How to Write Submission Guidelines
Another template for success
Again I offer you some language suggestions if you would like to start your own lit mag and don’t want to have to compose your own Submission Guidelines. Just feel free to swap out some of the nouns and you should be good to go.
The world has had enough borax. There is an island made of garbage the size of Texas. There is an immortal jellyfish. There were twelve disciples so at least 1.2 of them were statistically gay.
We want your statistically gay poems.
Please send us 3 to 9 poems in an inobtrusive font totaling no more than 6-11 pages. In your cover letter, list which publications your work has appeared in. We welcome work from new and established writers only. Only white people will be made to pay the submission fee which is why our journal is called Bottom Shelf Reparations.
Our response time averages 6-24 months. Please do not message us. That is like pushing the “close door button” in the elevator. If you don’t hear from us after 24 months, assume that we have folded and gotten into NFTs.
We welcome simultaneous submissions but please message us immediately if one of the poems in your submission to us is accepted elsewhere so we can discard your entire submission and block you on Instagram.
While our journal has no specific theme, we tend to only publish poems about trauma so I guess our theme is trauma.
Because of the extreme volume of poems we receive we cannot offer individual feedback at this time. Upon acceptance we will refund most of your submission fee.
To get a sense of our editorial proclivities, please purchase several of our back issues and read them in full. Furthermore:
We want poems that crash through our sternums, grabs hold and manually breaks our hearts until we’re permanently dead. We want poems that are toxic to toxicity. We don’t want poems that are racist or remind of us of our childhood bullies. We want poems that sound like chewing with your mouth closed. We want poems that break the force holding our protons to our neutrons. We want poems that will make us feel taller after reading them. We want poems that can recycle Styrofoam. We want poems that harvest all our bananas. We want poems that train our dogs for us while we get a few more emails done. We want poems that take our keys and hide them until we sober up from reading said poems. We want poems that are untranslatable. We want poems that have been translated. We do not pay for translations.
We read poems exclusively in the month of February, or until our submission quota is met. Mailed poems will be destroyed and we will file a restraining order because how did you even find our mailing address?
Failure to adhere to these guidelines will result in immediate and permanent rejection of your work and we will shun you at our table in the AWP book fair.
Submission fee: $23.
Add on more money because yolo: $53
Purchase all our back issues: $153
Thank you for entrusting us with your babies!