Last night I stayed up until midnight designing a better submission tracker. Designing is too big of a word--I finally transferred pages of notes in different files in Word into a nice and neat Excel file. Now at a glance I can see where my stories are. I also submitted six or seven stories--back in circulations, little puppies.
I love that many US magazines have on-line submission systems where, if I remember my username and password, I can see my status. I wish Canadian magazines finally embraced the technology. And what do they do with your SASE if your story is accepted? Ah? Ah? But jokes aside, postal submissions are such an incredible waste of paper that I wish I was gutsy enough simply not to submit. If a literary magazine receives 900 submissions per year, this is on average 27000 pages, and over 95% of this is a waste, even if they get to be recycled, and I'm sure they do. Recycling is only great when there are no other way to conserve, but submissions could easily be electronic.
This is a great point, Ania. It does seem like more and more journals are changing to electronic submissions, even highly respected ones like Glimmer Train and the New Yorker.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Davin. And yet with Canadian journals, I'm lucky when they agree to respond via email, rather than requesting a SASE.
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