Cosmos's Guide Where to Submit

Where to Submit Your Work

Cosmos Guide to where to submit

Cosmos Guide to where to submit
For my writer friends who are just getting started submitting works to literary journals, here are my suggestions and advice based on my four years of submitting to literary magazines and being published in over 150 places so far.

My advice for anyone starting on the submission game is to get the fundamentals down first.

Blog page and author email are essential

Before you submit anything, you need to set up a blog, make a preliminary spreadsheet for tracking, set up an author email., (including an email tracking system) a cover letter template, a folder to store your writing and an offsite backup — I use one drive and an external hard drive and back up every Sunday or before taking a trip.

Tracking System is a must

You need to set up a tracking system. Duotrope can handle it all for you but I double-track it with my spreadsheet. See attached for suggested headers. I use Google docs. There are several others out there but that's enough for now. Please feel free to let me know if you find out other useful sites.

Then put together whatever you want to submit, then look at the various market research sites I have included. and sign up for Duo trope — they will track your submission and send out a weekly market list. And finally, after submitting the update Duo trope and your spreadsheet.

Regarding the spreadsheet, I give each submission a topic so I can track my work. I have found that Microsoft word and One drive search engines are not very good so it is important to be able to track your work by topic.

The headers (columns) I use are

Status (rejected, accepted, withdrawn, re-write, the second submission? Sim okay? Deadline due)
vendor
additional vendors
topic
title
what submitted
format copied from web page submission guidelines
date of entry
date of submission
follow up due — default to three months
response date
response time
Duotrope entry date
update the date as needed
SIM ( note if the simultaneous submission is okay or not, Yes/No )
prior publication (note if prior publication is okay or not and what constitutes "unpublished, Yes/No, default to No if unclear )
re-submission date
prior submission date
title result
(copy from duo trope)
email
URL
address
POS
type of submission
–(email, online, submittable, duotrope. other)
Paid
Cost
source of info location
university affiliation
comments received
notes
additional comments received

I use google docs, Excel had too many bugs in it but any spreadsheet works fine, or access if you know how to use that. Duotrope will track things for you but I prefer to double-track my submissions. And I also post reminders on my daily to-do list as things come in. It is also important to track your submissions and writings in your email and your folders.
I try to save all items by category as I write them as I have found that Microsoft search feature to be not useful nor is One Drive any better.
Oh and one final point — pay attention to whether a site accepts reprints = most don't but they are pretty good at spelling out the rules — follow them!

The bottom line is don't submit until you have completed these preliminary steps.

If you don't have an author web page and an author Facebook page no one will take you seriously. Same thing if you don't have an author email. Once you start submitting you will soon be overwhelmed with emails. All the emails allow you to create more than one account. I use for my writing and jakecaller@gmail for everything else. The most common email is a simple author or writer followed by the rest of your email handle. The good thing is that if you have more than one account you will get additional storage space. I use one drive for my back-ups but have a G drive account where I store my spreadsheets.