Ten Submission Missteps to Avoid

Once a month we at Descant have our ‘reading session’ when we try, like a dog and his tail, to catch-up with our submissions. We receive about a thousand envelopes a year, packed with poems, fiction, essays, photographs and lots of hope. Unlike many other literary periodicals, our submission guidelines are barebones. Thus, writers sometimes feel less inhibited with creative and innovative ways to stand out from the pile. Some of the efforts are humorous but off-putting. Though we pride ourselves on being an open-minded bunch, we are only human. Some gimmicks challenge us at the start to remain unbiased even before we have read the submissions. Here our a few missteps that a submitter may wish to avoid.

1)    Size Matters. My personal pet-peeve is when I pick up an envelope and its weight causes me to groan.  Many magazines impose a cap on word length for submissions, but at Descant we do not. Once I chanced upon a submission for a ‘short’ story that was fifty-four pages long. While there is a place for longer short fiction, normally periodicals prefer more concise pieces. In the early stages of the writing process there is a phase that I call verbal diarrhea, wherein the writer needs to let out everything he can relating to his story. As the piece is refined in subsequent drafts, details get embedded into the story in more subtle ways and chunks of the early verbiage are edited out. When I see a submission that is generous with its pages, I fear that the writer has sent an early draft. I will read it though, just incase I am wrong. Perhaps it is a very engaging story that does require fifty pages to tell. Though I have yet to see such a brilliant submission.
2)    Double-sided submission. While printing on both sides of the paper is environmentally friendly and laudable, it confuses readers. The standard for submission in the publishing world is single-sided only and any departure from that norm risks the reader missing alternative pages.
3)    Fancy Fonts.  Poets are sometimes guilty of this. It reeks of desperation and puts the reader on the defensive.
4)    Bold Author’s Name. Occasionally a writer will try to catch our attention by placing his name above everything in a font that is double the size of the main text. It reads like a warning sign: Fragile Author Ego at Work, Beware.
5)    Once I opened a submission envelope and a barrage of cut-out stars and glitter hearts fell out across the desk. While it gave me a chuckle, it was an effort to clean up the mess and the text of the submission had to work that much harder to win me back.
6)    Submitting too often. There is a proverb in English that says ‘familiarity breeds contempt’. There is some truth in that. While persistence and tenacity in a writer are admirable, essential even, submitting too often can make the readers apathetic toward the submission. In this internet age many magazines around the world accept online submissions. Take advantage of this globalization, spread your stories upon fresh new fields.
7)    Obvious grammatical; and spelling errorrs. Such as the two here. While work that needs copy-editing is not a deal-breaker, it makes the text difficult to read and interferes with the flow. Always try to send copy with minimal errors. If you are submitting outside of Canada, set your spell-check for the country that you are submitting to. Americans think ‘color’ is correct but the Brits will think you are a sloppy speller.
8)    Stale-dated themed submissions. Descant routinely puts out calls for themed submissions on our website. Pay close attention to the deadline. We sometimes get submissions for themed issues months after the deadline when the text is at the copy-editing stage. We try to be flexible and the one question the editor of the themed issues will always ask is: “Is it brilliant?” In order for her to squeeze in your late submission it would have to be genius to make the editor reshuffle her careful work.
9)    Suspect publishing history. Many readers do not bother with the author’s cover letter, they go straight to the submission. But some readers will read the cover letter knowing that, like all resumes, there will be embellishments. I recall seeing a cover letter once where the author went on for a page and half listing her movie reviews on rottentomatoes.com. Anyone may write in a terse sentence and it will be published (‘This film sucked’). Descant co-editors are savvy enough to know a con. We’ll still read the submission, but with suspicion.
10)    A plethora of poems. We have a rule that we cannot publish anymore than a sweep of five poems by the same authors in one issue. Sometimes poets, because the work is so concise, will send us batches of a dozen or more. It is left to us to read them all and decide which five are the best of the bunch. Again, it puts the reader on the defensive.

The best way to get our attention is with fresh, crisp, crackling writing that gets us excited and eager to share our discovery with fellow co-editors.