers: Just close submissions for most of the year. Some magazines only read submissions for one or two months out of the year (No Tell Motel and Pool come to mind). This practice is a bit annoying/frustrating for writers, but here's what it's definitely not:
2 comments:
Thanks for posting this... I had not seen any of the hype on this yet.
It's interesting that someone thought of this approach... It is equally interesting the arguments against it.
It seems to me that such a policy, even if adopted by most publishers of literary journals would not likely be of significant impact on book stores to make major impact upon their profitability. It’s a nice gesture to a struggling industry for sure, but not likely to be the salvation of the independent book store.
I agree a better plan is to simply shorten the reading window if you really don’t want so much material to weed through. It’s a more forthright approach.
That was very intriguing. I've read for several national lit journals, some big, some small, and amount of slush junk is overwhleming--but it's easy enough to get through if you are honest about it (i.e. just read part of the poem/s). I'm disencahnted with journals and such, and am sending out much less work--it's too time consuming, too expensive, and doesn't amount to more than 1-2 acceptances per year for me anyway. I'm a bit bitter, I guess, about the whole process and state of affairs in publishing--wish I was born 20 years earlier in some ways.
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