So The Whistling Fire is fast approaching its third anniversary, with around 200 pieces published, over 50,000 hits, a staff of around 10 depending, it has been a wild ride. Don’t get me wrong, I love my little journal. It is the little journal that could. I have often heard that being an agent is kind of like being an author’s psychiatrist or at its worse their mom. I believe this is true and I think being the editor of a literary journal is kind of like being a cop. Not the glamorous do-good cop or edgy cop on television. We are the “please get down from there” cop, the “could you keep the noise down” cop, the “I really don’t give a shit but I have to stand here and listen to you complain” cop. We’re the cops that turn to donuts and drink too much coffee, who couldn’t actually chase you if our lives depended on it. We’re dealing with the general public here. That sounds bad I know but if you saw behind the scenes of what we deal with, you’d understand.
Some people may think online literary journals don’t matter, at least not as much as a print journal. Which I understand, print journals are alluring. You can hold them in your hands, you can buy copies to give to your granny. It is a physical manifestation of your creative work. But look at our economy, look at our new eco-friendly stance on the world, online journals are the present and future. Also while your print journal cost readers money and has a limited distribution, online the number of people your piece can reach is unlimited. Those people in high school who thought you were a big nerd probably won’t shell out money to read your story, but they might be curious enough to follow a link on your facebook page. Also your story is there essentially forever unless the journal removes it from its archives. So when people google you that story is going to pop up. So do you want that story to represent you poorly? Do you want the piece everyone reads to be your best work?
Now that being said there are a lot of online journals and it is super easy to submit to them, almost too easy. Everyone and their brother can submit to The Whistling Fire, and considering we don’t have a reading fee I can tell you everyone and their brother probably has. That can mount up to a big head ache. Here are some things you should be aware of when submitting to an online journal. Things that bother me and that I have heard fellow editors at other publications complain about.
Remember what is Important
Every now and then someone .:cough poets:. freaks out because there is a mistake in their work or it doesn’t look exactly how they want it. It isn’t that I don’t give a shit. But often authors think issues are a lot bigger than they really are. And when I am juggling my full time job, my own writing (which will always take precedence over yours), my pets, my family, my web editing duties at other journals, and buying/moving into my own place—I find it a bit hard to get it up for your missing line break. I want your work to be perfect, I do, but let us remember there are starving kids in Africa.
So think about what is really important before you email an editor, or before you email them a second time before they have time to reply. Does your change have major bearing to how your story is read? Then I will make it a top priority. If it doesn’t I will do my best to get to it in a timely manner but chill. So if your fiction story uses the name Rustin Ave and you’ve decided you’d like it to be Rustin Street, guess what my answer is going to be. First of all no one cares, it doesn’t change the story in any way, so that one I might leave for a bit cause now you’re annoying me.
It Isn’t that Complicated
I shouldn’t say this, I should tell you that running a journal is terribly terribly difficult and you need years of experience and special training. But really, that isn’t true. I get a lot of people worried about legal issues. Which is annoying cause I decided when I started college that I didn’t want to go to law school for a reason. It really isn’t rocket science. I once had an author ask if there was a legal reason her title showed an address of Street rather than Ave, and was worried there was a legal reason we couldn’t say the actual street name. Well guess what, the big legal issue was a copy/paste issue. I copied the title from a list someone had written out and in the list they accidently wrote Street not Ave. Yea major legal debacle there. That is not to say that we laugh in the face of legality. We have simple rules we follow. We don’t own any of the work, you do. If we are going to republish the work the author has to own the rights and we give credit to the previous publication. There is no money involved at this point, so it is pretty simple.
Don’t be A Nuisance
Interacting with journals should be about promoting good will, neither side should complicate things or annoy the other. I am like a young guy in the dating scene. I can deal with two or three emails from you in a day, but any more than that and I’m going to feel smothered and wish I hadn’t bought you that drink. I do a lot of our updating during my lunch break. Which means instead of taking a break from the computer screen slowly killing my eyes, I am trying to do some html and send out rejection letters in between bites of PB&J. In the last year or so I’ve become pretty good with html but I am not a computer science graduate, I do my best and sometimes all the html knowledge in the world can’t match WordPress not wanting to cooperate. We’re all just doing our best here.
Editors and web managers are busy people, they either work at a big journal with lots of submissions or a small one and have multiple jobs. If they are publishing you, be thankful and make an effort on your end to help things move along smoothly… So if I ask you for something, send it promptly and don’t email me a hundred times. If I say that I don’t have a publication date for you yet, that means I don’t have one yet. If I say I will email you when I do, I will email you when I do. I have a good system.
Pay Attention
One of the most unnecessary annoyances I deal with are people who simply do not pay attention. Either they blindly submit to us without ever having visited our site, they send a genre we do not publish, or they do not read our submission guidelines/rules. Grossly ignoring our word limit is frustrating, we have a word limit for a good reason so follow it. I am sorry if your piece doesn’ t fit, my work never fits literary journal’s word counts so I feel you. Even worse is if I do not catch your word limit party foul and it gets to my reader/guest editor. Then they read it, there by wasting their time when they could be reading a piece we might actually be able to publish. Or they like it and I have to go back to them and say, sorry not only did you waste your time but we can’t publish this. Small details may seem unimportant, like we ask you to state your genre in your subject line or when we have a guest editor we like you to tell us which month you are submitting to in your subject line. This helps us immediately know what the piece is and where it is going. If you do not put “November Guest Editor” in your subject line it will stay with our general submissions (unless I catch it in time). Every journal is a bit different, not just in the type of work they accept but in their submission process. It is all about what resources they have and what works for them. So look over their requirements carefully before you send your submissions. Journals receive lots submissions, so following these little rules can make a big difference.
Make a note of submission guidelines as well for what kind of work journals accept. We accept: poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and experimental works. They do change, we’ve expanded our word limit before and we may someday expand our genre list. Nowhere on our submission guidelines does it say we accept photos, take a look at our site…nope no photos. We also don’t list plays in our submission guidelines, yes we did publish a play once but it was for a special occasion. Once again read the submission guidelines. Don’t send us a poem in “play format,” we are wise to your tricky tricky ways. Also we do not review books, which you would know if you actually like went to our site. This is particularly annoying if you are a publisher/agent/etc and I hope your client fires you. We do not publish books! We do not have a print version! We do not do reviews!
Also do not say that you couldn’t find our submission guidelines anywhere, chances are if you found our email it was the same page as our guidelines. That just tells me you didn’t go to our site or just decided not to read the guidelines.
To address or not to address?
Some journals have separate emails for different editors (poetry, fiction, etc). Do not send a fiction piece to the poetry editor, do not spam all the editors. For some you may want to address your piece to the editor in charge or your genre. If you do know this information then it is better not to address your email to anyone specific, it is the same as sending a resume. It is better not to address it to someone rather than address it to the wrong person. In our journal it is hit or miss, depending on your genre it will be sent to one of our readers and if it passes inspection it will move to one of our editors. It is all based on who has time. Sometimes I will try to match the work with the appropriate person but the point of having readers is to screen the slush pile so I can focus on other things.
A lot of people address things to our editor Bryan because his name is first on the list of editors, assuming that makes him in charge, but if they looked carefully they would see our editors and readers names are listed in alphabetical order. Or they address it to me because most communications come from me. But Bryan may not read your piece, I may not read your piece, once again it depends on our readers and who has time available.
Bad Cover Letters
Nothing sets me up for not liking a piece more than a bad cover letter. Now at our journal we don’t require a cover letter and we don’t really care about them, we only care about your work. Your cover letter has no influence. Don’t create extra work for me. We may not even read it frankly, and the longer it is and the more links it contains the more likely I am not to read it. However, if your cover letter is immensely annoying it might influence me in some biological or mental way I cannot control (usually intense anger, annoyance, or frustration). On the other hand, your well thought out and serious cover letter may just have me in stiches the rest of the night (but usually I am laughing at you).
If your letter is long and messy with a hundred links (which I will not click on): I am going to groan, probably have an attack of the ADDs and decide to do something else for now and come back later. The longer and more elaborate your cover letter is the more risk you might say something stupid or make a mistake. Keep it simple. Don’t get too crazy with your bragging. Don’t say stuff that doesn’t make sense like “I would like to grant The Whistling Fire first publishing rights in this hemisphere”
to which my reply is “ummm ok thanks I guess?” We want to publish good work, so I really don’t care where you have been published or what prestigious school you almost failed out of, if the work doesn’t do it for us we won’t publish you. Plus to be perfectly honest, usually the more lengths a writer goes to to explain their work or sell themselves, the more likely the piece isn’t going to be good. This is just a pattern I have seen. We accept short pieces, you should have a short description (though I’d rather not be given a description). Let your work speak for itself. Telling me your piece is about a blind mouse crossing a road doesn’t really spark my interest. But your piece may be beautifully written; the mouse may be a metaphor for my relationship with my peers, and I will cry and laugh and think about it for days. So let me discover that and find out for myself, don’t ruin it for me by pitching me a boring mouse story. Now if a journal asks for a cover letter, do it; but keep it short and simple.
At the same time I am not a huge fan of comply blank emails with an attachment. It is a bit cold and abrupt, too wam bam thank you mam. Show me you care, we don’t need to be courted but introduce yourself before we go to bed. Sometimes for our Guest Editors we request a bio, we do this not because we really care that much about your past publishing work or that you are a super hero to your dog, but because it saves me having to ask you for it if we decide to accept your work. On that note: learn what third person means. Cause when we ask for a third person bio and we get first person I will laugh at you. Also sometimes sending an email with nothing but an attachment can cause problems. Spam folders are a wonderful wonderful thing which prevent us from sending our life savings to princes in Zanzibar. But sending an email to a stranger with no body or no subject line can sometimes result in legitimate emails finding their way into our spam folders. Especially if you have an odd email like catloversurferdude22@earthlink.whatever. Which, is this a good time to tell you to ditch your old screen name? I know we all have stupid screen names from our internet early days that we are afraid to let go of… this is the world saying time to grow up now.
Who the hell are you? Itchy trigger fingers. Spammers : Little things that Bug me
Here are some things that at least drive me up the wall. So replying to rejections is always bad business, you want editors to remember you for good reasons. And if you send us a creepy or hate filed rant we will remember you. It not only closes the door on that journal, it also closes the door on those staff members who while they work at that journal now could be at another journal you submit to a few years down the road. Also did I mention it is creepy. But one of my dislikes is when people reply to a rejection letter with another submission, I mean not even send a new email they just hit reply. Formally submit stuff please and if you get a rejection letter, take some time process the rejection and then if you wish resubmit. Don’t hit reply the minute you get one with another poem. This isn’t a drive-thru. “I’ve got a million more where that came from,” just tells me you aren’t taking your craft very seriously. Do not use online journals as recycling centers for the 100 poems you wrote while going through a phase in 1979. If we reject you often, by all means keep trying. You may wear me down yet. But just maybe you should think about your submission. Wait a bit. Maybe work on some on your stuff a bit longer, let it cook till fully done. Maybe read other posts on our site to see the level or work we normally publish. Think about why you have been rejected every month for the last year before you send us some more work. If we have never published you and I recognize your email because you routinely send us a piece every month, you’ve probably overstayed your welcome. I applaud your determination but you don’t want to be that guy who can’t take a hint. Also some journals do have a limit, like we only want two pieces a month because we get a lot of submissions, so no I will not read your twenty poems.
Who are you? This is a big pet peeve of mine. If you have a joint email with your spouse, I have some questions for you: WHY? WHAT ARE YOU THINKING? SERIOUSLY? I don’t think anyone should have a joint email, especially if you are using that email professionally. Joint emails are kind of like sharing toothbrushes. There are lots of reasons it is a bad idea but let me let you in on something that has happened frequently at TWF. I get a response from one of our editors or readers saying they cannot recommend we publish a piece. I sit down one evening or during my lunch break (one hand on the computer the other shoveling food in my mouth) and get to work sending out rejection letters. I open your email with my editors comments, write the rejection, glance at the top of the email which gmail informs me is from Daisy Anderson (I just made that up) at DBAnderson@aol.whatever I type Dear Daisy and presto sendo. Then here comes an angry letter accusing us of not really reading submissions because Bob Anderson sent that email. I scroll to the very bottom of the long email with no bio and see oh yea “—Bob.” Can you see how easy it is to make this mistake? Well the top of the email said Daisy, once again cover letters are just filler in my eyes, and I didn’t actually read your piece another editor did but it is my job to send you a letter. Joint emails suck. On that same note we have received an email where the top of the email says it came from Robert, the author introduces himself as David, and the bio reads Jonathan. Who the hell are you? I’m sorry did you forget your alias today world’s worst spy? As you were sending your submission did you have second thoughts about what your pen name should be?
Do not spam and never send mass emails to a journal. Submission should never be sent to multiple journals at once. We accept simultaneous submissions, but send us a separate email. Do not try to kill multiple birds with one stone. And if your work gets accepted by another journal: great! But let us know so I don’t have anyone waste their time on a piece we cannot publish. Don’t send mass emails period, especially if we have never published you. We got one recently (which by the way was from a joint spouse email) which I believe was from someone we have never published announcing a poetry collection that they were having published. At least I think that was what it was, I really have no idea what it was or who it was from. Can you see how annoying this is? Can you see how you may have just lost some good will from our journal?
You may think well, authors get over excited or people make mistakes. Very true. But imagine this from my side of the table. Imagine this happening every day, imagine seeing this over and over again, and the tole that eventually takes. Imagine the bitterness growing. I am not asking to be sucked up to. But be considerate when you send submissions. Remember what your goal is: you want them to actually read your work and consider it, then you want them to hopefully publish it or at the very least be receptive to look at more of your work in the future. At TWF if we could spend as much time reading new submissions and actually publishing work as we do dealing with crisis and neglecting our work because we don’t want to deal with all the crazy; our response time would be weeks rather than months.
