I’d like to talk about Submittable. What’s the dealie, friends?
In my most recent interview with Whitney Koo, Editor of Gasher, I joked that editors sometimes describe Submittable as the lit mag mafia. (I want to give props here to Whitney, who has gone above and beyond the call of duty to ensure that submissions to her magazine always remain free.)
The truth is, I actually don’t know very much about the mechanics of Submittable. I don’t know how much it costs for editors. I don’t know why some editors have to cap submissions at a certain level, and/or have to cap free submissions after a certain point.
I know that many editors are frustrated with or cannot afford the platform. For these reasons, some never stopped using simple email submissions. Others are migrating to Duosoma. Others continue to use Submission Manager.
But I don’t know what Submittable’s costs are, why journals feel so beholden to the platform, or any details at all of what actually goes on behind the scenes.
And, if you know anything about me by now, it is that I must know what goes on behind the scenes.
Also, I don’t like seeing people with little money exploited in order to subsidize large companies with lots of money.
Is that what is happening here?
According to Crunchbase, as of June 2022, “Submittable has raised a total of $64.3M in funding over 7 rounds.”
Submittable financials according to Crunchbase
Is Submittable itself taking home a ton of profit? Not necessarily. Their funding comes largely from venture capital firms. Thus Submittable is beholden to its investors. Everyone here must get paid.
Everyone, that is, except the writer.
And it’s the writer upon whose labor this entire endeavor rests. For without us, there would be no literary magazines at all. (And without literary magazines, there would be no submissions portal. And without a submissions portal, there would be nothing for Submittable to sell, and nothing for the investors to invest in.)
Of course, writers sometimes do get paid for their stories, essays and poems. But not always, and not very much when they do.
What we have, then, is a curious little situation: a bunch of people with not very much money doing a ton of work, and then paying in order to sustain a company that has raised over $60 million, which is itself sharing its profits with companies that also fundraise for millions of dollars.
Do I have that right?
All of this is not to tell writers that they should or should not pay submission fees. You know your own budget, your own ethical code and your own ambition. Personally, I do pay submission fees, though rarely will I pay over five bucks, and even that is usually more than I’m willing to pay.
What I would like to understand here is how Submittable works on the editorial end. I think a whole lot of writers would also like to know why, exactly, they are being charged fees in order to have their work considered by magazines.
If you are an editor with insights, can you share how Submittable works? Are you happy with the software? Have you considered using other platforms?
Is the system here fair?
Is there a better way?
What would help writers to know?
Did I misunderstand this situation entirely? What did I miss?
Oct 22, 2022·edited Oct 22, 2022Liked by Becky Tuch
Submittable costs my magazine $1500 a year, just for our subscription. That is a huge part of our magazine's budget. When we started, ten years ago, it was few hundred. On top of that, they take .99 plus 5% of every penny we take in through Submittable. They pay us through PayPal, which takes another cut. It's incredibly expensive and they house 10 years of our archives. They recently updated their platform which forced a lot of changes that make it more difficult for us to use it (but must be useful to their enterprise-level clients). There are a ton of features that are locked to us because we have a lower-level membership. Why do we stay? It's pretty much baked into the way we operate (many editors can view and comment together on a manuscript, and message one another on the back end; we can also carry on conversations with the writers and accept revisions and other uploads, such as bios and photos for publication, etc.) We will probably eventually leave but we need a product in place that can offer much of what Submittable does at a lower cost.
Submittable is moving toward becoming a profitable company, as Becky pointed out re: series A funding. They have venture capital who will be interested in making money when Submittable goes public etc. However, Karen Rile, if you run a magazine you should become a member of CLMP. Members of CLMP are grandfathered in to a lower pricing structure. The CLMP membership comes with a fee, starting at around $125 per year for small organizations. Submittable costs "only" $350 or something in that arena with proof of CLMP membership. This was a big deal when the new CEO took over and Submittable changed its pricing structure and Submission Manager sort of left the arena (they no longer service their product and decoupled from CLMP who had vouched for SM and provided the clients at a very affordable one time fee, in addition to the CLMP membership). Short of it is you can get submittable cheaply (though not as cheap as when they started). Regarding submissions costing, while this has created a burden for writers to an extent, it also creates more opportunities for writers since more lit lags are able to function by virtue of charging nominal fees. So long as the lit mags due their part and select from their submission pools and do no solicit big names and do not insert their friends and colleagues and continue to pay out something (whether it's subscriptions, copies, or cash) the new economy can be viewed as positive. Certainly, however, there are issues with big magazines who are fully funded nonprofits either through foundations or by attached universities should tread very lightly in terms of charging for submissions...that seems a bit like it's taking advantage, especially since these established venues are quite selective and can sometimes be elitist. Perhaps a simple rule of thumb ought be, if you already take PUBLIC money to fund your enterprise, you oughtn't charge sub fees. If you're a bootstrapping new mag who needs the funds to survive, then by all means, you're providing a service to the community by any measure (as long as no behind the scenes dealing), and the community ought support via fees. That seams like a fair exchange.
Since the developer of Submission Manager makes the software available for free. (See https://www.devinemke.com/index.php?page=software) It seems not to have the bells and whistles of Submittable but I am curious why even a few more litmags don't use it.
Story still uses Submission Manager, probably because it was created for them. But does anyone else? For example, One Story no longer does.
I don’t know if I’d go so far as to call SM abandonware, but it looks headed in that direction. It might have been a good solution 10 or 15 years ago, but hasn’t kept up.
To use SM, you’d have to install it yourself on your own server, or pay a consultant to do it for you. And then who would support it? The same expensive consultant? And at the end of the day, it still wouldn’t be a one-stop-shopping, turnkey system with the features you need. And it would probably end up costing far more to operate than Submittable.
No, I would say SM is a non-starter. Unless you’re a tinkerer or a masochist.
The idea of a lit mag is to publish, not to get into software engineering.
One other observation: in past years, when we had a glitch, often a software issue on their end, their support staff would answer promptly. They are now no longer available on weekends or evenings (which is exactly when most of us, who have day jobs, do our Submittable-based work.) The last time we had an emergency, which was related to their (to us) user-unfriendly platform update, they never even responded to my email ticket. I don't think they are interested in small magazines anymore--they are chasing large clients like universities and foundations. A few years ago a rep even said to me, "We still care about the small magazines like yours who were there when we started." I knew that was a bad sign...
Thanks for these insights, Karen. And yes, it looks like they got a new CEO in 2020. I remember meeting the original founder, Michael Fitzgerald, at AWP. He was really nice, approachable and seemed interested in being accessible. With the new CEO it looks like they have sought to expand well beyond lit mags.
That tracks with the change of corporate attitude I've observed. I would not be surprised if they are hoping to offload the small magazine like us with a policy of overpricing/underservice.
It's the Amazon model. Corner a niche market for proof of concept and to undergird your enterprise, then expand and cut services to that original group who made your company. Sigh.
Isn't this part of a bigger issue, though? That writing used to be for an audience of readers but now is often for an audience of other writers? We pay to get read by other writers in the lit world, which almost feels like a vanity fee. I know of no one outside of other writers who read lit mags or small press chapbooks, etc. This not only results in writers getting paid little to nothing, it often results in a stylistic echo chamber. I think we have to start brainstorming entirely new systems.
I fail to see the logic of literary magazines passing on the cost of Submittable to writers. Yes, Submittable is expensive, but so are a lot of things in the writing world. Why is the writer expected to foot the magazine’s bill for a software management program that the writer had no part in choosing? As publishing writers who submit to literary magazines, we have absolutely no voice in which method those magazines use to accept our work. This seems deeply unfair. I’ve used Submittable as an editor, and I found it mediocre at best, but my opinions on its usefulness are beside the point. The point is, writers should not have to pay for something we had no say in choosing.
Sounds like the logic of passing on this cost has something to do with sustaining a healthy and diverse literary ecosystem. It’s not ideal, and on the one hand I sympathize with your principled objection. On the other, I don’t mind paying a nominal fee if that means my options for submitting are not limited to litmags funded by established nonprofits, university MFA programs, government programs and/or the CIA. Otherwise the next step is samizdat, which I find exciting, but I doubt that most other writers do.
I think submission fees actively cut against a healthy and diverse literary ecosystem. There's no pressure on magazines to sustain themselves by finding an audience or identifying new, interesting niche markets to cater to. They don't have to cater to readers at all, because funding is coming from submission fees.
Is there any other art form that props itself up this way? Record labels that survive by charging musicians, or film/TV studios that charge their directors and actors? By creating revenue models driven by submission fees, lit mags have essentially excused themselves from the actual hard work of curating excellent content that readers will pay for.
The explosion of paid Substack newsletters is evidence that readers are out there for all kinds of extremely niche and diverse forms of writing. Those readers were not being reached or served by literary journals, and those journals have absolutely no incentive to do so as long as they make money off of writers instead of by cultivating an actual audience.
You make excellent points, Alex, and they all lead (at least where poetry is concerned) into the territory marked with the names “John Barr” and “Dana Gioia” and “Joseph Epstein,” all under the general rubrics of “The MFA Industrial Complex” and “Who Killed Poetry?” A related observation, since you mentioned record companies, is that most working musicians and bands don’t have deals with the big record companies. There is a thriving indie music scene in this country, and lots of people are putting out great music under their own labels and organizing their own tours, alone and with like-minded others. Poets and other writers could take the hint, and I think they may do so as time goes on and the established channels (now including many university-affiliated litmags) grow ever more insular and sclerotic. For poets today, and maybe also for other writers who are not churning out beach books, the leading edge may be reading series with point-of-sale pamphlets and chapbooks. There is lots of life beyond and outside the best seller and the midlist book.
I think it depends on the magazine. Some of us have an all-volunteer staff doing unpaid work with a commitment towards honoring the works of writers and providing reliable stewardship. For the first five years I personally funded the magazine I founded out of my own pocket, to the tune of thousands of dollars a year. Now, the magazine is self-sustaining, but we the staff remain volunteers. We respect the decision of any writer not to pay for submissions—for any reason—and will provide them a link to submit for free if they ask. Most writers don’t mind helping support the magazine. We’re grateful for that community.
I get it about most literary magazines being volunteer efforts. And writers who wish to support magazines are free to do so. But many journals that charge fees do not pay writers. I would argue that any writer who submits her work for free is already supporting the magazine--charging a fee seems doubly unfair.
Fully agree. Not to add that it's not as if these lit mags don't have cover prices. I bet what many rake in via fees even after paying Submittable surpasses that via cover price. Shouldn't that be of ethical importance?
Why do litmags charge for submissions where genre mags generally do not? Even the ones using Submittable instead of Moksha or the Clarkesworld submission manager do not charge.
Is it because genre mags, specifically the speculative fiction ones, have been consistently part of a culture where the dominant voice is "money flows to the author, payment for reading is BAD"?
Or is it because litfic has a huge "pay-to-play" zine culture, whereas SFF has a big "for-the-love" zine culture?
Note: I will NEVER pay to submit to a magazine. Period. That's not how it works. The degree to which so much is monetized in litfic world has me side-eying a lot of it, because it sure looks like a financial means of gatekeeping to me.
The big commercial genre magazines use Moksha or the Clarkesworld submission system, not Submittable. It's the little literary equivalent to genre magazines that use Submittable. I rather think it's the culture of the SFF genre in particular, where "money flows to the writer" is the status quo. Seriously.
Oct 22, 2022·edited Oct 23, 2022Liked by Becky Tuch
I am an editor and publisher who has used Submittable since it started, back when I was in the beta-testing group for it. I can give some insight into the submission-cap situation: Submittable used to be free. They used to have a free account that was promised to remain free, and it didn't come with stipulations; for those of us who have been around for a long time, we were able to keep our free accounts, *but* when Submittable went to all-paying, they put stipulations on us. In order to keep our free account, we can now only accept 100 free submissions across all our categories per month (and no access to the features of the upgraded plans). Other paying tiers have similar caps; if I were to upgrade to the next level, I could get 300 free submissions. But we have 100 because I'm not paying $1,000 per year for the upgrade. We have multiple categories open and need some of those to remain free, and it doesn't take any time at all to hit that 100 mark. We usually hit 100 free submissions by the end of the first week of every month. So, then, what? Do we stop taking submissions because we've used up all our free ones?
No, because we won't have enough quality submissions, so we have to charge a small fee for the rest of the submissions, which do not count against any limitations or stipulations. On Submittable's end, the sky is the limit for people sending in paid submissions, and they take a cut of that. For an average month, Submittable gets several hundred dollars off me in percentages. It's also important to note that Submittable puts a *minimum* limit to how low your charged fee can be. The minimum is $2.00, and the editor doesn't see any of that except a few cents. So, if you see a fee that is $2.00 or so, the editor really is using that entirely to pay Submittable for the submission. (If you have a paying account, Submittable still takes a cut of the fee, but it's a smaller percentage. For us, however, the smaller percentage was not equal to the amount that the upgrade would cost in total per year, and it's especially not equal if you are an editor who only takes submissions during certain months and not yearlong, because it's a yearly plan.)
Someone else mentioned getting a deluge of submissions if you don't cap, and this is also true. Submittable as a platform has enabled tons of non-professionals to effectively spam you. They don't read the guidelines; they submit to whatever category is free, even if their work doesn't fit; they WASTE YOUR TIME. When we have to have paying subs open, we do have the option of letting authors submit for free, but you have to email us to get the link to submit for free; by doing this added step, we only get people who really want to submit but can't afford it, who think that extra step is worth it.
I am not familiar with Duosuma, but I would be surprised if it's actually free since the rest of their services are not, and the aforementioned Submission Manager is not free. You have to pay for it or pay for a CLMP membership, and you can also charge fees on that platform (look, for instance, at the submission portal in the link that is linked in the article, and you'll see that it has a payment of $3.00 to submit). Submittable also has a reduced fee for an account if you are a member of CLMP. [Edit: Looks like Submission Manager is now free through Github, though that wasn't always the case. My original point, however, is that you can also charge on other platforms and that fees are not just a Submittable issue, and that's still true of Submission Manager, as well.]
So, why do we stay? Well, we still have our free account, and it's been promised to us for life, so we don't have to pay for the yearly cost. Many small presses that got in at the beginning still have their free accounts. Second, my inbox is absolutely explosive, so I can't take email correspondence and submissions because they'll just get lost; Submittable organizes all of that for me and keeps conversations and files in tidy threads. Submittable also allows add-ons of our books, which enables us to sell dozens of books per month that we wouldn't otherwise sell. I think the only thing that would make me switch at this point is if Submittable started charging the author to create an account to submit, which I doubt will happen.
The link is to Story's Submission Manager. Story charges $3 per submission. But the software is apparently free. (In this case, I don't mind that Story gets my $3 instead of USPS and Staples). The developer of Submission Manager makes the software available for free on github. https://www.devinemke.com/index.php?page=software.
I understand that the link is to Story's Submission Manager and that Story charges $3.00. My point was that you could also charge on other platforms (and many do), like Submission Manager, and that charging is not just a Submittable issue. I don't mind that Story gets the $3.00, either, and I'm not against submission fees in the slightest, though I don't think the alternative is "USPS and Staples." Very few people accept paper submissions anymore, but it's not just because of submission portals; it's because we're in the digital age now, and paper is wasteful. The alternative to a submission portal isn't snail mail; the alternative is to accept submissions via email.
I'm glad Submission Manager is free now. That wasn't always the case. You used to have to be a CLMP member or pay for the software. I imagine making it free was a response to Submittable becoming a contender. (I've been publishing for 30 years, since the days of paper-mailings, and I've watched these forces duke it out. Submittable was a game-changer when it came on the scene, and it really shook things up.)
Nope. This is a thread about Submittable, so I'm talking about Submittable. But since they are the same company run by the same people, the semantics of the company name don't matter anyway, so whether it's Submittable or Submishmash is a moot point that doesn't require any "aside." We changed our account URL to the new Submittable domain name when it opened up.
Sorry, Leah, I had read your first post too quickly before I replied. Only afterward did I realize you had referred to charging a fee as a possibility with SM. (Most litmags I encounter that use SM do not charge any submission fee). And I do agree that digital is better than post!
Hi, SunnyFlow. On the administrative/editor side, under Forms, you can select one of your Forms, add a field for Multiple Responses, then add in your book titles and prices that your customers can purchase. When a submitter is filling out the Form for his submission, he can select to buy those add-on books, and that purchase comes through with his submission.
I'll rely on others more well versed in finance to conclude whether Submittable's business model is fair to writers and litmags and whether their margins are acceptable. However, I am reminded of Churchill's comment that democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.
I know from personal experience that software takes time to develop, time to maintain and is notoriously difficult to monetise to ultimately get a reward for all of that (initially) unpaid effort. And that is one of the reasons why most internet services rely on advertising and/or paid subscriptions and/or sales and/or donations to survive.
The element that seems to be a glaring omission in the litmag field is advertising. Whether that's because litmags are a bit sniffy about accepting filthy lucre from commerce, or because litmags don't deliver enough eyeballs to interest advertisers I don't know but I grow a little tired of the argument that some mysterious 'they' should be shelling out money from an inexhaustible supply shrouded in secrecy.
This where we need to heed Jessica Michael's earlier comments and have some deep conversations about who is actually reading litmags and re-think whether there has ever been a viable market for them or is ever likely to be. To do that we need to shift our thinking away from the wild west of the early internet and stop thinking everything online can and should be free.
PS - Just to get tongues wagging, here's a list of dreadful sell-outs who stooped to having their work published in Playboy to get an audience: Roald Dahl, Jack Kerouac, Margaret Atwood, Ursula Le Guin, Ian Fleming, Ray Bradbury, Arthur C Clarke, Vladimir Nabokov, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Norman Mailer, and Alice Denham. My point is that to get paid you need to go to where the eyeballs are and that's not litmags.
I read through all of these and most seem to be from editors, good people all I can see, but might I present the view of a 'poor poet' [as in 'being paid'] and an old one [75] at that: IT AIN'T RIGHT! It's not right or fair to charge poets or any writers for the privilege of being rejected 90 % of the time [roughly what my odds have been in the past 5 years: applied to over 900 lit mags, published in 114 as of last week]. And if I had spent 3-5 bucks each time, that would have eaten up 3 or 4 months of the bag of peanuts Social Insecurity sends me every month. Now I don't mind not being paid for my poetry or essays: seeing them published is like gold to my ego [and that little beast does a happy dance every time!] I don't mind either only getting a 12% royalty on the 2 book-length collections a trade publisher has released-- that from what I've learned is in line for writers in general--and I donate it anyway to a charity. But I will not pay a dime as a reading/submission fee, and why should anyone have to? Email is free! Even snail mail is only the cost of a stamp or two. I get the dedication of the editing staff at most lit mags-- I'm asked to volunteer on request sometimes for one of them myself. But don't make writers put out 100's of dollars when most of the time their egos, poor fellows, will not be doing a happy dance....
I use Submittable for my own writing submissions and don’t mind smaller fees. I feel you sort of have to be on Submittable to be in the game. As a Managing Editor of Novus, Submittable has been a godsend for establishing us in the international world of magazines. By joining Submittable, we were able to take a small university-driven journal and become an international one representing over 13 countries in one recent digital edition, and we continue to grow and attract worthy writers and poets of stature which we never would reach without the platform. For non-profits like us, it costs about $400ish a year —first by joining CLMP to get the discount and then the Submittable fee. It’s higher fees for for-profit journals. All in all, it’s a good experience for us and we wouldn’t be what we are without it. Editors cap submissions because you can get deluged with them if offering free subs, so they cap free campaigns. (They may have other reasons I don’t know of.) I do find by charging a small fee, we weed out non-serious writers and we do make some modest $$ for our journal which has little funding but via a small grant from the university. (If a writer or artist has a hardship about the fee, we can make accommodations.). Hope this helps. I find all these conversations relevant and interesting, but hadn’t joined before to comment! Thanks for what you do! Sandee
We belong to CLMP but the discounted membership doesn't have enough seats for our large editorial staff. Charging a small fee helps us cover the cost of Submittable, but it does also have the advantage, as Sandee points out, of reducing non-serious submitters. We used to have a lot of submissions that were inappropriate for our journal. We do offer free submissions to anyone who asks, but most submitters don't seem to mind the small fee, for which we are grateful.
Why does this surprise you? Books are a market, a big, even a huge business. Naturally, managers want to get paid for their work.
Writer? Writers, authors sponsor their existence. But for the sake of truth and fairness, I must say that I read the stories of the winners of many competitions with horror, they are so boring, inexpressive, not interesting.
How did they become "winners"? What does it say? On the general decline of culture. The fact that the organizers of the contests are not worried about the quality of the texts.
Like in chess. Previously, there were only classical chess, but today there are varieties: both blitz and armageddon with a low level of play. The main thing is to tickle the nerves of the audience, to raise money for the tournament. Business.
The era of enlightenment and classical literature is long over. It's time for mass culture.
Great question. I'd also like to have more insight. The service does add a bit of value, in that it saves users the cost of printing and mailing, while providing a bit of transparency. But I'm surprise that, as a software, the service hardly seems to have evolved much from its original functionality. Where is all that capital going? I recall sending in a feature request 4-5 years ago, getting a response from their team within a month, but nothing more than that. Are there improvements happening on the litmag side? I wonder if magazines have become chained to a certain workflow because of the service. How can a competitor get in, leading to lower prices?
Submitters aren’t their customers. So your needs take lower priority of editors, especially as others have mentioned, the company is targeting areas far beyond literary journals.
So glad to see so many other lit mag editors answering this post. I can confirm that a lot of what's being said here is common for lit mags. One thing I didn't see is a comparison of Submittable to Duotrope (for lit mags, the service is Duosumo, the admin host that then posts things to the public-facing side Duotrope).
At first, Duotrope looks less expensive for mags. However, they send the month's payments through Stripe, which takes its own cut. In the end, it is slightly less expensive, but about on par with Submittable's costs.
The big drawbacks to Duosumo/Duotrope are functionality and effectiveness.
Functionality: The dashboard is less intuitive, although users can figure it out quickly enough. It's difficult to have multiple team members using the site efficiently, which Submittable (for the most part) has taken care of.
Effectiveness: Sooooo few submissions! Sunspot Lit set up a Duosumo/Duotrope account in the hopes of reaching more writers, artists, and creatives. The result is that, for every open call we've done, we get about 3% of the total submissions through Duosumo. We do advertise, both paid and free options, for each call. The only difference I see to explain why Duotrope doesn't reach as many people for us is that Submittable has the "closing soon" option automatically sort results by date, whereas Duotrope's discovery search for writers/creatives is much less detailed.
Sunspot tried (and still uses) Duosumo because Submittable, over the past two years, seems to be turning in a very different direction. Their newsletters are focused on funding applications, and many lit mags feel their user interface is changing to prioritize funding grants. It's a shame that Duosumo isn't working as well. It's confusing, too, because it sure seems like so many more creatives use Duosumo compared to Submittable. But the 97% response rate from Submittable can't be ignored. It's a channel that our magazine, and many small magazines, can't turn off without risking their magazines' continued existence.
There was another question about why more lit mags don't use the free version of the software or other free software. A few dozen CLMP members got together last year to consider this after an open discussion happened on the CLMP email. They looked deeply into options and shared results and ideas with the entire list as they progressed. The option to have multiple lit mags pay the individual who would have to manage the software was also considered. In the end, it was far too much work for mags that already have staffing shortages and work overloads, not to mention the additional costs on cash-strapped publications.
This info is presenting mostly from the small lit mag perspective. The big university ones, with their endowments that pay out very salaries, are working under very different financial conditions. I can't provide any input from that side.
Gah, I wish I read this earlier! I just cancelled Submittable for Duosuma (with a gut feeling Submittable was probably better but wanting to escape). This is very helpful, thank you.
So, I have been on the “investor” end of these kind of “deals” and frankly it’s a double edge sword. Folks raise venture $$ for 3 reasons: 1) to have more $$ to invest in improving the product, 2) to “acquire” customers, and 3) to enter new markets. I don’t know enough about the submittable market to know which BUT it seems like a finely tuned web-machine (at least from a poet’s point of view).
And yes, we investors sustain the salaries of the employees/founders and keep the lights on until they figure out how to turn a profit. I’ve never been one of the “squeeze the company for all we can get out of it” types of investors. I prefer to be a partner who shares the vision and takes on risk to see that vision come to fruition.
That said, there is a substantial risk for us small players that we will loose everything so when a bigger investor comes along and funds growth and enhances our chances of making money in the deal, our knees go weak – as to the founders – who also start to see $$$$$$$’s in their dreams. They will cross the line between their investors being advisory partners to bending to the bigger investors’ vision for the company.
I suspection you and your commenters are 100% right when you speculate that a raise of $70mm implies they have an expanding vision for who their platform can sell to. To justify $70 million in investment, there has to be a business model somewhere that earns that much in revenue ANNUALY! At $2 a submission – that would be 35mm submissions a year. SOOOOOO, there must be some other master that submittable is, well, submitting to to make this worthwhile for their investors.
Meanwhile, I left that world a while back when it started getting so usurious and manipulative. I am much happier now – although I met and worked with some incredibly creative and thoughtful entrepreneurs back in the day.
As both a submitter and editor, I go nuts if I don't have everything in one place, which is basically why I've stuck with Submittable over many years. Thanks for your thoughts, which I agree with. It's like FB, I'm too far in to get out.
As a submitter, I appreciate editors for many things, one of which is using Submittable which makes it easier for me to track and manage submissions. By all means, pass the cost on to me, an office worker who burns out on details with her day job that allows her to afford this small luxury! I also love paying extra for expedited submissions--except when it turns out they are not, which has happened a lot lately, and annoys me perhaps disproportionately. And I also don't like paying for mandatory feedback--I prefer to be able to opt out. Sorry if Submittable is oppressive, and I hope you can address that somehow, and that I might be a part of it, but mainly thanks!
(This reminds me a bit about the Bookshop debate!)
I've never been a lit mag editor and I have far less experience submitting to them than most people here, I'm sure. That being said, I wonder if MacGuyvering an interface that performs Submittable's basic functions would be easier than we imagine.
I worked as an editorial assistant in textbook publishing in the late aughts and early 2010s. My job consisted mostly of commissioning professors to review manuscripts and published texts for insultingly tiny honoraria. At the time, my company and its competitors were tiptoeing from a paper-based system -- sending printed manuscripts, questionnaires, W9 forms, etc. by postal mail with an SASE, which was slow, cumbersome, and error-prone -- toward an electronic one where everything was done by email attachment, which was merely cumbersome and error-prone.
Then someone started peddling a web-based interface that claimed to streamline the review process. You could keep your reviewers' contact information in a database, send them automated emails, and put all the documents in one place for them to download, and when they were finished you'd have all their questionnaires and tax forms in one place. It was clunky as hell in both form and function, and probably illegal because of the tax thing, but a lot of editors were jazzed about it because it allegedly made record-keeping easier and eliminated a lot of the back-and-forth, which would allegedly free up their assistants to run twice as many reviews at one time. That they paid money to use this service; when I, the reviewers, and everyone contributing actual labor to the enterprise got paid dick; was insult piled upon injury.
My editor wanted to get in on it and I told him, don't. Give me an hour with Google Docs and I'll make you an interface that looks better than this, works just as well, and costs nothing. Which I did. To host the review documents, I made a single HTML page with embedded links to all the materials and paperwork. Automating the emails was as simple as putting the reviewers' information in a spreadsheet, with additional columns for status tracking, and using Mail Merge to send invitations, instructions, reminders, and acknowledgements from templates.
I repeat, I have no experience on the editorial side of a litmag (other than volunteering as a proofreader during my MFA). But I feel like it's got to be possible to create processes that mimic the core functions of submission management software -- using tools that are available for free, ingenuity, and meticulous file/data management.
In my last job, when I needed to solicit photos or other submissions for the newsletter I edited, first thing I'd do is make a Google Form where folks could submit attachments, comments, and contact info, and have it collect all that information in a spreadsheet on the back end. Help me poke holes in this: why wouldn't a similar DIY system work for a lit mag?
As a former journalist with a few decades of effort behind him, I much appreciate your kick ass approach to the topic of unrelenting lit mag ripoff. Irish mags always pay, btw. Cheers.
Oct 22, 2022·edited Oct 22, 2022Liked by Becky Tuch
I confess I've only skimmed the comments, so forgive me if this has been asked and answered: Our university recently moved to Janeway as a submission and publication platform for online journals housed here, and my understanding it that it includes many of the features described as characteristics of Submittable or at least Submission Manager: multiple reviewers can be assigned and comment in one place, the author can track the progress of the submission, revised versions are stored alongside original ones (in academic publishing the assumption is there will be at least one, perhaps multiple, revisions before publication), and final versions are assembled into online issues from the platform itself. Janeway is free and here's a description of its features https://janeway.systems/features
Just a thought, given some peoples' mention that Submittable may be planning to move into academic publishing.
Does your university host the Janeway system itself, or does it use the Janeway hosting service, which looks priced similar to Submittable but without some of the key features like a secure frontend for fees. (Groucho Marx: "Love flies out the door when money comes innuendo.")
Submittable can be used for more than just submissions. The Oregon Poetry Association, for example, uses it to handle membership dues, contest entry fees, and sales of its annual anthology of contest-winning poems (distributed free to members) and of member books. I think it can also be used to handle job applications much in the way submissions are, with data such as resumes handed around to various staffers who may not live in the same place. And that's another advantage: your staff does not have to be physically located in the same place, but can be spread all over the country. As for volume, postal submissions were a soda straw, Submittable is a fire hose. It also enables submitters to do what is called "carpet bombing" (which editors hate), that is, making up a batch of poems, typically five, and submitting that batch repeatedly to one litmag after another; Submittable makes it easy by retaining the submitter's contact information so it doesn't have to be re-entered every time. I don't see much here about contest fees, which seem to be a major way litmags raise money, since they take in way more than the prize is worth. I don't mind paying a $3 submission fee, but have become sensitive to contest fees, which are rising. It's also interesting that many of the top-tier litmags (see the "top tier" discussion elsewhere on this forum) do not charge fees, probably because they can afford not to. That's a good reason to aim high.
Surely there aren’t millions in tiny lit mags. I wonder if some of the fundraising is in preparation for future initiatives. Seems like any enterprise that needs a secure frontend for fees and submissions would need a product like what’s on offer here. Obviously, sticking with e-mail submissions would mean no fees could be charged.
The name of the company suggests the founders were thinking rather small. The technology, however, is probably useful for a lot of things.
If they overcharge or get too big for their britches, they’ll become vulnerable to disruption from below, where someone comes in with a product that may not do everything Submittable does, but is cheaper and “good enough.”
Early in a startup’s life, customers often get a good bargain, not paying anything like what the service should cost. This loss-making is subsidized by the investors, who are in it for an eventual payout, which often never comes, hence why they invest in lots of things.
Professional services are expensive. For something used every day, Submittable might be a very good value. Compare to the cost of attorney and accountant fees or liability insurance.
One last post to get back to one of Becky's forward-looking questions, Is there a better way?
Considering how much Submittable's upgrade costs and how it appears to have locked itself in, I thought I'd just take a look around in the various categories of software that Submittable itself operates in (admissions management, awards management, contest management, talent casting). I came across quite a few names. It seems that some, at least on the surface, might fit easily into a lit mag's operations while also cost less:
As I understand it, Submittable is getting VC because they're getting into the development/fundraising world. They don't care about the chump change they're getting from journals. This is reflected in their customer service.
Nobody at my journal likes Submittable. I detest it. It's slow (loading times are 2005ish), awkward, inflexible, and doesn't give me the data I want. I don't know what alternatives exist but it's apparently something we're looking into.
As a writer? Well, despite my notification settings Submittable didn't send me an email telling me my story had been accepted for publication. I only learned about it, and that I had messages from the editors, when I was on Submittable doing journal work and on a whim checked to see if my story had moved from received to in-progress.
Maybe a little late to the conversation but I’m wondering from editors if there was a cheaper, hosted solution (i.e., no installation required), would people move or do they feel too entrenched in Submittable?
(I’m part assuming that young lit mags on a shoestring: yes. Older ones with years of archives on a painful but doable CLMP discount: maybe not.)
It’s the same as Spotify and all those other venture capital-driven abusers of creatives. See Netflix’s latest series : “Playlist” , the story of Spotify, as only one example of our brave new digital world of capitalist banditry.
Appreciate your thoughtful approach to examining the current state of writing and publishing. I hope that the limitations of current portals/ approaches to sending out work will evolve, and the kinds of conversations you are inspiring may be a catalyst for some part of the "system" to change.
Reminds me of the advent of paperback books, which apparently became popular in the 1930's, because there was a demand for access to a a format cheaper than hardback books.
Is there an extra charge to opt in or out for publications to use the "Discover" tab on Submittable. As a writer, I've noticed that some publications that use the Submittable platform to receive submissions are not readily visible when I browse the site to see who is currently "reading." Does it have something to do with the number of submissions or the cost? Thank you- Nadja Maril https://nadjamaril.com/
I can answer only through my own experience, which is that we do not pay a fee and have not been given an opt-out option, but when we create a "project" we can tag that project (I think up to three tags?) and I think the tags are how they select for the Discover section. I can't say for sure, however. But you can skip the tagging and that might preclude your "project" from showing up in Discover.
Submittable is crazy expensive - their heart was in the right place when they started but they seem to have pivoted to serve Grant organizations. It might be worth looking at alternatives built to support the creative industries instead - Picter (https://www.picter.com/) and Zealous (https://zealous.co/) look like good alternatives.
Submittable is the worst platform I have used in 20 years of managing grants for many nonprofit organizations. The only information Submittable provides is through Q/As that are impenetrable and irrelevant, and most of them are only focused on submitting a grant application. There are no live persons or live chats that I have found.. It's Kafkaesque.
Is there any reason magazines are not using Moksha instead of Submittable? I looked at prices on Moksha's home page and it says $750 a year. It seems like that is comparable to Submittalble with their price increase, so is the a functionality difference that makes one more compelling?
Submittable costs my magazine $1500 a year, just for our subscription. That is a huge part of our magazine's budget. When we started, ten years ago, it was few hundred. On top of that, they take .99 plus 5% of every penny we take in through Submittable. They pay us through PayPal, which takes another cut. It's incredibly expensive and they house 10 years of our archives. They recently updated their platform which forced a lot of changes that make it more difficult for us to use it (but must be useful to their enterprise-level clients). There are a ton of features that are locked to us because we have a lower-level membership. Why do we stay? It's pretty much baked into the way we operate (many editors can view and comment together on a manuscript, and message one another on the back end; we can also carry on conversations with the writers and accept revisions and other uploads, such as bios and photos for publication, etc.) We will probably eventually leave but we need a product in place that can offer much of what Submittable does at a lower cost.
Submittable is moving toward becoming a profitable company, as Becky pointed out re: series A funding. They have venture capital who will be interested in making money when Submittable goes public etc. However, Karen Rile, if you run a magazine you should become a member of CLMP. Members of CLMP are grandfathered in to a lower pricing structure. The CLMP membership comes with a fee, starting at around $125 per year for small organizations. Submittable costs "only" $350 or something in that arena with proof of CLMP membership. This was a big deal when the new CEO took over and Submittable changed its pricing structure and Submission Manager sort of left the arena (they no longer service their product and decoupled from CLMP who had vouched for SM and provided the clients at a very affordable one time fee, in addition to the CLMP membership). Short of it is you can get submittable cheaply (though not as cheap as when they started). Regarding submissions costing, while this has created a burden for writers to an extent, it also creates more opportunities for writers since more lit lags are able to function by virtue of charging nominal fees. So long as the lit mags due their part and select from their submission pools and do no solicit big names and do not insert their friends and colleagues and continue to pay out something (whether it's subscriptions, copies, or cash) the new economy can be viewed as positive. Certainly, however, there are issues with big magazines who are fully funded nonprofits either through foundations or by attached universities should tread very lightly in terms of charging for submissions...that seems a bit like it's taking advantage, especially since these established venues are quite selective and can sometimes be elitist. Perhaps a simple rule of thumb ought be, if you already take PUBLIC money to fund your enterprise, you oughtn't charge sub fees. If you're a bootstrapping new mag who needs the funds to survive, then by all means, you're providing a service to the community by any measure (as long as no behind the scenes dealing), and the community ought support via fees. That seams like a fair exchange.
Thanks, Ephemera! We do belong to CLMP, but we need more seats than the CLMP version of the membership allows.
Since the developer of Submission Manager makes the software available for free. (See https://www.devinemke.com/index.php?page=software) It seems not to have the bells and whistles of Submittable but I am curious why even a few more litmags don't use it.
Story still uses Submission Manager, probably because it was created for them. But does anyone else? For example, One Story no longer does.
I don’t know if I’d go so far as to call SM abandonware, but it looks headed in that direction. It might have been a good solution 10 or 15 years ago, but hasn’t kept up.
To use SM, you’d have to install it yourself on your own server, or pay a consultant to do it for you. And then who would support it? The same expensive consultant? And at the end of the day, it still wouldn’t be a one-stop-shopping, turnkey system with the features you need. And it would probably end up costing far more to operate than Submittable.
No, I would say SM is a non-starter. Unless you’re a tinkerer or a masochist.
The idea of a lit mag is to publish, not to get into software engineering.
We don't use it because it is super clunky. It needs an update.
Or...perhaps it's time that litfic learned how to run Kickstarters.
Thank you for cluing us ignorant submitters in on the editor side!
One other observation: in past years, when we had a glitch, often a software issue on their end, their support staff would answer promptly. They are now no longer available on weekends or evenings (which is exactly when most of us, who have day jobs, do our Submittable-based work.) The last time we had an emergency, which was related to their (to us) user-unfriendly platform update, they never even responded to my email ticket. I don't think they are interested in small magazines anymore--they are chasing large clients like universities and foundations. A few years ago a rep even said to me, "We still care about the small magazines like yours who were there when we started." I knew that was a bad sign...
Thanks for these insights, Karen. And yes, it looks like they got a new CEO in 2020. I remember meeting the original founder, Michael Fitzgerald, at AWP. He was really nice, approachable and seemed interested in being accessible. With the new CEO it looks like they have sought to expand well beyond lit mags.
That tracks with the change of corporate attitude I've observed. I would not be surprised if they are hoping to offload the small magazine like us with a policy of overpricing/underservice.
It's the Amazon model. Corner a niche market for proof of concept and to undergird your enterprise, then expand and cut services to that original group who made your company. Sigh.
Well put!
Do you have their lit journal pricing? It is supposed to be different than their normal pricing, essentially as a nod to their roots.
They are really made for glossies and even HR now, and that is a whole different volume and value proposition than lit journals.
I don’t know if it was tied to CLMP always, but here it is: https://www.submittable.com/clmp/
BTW, the caps are because certain grandfathered-in accounts can be free, but there is a monthly submission limit.
Isn't this part of a bigger issue, though? That writing used to be for an audience of readers but now is often for an audience of other writers? We pay to get read by other writers in the lit world, which almost feels like a vanity fee. I know of no one outside of other writers who read lit mags or small press chapbooks, etc. This not only results in writers getting paid little to nothing, it often results in a stylistic echo chamber. I think we have to start brainstorming entirely new systems.
Bravo, Jessica, for calling out this issue. I've also raised this issue with Becky and she has it in her in her queue.
I fail to see the logic of literary magazines passing on the cost of Submittable to writers. Yes, Submittable is expensive, but so are a lot of things in the writing world. Why is the writer expected to foot the magazine’s bill for a software management program that the writer had no part in choosing? As publishing writers who submit to literary magazines, we have absolutely no voice in which method those magazines use to accept our work. This seems deeply unfair. I’ve used Submittable as an editor, and I found it mediocre at best, but my opinions on its usefulness are beside the point. The point is, writers should not have to pay for something we had no say in choosing.
Sounds like the logic of passing on this cost has something to do with sustaining a healthy and diverse literary ecosystem. It’s not ideal, and on the one hand I sympathize with your principled objection. On the other, I don’t mind paying a nominal fee if that means my options for submitting are not limited to litmags funded by established nonprofits, university MFA programs, government programs and/or the CIA. Otherwise the next step is samizdat, which I find exciting, but I doubt that most other writers do.
I think submission fees actively cut against a healthy and diverse literary ecosystem. There's no pressure on magazines to sustain themselves by finding an audience or identifying new, interesting niche markets to cater to. They don't have to cater to readers at all, because funding is coming from submission fees.
Is there any other art form that props itself up this way? Record labels that survive by charging musicians, or film/TV studios that charge their directors and actors? By creating revenue models driven by submission fees, lit mags have essentially excused themselves from the actual hard work of curating excellent content that readers will pay for.
The explosion of paid Substack newsletters is evidence that readers are out there for all kinds of extremely niche and diverse forms of writing. Those readers were not being reached or served by literary journals, and those journals have absolutely no incentive to do so as long as they make money off of writers instead of by cultivating an actual audience.
You make excellent points, Alex, and they all lead (at least where poetry is concerned) into the territory marked with the names “John Barr” and “Dana Gioia” and “Joseph Epstein,” all under the general rubrics of “The MFA Industrial Complex” and “Who Killed Poetry?” A related observation, since you mentioned record companies, is that most working musicians and bands don’t have deals with the big record companies. There is a thriving indie music scene in this country, and lots of people are putting out great music under their own labels and organizing their own tours, alone and with like-minded others. Poets and other writers could take the hint, and I think they may do so as time goes on and the established channels (now including many university-affiliated litmags) grow ever more insular and sclerotic. For poets today, and maybe also for other writers who are not churning out beach books, the leading edge may be reading series with point-of-sale pamphlets and chapbooks. There is lots of life beyond and outside the best seller and the midlist book.
I think it depends on the magazine. Some of us have an all-volunteer staff doing unpaid work with a commitment towards honoring the works of writers and providing reliable stewardship. For the first five years I personally funded the magazine I founded out of my own pocket, to the tune of thousands of dollars a year. Now, the magazine is self-sustaining, but we the staff remain volunteers. We respect the decision of any writer not to pay for submissions—for any reason—and will provide them a link to submit for free if they ask. Most writers don’t mind helping support the magazine. We’re grateful for that community.
I get it about most literary magazines being volunteer efforts. And writers who wish to support magazines are free to do so. But many journals that charge fees do not pay writers. I would argue that any writer who submits her work for free is already supporting the magazine--charging a fee seems doubly unfair.
Fully agree. Not to add that it's not as if these lit mags don't have cover prices. I bet what many rake in via fees even after paying Submittable surpasses that via cover price. Shouldn't that be of ethical importance?
You don't have to pay for it: if you don't like the submission condittions of a particular litmag, you can choose not to submit to it.
So here's a question.
Why do litmags charge for submissions where genre mags generally do not? Even the ones using Submittable instead of Moksha or the Clarkesworld submission manager do not charge.
Is it because genre mags, specifically the speculative fiction ones, have been consistently part of a culture where the dominant voice is "money flows to the author, payment for reading is BAD"?
Or is it because litfic has a huge "pay-to-play" zine culture, whereas SFF has a big "for-the-love" zine culture?
Note: I will NEVER pay to submit to a magazine. Period. That's not how it works. The degree to which so much is monetized in litfic world has me side-eying a lot of it, because it sure looks like a financial means of gatekeeping to me.
Isn't it simply becaue genre is commercially viable, whereas 'literary' isn't?
The big commercial genre magazines use Moksha or the Clarkesworld submission system, not Submittable. It's the little literary equivalent to genre magazines that use Submittable. I rather think it's the culture of the SFF genre in particular, where "money flows to the writer" is the status quo. Seriously.
I am an editor and publisher who has used Submittable since it started, back when I was in the beta-testing group for it. I can give some insight into the submission-cap situation: Submittable used to be free. They used to have a free account that was promised to remain free, and it didn't come with stipulations; for those of us who have been around for a long time, we were able to keep our free accounts, *but* when Submittable went to all-paying, they put stipulations on us. In order to keep our free account, we can now only accept 100 free submissions across all our categories per month (and no access to the features of the upgraded plans). Other paying tiers have similar caps; if I were to upgrade to the next level, I could get 300 free submissions. But we have 100 because I'm not paying $1,000 per year for the upgrade. We have multiple categories open and need some of those to remain free, and it doesn't take any time at all to hit that 100 mark. We usually hit 100 free submissions by the end of the first week of every month. So, then, what? Do we stop taking submissions because we've used up all our free ones?
No, because we won't have enough quality submissions, so we have to charge a small fee for the rest of the submissions, which do not count against any limitations or stipulations. On Submittable's end, the sky is the limit for people sending in paid submissions, and they take a cut of that. For an average month, Submittable gets several hundred dollars off me in percentages. It's also important to note that Submittable puts a *minimum* limit to how low your charged fee can be. The minimum is $2.00, and the editor doesn't see any of that except a few cents. So, if you see a fee that is $2.00 or so, the editor really is using that entirely to pay Submittable for the submission. (If you have a paying account, Submittable still takes a cut of the fee, but it's a smaller percentage. For us, however, the smaller percentage was not equal to the amount that the upgrade would cost in total per year, and it's especially not equal if you are an editor who only takes submissions during certain months and not yearlong, because it's a yearly plan.)
Someone else mentioned getting a deluge of submissions if you don't cap, and this is also true. Submittable as a platform has enabled tons of non-professionals to effectively spam you. They don't read the guidelines; they submit to whatever category is free, even if their work doesn't fit; they WASTE YOUR TIME. When we have to have paying subs open, we do have the option of letting authors submit for free, but you have to email us to get the link to submit for free; by doing this added step, we only get people who really want to submit but can't afford it, who think that extra step is worth it.
I am not familiar with Duosuma, but I would be surprised if it's actually free since the rest of their services are not, and the aforementioned Submission Manager is not free. You have to pay for it or pay for a CLMP membership, and you can also charge fees on that platform (look, for instance, at the submission portal in the link that is linked in the article, and you'll see that it has a payment of $3.00 to submit). Submittable also has a reduced fee for an account if you are a member of CLMP. [Edit: Looks like Submission Manager is now free through Github, though that wasn't always the case. My original point, however, is that you can also charge on other platforms and that fees are not just a Submittable issue, and that's still true of Submission Manager, as well.]
So, why do we stay? Well, we still have our free account, and it's been promised to us for life, so we don't have to pay for the yearly cost. Many small presses that got in at the beginning still have their free accounts. Second, my inbox is absolutely explosive, so I can't take email correspondence and submissions because they'll just get lost; Submittable organizes all of that for me and keeps conversations and files in tidy threads. Submittable also allows add-ons of our books, which enables us to sell dozens of books per month that we wouldn't otherwise sell. I think the only thing that would make me switch at this point is if Submittable started charging the author to create an account to submit, which I doubt will happen.
The link is to Story's Submission Manager. Story charges $3 per submission. But the software is apparently free. (In this case, I don't mind that Story gets my $3 instead of USPS and Staples). The developer of Submission Manager makes the software available for free on github. https://www.devinemke.com/index.php?page=software.
I understand that the link is to Story's Submission Manager and that Story charges $3.00. My point was that you could also charge on other platforms (and many do), like Submission Manager, and that charging is not just a Submittable issue. I don't mind that Story gets the $3.00, either, and I'm not against submission fees in the slightest, though I don't think the alternative is "USPS and Staples." Very few people accept paper submissions anymore, but it's not just because of submission portals; it's because we're in the digital age now, and paper is wasteful. The alternative to a submission portal isn't snail mail; the alternative is to accept submissions via email.
I'm glad Submission Manager is free now. That wasn't always the case. You used to have to be a CLMP member or pay for the software. I imagine making it free was a response to Submittable becoming a contender. (I've been publishing for 30 years, since the days of paper-mailings, and I've watched these forces duke it out. Submittable was a game-changer when it came on the scene, and it really shook things up.)
If you've been there this long you'd be talking of Submishmash then ...just an aside.
Nope. This is a thread about Submittable, so I'm talking about Submittable. But since they are the same company run by the same people, the semantics of the company name don't matter anyway, so whether it's Submittable or Submishmash is a moot point that doesn't require any "aside." We changed our account URL to the new Submittable domain name when it opened up.
Sorry, Leah, I had read your first post too quickly before I replied. Only afterward did I realize you had referred to charging a fee as a possibility with SM. (Most litmags I encounter that use SM do not charge any submission fee). And I do agree that digital is better than post!
what/where are these 'add ons' of books - am I missing a trick here?
Hi, SunnyFlow. On the administrative/editor side, under Forms, you can select one of your Forms, add a field for Multiple Responses, then add in your book titles and prices that your customers can purchase. When a submitter is filling out the Form for his submission, he can select to buy those add-on books, and that purchase comes through with his submission.
I'll rely on others more well versed in finance to conclude whether Submittable's business model is fair to writers and litmags and whether their margins are acceptable. However, I am reminded of Churchill's comment that democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.
I know from personal experience that software takes time to develop, time to maintain and is notoriously difficult to monetise to ultimately get a reward for all of that (initially) unpaid effort. And that is one of the reasons why most internet services rely on advertising and/or paid subscriptions and/or sales and/or donations to survive.
The element that seems to be a glaring omission in the litmag field is advertising. Whether that's because litmags are a bit sniffy about accepting filthy lucre from commerce, or because litmags don't deliver enough eyeballs to interest advertisers I don't know but I grow a little tired of the argument that some mysterious 'they' should be shelling out money from an inexhaustible supply shrouded in secrecy.
This where we need to heed Jessica Michael's earlier comments and have some deep conversations about who is actually reading litmags and re-think whether there has ever been a viable market for them or is ever likely to be. To do that we need to shift our thinking away from the wild west of the early internet and stop thinking everything online can and should be free.
PS - Just to get tongues wagging, here's a list of dreadful sell-outs who stooped to having their work published in Playboy to get an audience: Roald Dahl, Jack Kerouac, Margaret Atwood, Ursula Le Guin, Ian Fleming, Ray Bradbury, Arthur C Clarke, Vladimir Nabokov, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Norman Mailer, and Alice Denham. My point is that to get paid you need to go to where the eyeballs are and that's not litmags.
I read through all of these and most seem to be from editors, good people all I can see, but might I present the view of a 'poor poet' [as in 'being paid'] and an old one [75] at that: IT AIN'T RIGHT! It's not right or fair to charge poets or any writers for the privilege of being rejected 90 % of the time [roughly what my odds have been in the past 5 years: applied to over 900 lit mags, published in 114 as of last week]. And if I had spent 3-5 bucks each time, that would have eaten up 3 or 4 months of the bag of peanuts Social Insecurity sends me every month. Now I don't mind not being paid for my poetry or essays: seeing them published is like gold to my ego [and that little beast does a happy dance every time!] I don't mind either only getting a 12% royalty on the 2 book-length collections a trade publisher has released-- that from what I've learned is in line for writers in general--and I donate it anyway to a charity. But I will not pay a dime as a reading/submission fee, and why should anyone have to? Email is free! Even snail mail is only the cost of a stamp or two. I get the dedication of the editing staff at most lit mags-- I'm asked to volunteer on request sometimes for one of them myself. But don't make writers put out 100's of dollars when most of the time their egos, poor fellows, will not be doing a happy dance....
New Ohio Review now charges $16 for a discounted subscription to submit work. I think that's over the top.
I use Submittable for my own writing submissions and don’t mind smaller fees. I feel you sort of have to be on Submittable to be in the game. As a Managing Editor of Novus, Submittable has been a godsend for establishing us in the international world of magazines. By joining Submittable, we were able to take a small university-driven journal and become an international one representing over 13 countries in one recent digital edition, and we continue to grow and attract worthy writers and poets of stature which we never would reach without the platform. For non-profits like us, it costs about $400ish a year —first by joining CLMP to get the discount and then the Submittable fee. It’s higher fees for for-profit journals. All in all, it’s a good experience for us and we wouldn’t be what we are without it. Editors cap submissions because you can get deluged with them if offering free subs, so they cap free campaigns. (They may have other reasons I don’t know of.) I do find by charging a small fee, we weed out non-serious writers and we do make some modest $$ for our journal which has little funding but via a small grant from the university. (If a writer or artist has a hardship about the fee, we can make accommodations.). Hope this helps. I find all these conversations relevant and interesting, but hadn’t joined before to comment! Thanks for what you do! Sandee
We belong to CLMP but the discounted membership doesn't have enough seats for our large editorial staff. Charging a small fee helps us cover the cost of Submittable, but it does also have the advantage, as Sandee points out, of reducing non-serious submitters. We used to have a lot of submissions that were inappropriate for our journal. We do offer free submissions to anyone who asks, but most submitters don't seem to mind the small fee, for which we are grateful.
Why does this surprise you? Books are a market, a big, even a huge business. Naturally, managers want to get paid for their work.
Writer? Writers, authors sponsor their existence. But for the sake of truth and fairness, I must say that I read the stories of the winners of many competitions with horror, they are so boring, inexpressive, not interesting.
How did they become "winners"? What does it say? On the general decline of culture. The fact that the organizers of the contests are not worried about the quality of the texts.
Like in chess. Previously, there were only classical chess, but today there are varieties: both blitz and armageddon with a low level of play. The main thing is to tickle the nerves of the audience, to raise money for the tournament. Business.
The era of enlightenment and classical literature is long over. It's time for mass culture.
"I read the stories of the winners of many competitions with horror, they are so boring, inexpressive, not interesting." Yep.
Great question. I'd also like to have more insight. The service does add a bit of value, in that it saves users the cost of printing and mailing, while providing a bit of transparency. But I'm surprise that, as a software, the service hardly seems to have evolved much from its original functionality. Where is all that capital going? I recall sending in a feature request 4-5 years ago, getting a response from their team within a month, but nothing more than that. Are there improvements happening on the litmag side? I wonder if magazines have become chained to a certain workflow because of the service. How can a competitor get in, leading to lower prices?
I should add, in case it wasn't obvious, that I'm merely a submitter.
Submitters aren’t their customers. So your needs take lower priority of editors, especially as others have mentioned, the company is targeting areas far beyond literary journals.
So glad to see so many other lit mag editors answering this post. I can confirm that a lot of what's being said here is common for lit mags. One thing I didn't see is a comparison of Submittable to Duotrope (for lit mags, the service is Duosumo, the admin host that then posts things to the public-facing side Duotrope).
At first, Duotrope looks less expensive for mags. However, they send the month's payments through Stripe, which takes its own cut. In the end, it is slightly less expensive, but about on par with Submittable's costs.
The big drawbacks to Duosumo/Duotrope are functionality and effectiveness.
Functionality: The dashboard is less intuitive, although users can figure it out quickly enough. It's difficult to have multiple team members using the site efficiently, which Submittable (for the most part) has taken care of.
Effectiveness: Sooooo few submissions! Sunspot Lit set up a Duosumo/Duotrope account in the hopes of reaching more writers, artists, and creatives. The result is that, for every open call we've done, we get about 3% of the total submissions through Duosumo. We do advertise, both paid and free options, for each call. The only difference I see to explain why Duotrope doesn't reach as many people for us is that Submittable has the "closing soon" option automatically sort results by date, whereas Duotrope's discovery search for writers/creatives is much less detailed.
Sunspot tried (and still uses) Duosumo because Submittable, over the past two years, seems to be turning in a very different direction. Their newsletters are focused on funding applications, and many lit mags feel their user interface is changing to prioritize funding grants. It's a shame that Duosumo isn't working as well. It's confusing, too, because it sure seems like so many more creatives use Duosumo compared to Submittable. But the 97% response rate from Submittable can't be ignored. It's a channel that our magazine, and many small magazines, can't turn off without risking their magazines' continued existence.
There was another question about why more lit mags don't use the free version of the software or other free software. A few dozen CLMP members got together last year to consider this after an open discussion happened on the CLMP email. They looked deeply into options and shared results and ideas with the entire list as they progressed. The option to have multiple lit mags pay the individual who would have to manage the software was also considered. In the end, it was far too much work for mags that already have staffing shortages and work overloads, not to mention the additional costs on cash-strapped publications.
This info is presenting mostly from the small lit mag perspective. The big university ones, with their endowments that pay out very salaries, are working under very different financial conditions. I can't provide any input from that side.
Gah, I wish I read this earlier! I just cancelled Submittable for Duosuma (with a gut feeling Submittable was probably better but wanting to escape). This is very helpful, thank you.
So, I have been on the “investor” end of these kind of “deals” and frankly it’s a double edge sword. Folks raise venture $$ for 3 reasons: 1) to have more $$ to invest in improving the product, 2) to “acquire” customers, and 3) to enter new markets. I don’t know enough about the submittable market to know which BUT it seems like a finely tuned web-machine (at least from a poet’s point of view).
And yes, we investors sustain the salaries of the employees/founders and keep the lights on until they figure out how to turn a profit. I’ve never been one of the “squeeze the company for all we can get out of it” types of investors. I prefer to be a partner who shares the vision and takes on risk to see that vision come to fruition.
That said, there is a substantial risk for us small players that we will loose everything so when a bigger investor comes along and funds growth and enhances our chances of making money in the deal, our knees go weak – as to the founders – who also start to see $$$$$$$’s in their dreams. They will cross the line between their investors being advisory partners to bending to the bigger investors’ vision for the company.
I suspection you and your commenters are 100% right when you speculate that a raise of $70mm implies they have an expanding vision for who their platform can sell to. To justify $70 million in investment, there has to be a business model somewhere that earns that much in revenue ANNUALY! At $2 a submission – that would be 35mm submissions a year. SOOOOOO, there must be some other master that submittable is, well, submitting to to make this worthwhile for their investors.
Meanwhile, I left that world a while back when it started getting so usurious and manipulative. I am much happier now – although I met and worked with some incredibly creative and thoughtful entrepreneurs back in the day.
Wow, great article Becky.
As both a submitter and editor, I go nuts if I don't have everything in one place, which is basically why I've stuck with Submittable over many years. Thanks for your thoughts, which I agree with. It's like FB, I'm too far in to get out.
Same-- having it in one place keeps us functioning as a magazine.
As a submitter, I appreciate editors for many things, one of which is using Submittable which makes it easier for me to track and manage submissions. By all means, pass the cost on to me, an office worker who burns out on details with her day job that allows her to afford this small luxury! I also love paying extra for expedited submissions--except when it turns out they are not, which has happened a lot lately, and annoys me perhaps disproportionately. And I also don't like paying for mandatory feedback--I prefer to be able to opt out. Sorry if Submittable is oppressive, and I hope you can address that somehow, and that I might be a part of it, but mainly thanks!
(This reminds me a bit about the Bookshop debate!)
I've never been a lit mag editor and I have far less experience submitting to them than most people here, I'm sure. That being said, I wonder if MacGuyvering an interface that performs Submittable's basic functions would be easier than we imagine.
I worked as an editorial assistant in textbook publishing in the late aughts and early 2010s. My job consisted mostly of commissioning professors to review manuscripts and published texts for insultingly tiny honoraria. At the time, my company and its competitors were tiptoeing from a paper-based system -- sending printed manuscripts, questionnaires, W9 forms, etc. by postal mail with an SASE, which was slow, cumbersome, and error-prone -- toward an electronic one where everything was done by email attachment, which was merely cumbersome and error-prone.
Then someone started peddling a web-based interface that claimed to streamline the review process. You could keep your reviewers' contact information in a database, send them automated emails, and put all the documents in one place for them to download, and when they were finished you'd have all their questionnaires and tax forms in one place. It was clunky as hell in both form and function, and probably illegal because of the tax thing, but a lot of editors were jazzed about it because it allegedly made record-keeping easier and eliminated a lot of the back-and-forth, which would allegedly free up their assistants to run twice as many reviews at one time. That they paid money to use this service; when I, the reviewers, and everyone contributing actual labor to the enterprise got paid dick; was insult piled upon injury.
My editor wanted to get in on it and I told him, don't. Give me an hour with Google Docs and I'll make you an interface that looks better than this, works just as well, and costs nothing. Which I did. To host the review documents, I made a single HTML page with embedded links to all the materials and paperwork. Automating the emails was as simple as putting the reviewers' information in a spreadsheet, with additional columns for status tracking, and using Mail Merge to send invitations, instructions, reminders, and acknowledgements from templates.
I repeat, I have no experience on the editorial side of a litmag (other than volunteering as a proofreader during my MFA). But I feel like it's got to be possible to create processes that mimic the core functions of submission management software -- using tools that are available for free, ingenuity, and meticulous file/data management.
In my last job, when I needed to solicit photos or other submissions for the newsletter I edited, first thing I'd do is make a Google Form where folks could submit attachments, comments, and contact info, and have it collect all that information in a spreadsheet on the back end. Help me poke holes in this: why wouldn't a similar DIY system work for a lit mag?
Yes, would you like to share this Google Docs system? That would be amazing.
I just saw this comment. It’ll take me a little while, but I’ll mock something up. Stay tuned.
Just wondering, Becky, if you're planning to seek comment from Submittable at some point?
As a former journalist with a few decades of effort behind him, I much appreciate your kick ass approach to the topic of unrelenting lit mag ripoff. Irish mags always pay, btw. Cheers.
Wow... fascinating question and informative comments. As a writer/submitter I had no idea of all that goes on behind the scenes
I confess I've only skimmed the comments, so forgive me if this has been asked and answered: Our university recently moved to Janeway as a submission and publication platform for online journals housed here, and my understanding it that it includes many of the features described as characteristics of Submittable or at least Submission Manager: multiple reviewers can be assigned and comment in one place, the author can track the progress of the submission, revised versions are stored alongside original ones (in academic publishing the assumption is there will be at least one, perhaps multiple, revisions before publication), and final versions are assembled into online issues from the platform itself. Janeway is free and here's a description of its features https://janeway.systems/features
Just a thought, given some peoples' mention that Submittable may be planning to move into academic publishing.
Does your university host the Janeway system itself, or does it use the Janeway hosting service, which looks priced similar to Submittable but without some of the key features like a secure frontend for fees. (Groucho Marx: "Love flies out the door when money comes innuendo.")
I don't know.
Submittable can be used for more than just submissions. The Oregon Poetry Association, for example, uses it to handle membership dues, contest entry fees, and sales of its annual anthology of contest-winning poems (distributed free to members) and of member books. I think it can also be used to handle job applications much in the way submissions are, with data such as resumes handed around to various staffers who may not live in the same place. And that's another advantage: your staff does not have to be physically located in the same place, but can be spread all over the country. As for volume, postal submissions were a soda straw, Submittable is a fire hose. It also enables submitters to do what is called "carpet bombing" (which editors hate), that is, making up a batch of poems, typically five, and submitting that batch repeatedly to one litmag after another; Submittable makes it easy by retaining the submitter's contact information so it doesn't have to be re-entered every time. I don't see much here about contest fees, which seem to be a major way litmags raise money, since they take in way more than the prize is worth. I don't mind paying a $3 submission fee, but have become sensitive to contest fees, which are rising. It's also interesting that many of the top-tier litmags (see the "top tier" discussion elsewhere on this forum) do not charge fees, probably because they can afford not to. That's a good reason to aim high.
Surely there aren’t millions in tiny lit mags. I wonder if some of the fundraising is in preparation for future initiatives. Seems like any enterprise that needs a secure frontend for fees and submissions would need a product like what’s on offer here. Obviously, sticking with e-mail submissions would mean no fees could be charged.
The name of the company suggests the founders were thinking rather small. The technology, however, is probably useful for a lot of things.
If they overcharge or get too big for their britches, they’ll become vulnerable to disruption from below, where someone comes in with a product that may not do everything Submittable does, but is cheaper and “good enough.”
Early in a startup’s life, customers often get a good bargain, not paying anything like what the service should cost. This loss-making is subsidized by the investors, who are in it for an eventual payout, which often never comes, hence why they invest in lots of things.
Professional services are expensive. For something used every day, Submittable might be a very good value. Compare to the cost of attorney and accountant fees or liability insurance.
One last post to get back to one of Becky's forward-looking questions, Is there a better way?
Considering how much Submittable's upgrade costs and how it appears to have locked itself in, I thought I'd just take a look around in the various categories of software that Submittable itself operates in (admissions management, awards management, contest management, talent casting). I came across quite a few names. It seems that some, at least on the surface, might fit easily into a lit mag's operations while also cost less:
submit.com
evalato
award force
apply (from survey monkey)
zealous
compete (from untap)
judgify
reviewr
I founded Zealous - glad it was on this list :D. That was the whole point of creating it in the first place. Supporting the creative industries.
As I understand it, Submittable is getting VC because they're getting into the development/fundraising world. They don't care about the chump change they're getting from journals. This is reflected in their customer service.
Nobody at my journal likes Submittable. I detest it. It's slow (loading times are 2005ish), awkward, inflexible, and doesn't give me the data I want. I don't know what alternatives exist but it's apparently something we're looking into.
As a writer? Well, despite my notification settings Submittable didn't send me an email telling me my story had been accepted for publication. I only learned about it, and that I had messages from the editors, when I was on Submittable doing journal work and on a whim checked to see if my story had moved from received to in-progress.
Great questions! Thank you for asking them.
Maybe a little late to the conversation but I’m wondering from editors if there was a cheaper, hosted solution (i.e., no installation required), would people move or do they feel too entrenched in Submittable?
(I’m part assuming that young lit mags on a shoestring: yes. Older ones with years of archives on a painful but doable CLMP discount: maybe not.)
It’s the same as Spotify and all those other venture capital-driven abusers of creatives. See Netflix’s latest series : “Playlist” , the story of Spotify, as only one example of our brave new digital world of capitalist banditry.
Becky -
Appreciate your thoughtful approach to examining the current state of writing and publishing. I hope that the limitations of current portals/ approaches to sending out work will evolve, and the kinds of conversations you are inspiring may be a catalyst for some part of the "system" to change.
Reminds me of the advent of paperback books, which apparently became popular in the 1930's, because there was a demand for access to a a format cheaper than hardback books.
Excellent question.
Is there an extra charge to opt in or out for publications to use the "Discover" tab on Submittable. As a writer, I've noticed that some publications that use the Submittable platform to receive submissions are not readily visible when I browse the site to see who is currently "reading." Does it have something to do with the number of submissions or the cost? Thank you- Nadja Maril https://nadjamaril.com/
I can answer only through my own experience, which is that we do not pay a fee and have not been given an opt-out option, but when we create a "project" we can tag that project (I think up to three tags?) and I think the tags are how they select for the Discover section. I can't say for sure, however. But you can skip the tagging and that might preclude your "project" from showing up in Discover.
Does anyone know how Duosoma compares with Submittable in terms of cost and functionality? (Just curious - I'm a humble submitter.)
Submittable is crazy expensive - their heart was in the right place when they started but they seem to have pivoted to serve Grant organizations. It might be worth looking at alternatives built to support the creative industries instead - Picter (https://www.picter.com/) and Zealous (https://zealous.co/) look like good alternatives.
Submittable is the worst platform I have used in 20 years of managing grants for many nonprofit organizations. The only information Submittable provides is through Q/As that are impenetrable and irrelevant, and most of them are only focused on submitting a grant application. There are no live persons or live chats that I have found.. It's Kafkaesque.
Mags charge submission fees because they can.
The fees paid by struggling writers pay established writers commissioned by mags.
It's quite cynical.
Is there any reason magazines are not using Moksha instead of Submittable? I looked at prices on Moksha's home page and it says $750 a year. It seems like that is comparable to Submittalble with their price increase, so is the a functionality difference that makes one more compelling?