WiS Submissions Process: Behind the Scenes
/Hello! Managing Editor Lis here to give you a peek behind the curtain at our submission process!
My favorite part of working at Wizards in Space is getting to see all the submissions that come in... and I do mean ALL. I read every word of every written piece that’s submitted, and look at every piece of visual art. It’s an honor to be trusted with so many people’s art, whether written or visual, but it’s a serious chunk of work: in the issue 07 submission period alone, we got nearly seven hundred submissions for about twenty-five spots in the book. It’s also the hardest part, in many ways. I could easily have filled ten issues with pieces I loved, but unfortunately, money is a thing. So instead, we have to narrow it down.
By page count, an issue usually breaks down to 50% fiction, 40% poetry, 10% art and nonfiction. But since fiction is much longer, generally, that means a lot fewer pieces even though it accounts for about a third of our submissions. An issue typically has five to seven fiction pieces, alongside about fifteen poems and five to ten art and nonfiction pieces.
(The thing about editing a magazine is this: it’s not about finding the 25 absolute best pieces, the most technically proficient and clean and gorgeous. No piece is perfect, especially not when we’ve got six people with very different tastes making final selections together! It’s about finding the pieces that fit together best.)
When we get a piece, I’m the first one to see it, and I decide which pieces make it to round 2 of our submission process. I’m going to focus on prose here, because Riley covered art back in June and poetry follows a very similar process.
Things I look for on my first pass through the submission queue:
Does the submission follow the guidelines? Is it longer than our wordcount (or for poetry, linecount) limit? If so, it’s an automatic rejection. We just don’t have the space or the funds to publish works longer than that!
Is it an anonymous submission? We ask in our guidelines that all names be removed from pieces prior to submission, and that submitters not include their name in the background field. This is to help us judge fairly! We’re members of the community, and fans of the kind of work we’re looking for–otherwise why would we be editing this magazine?–so if I see that a piece is by a friend, or by someone whose work I admire, it might bias my reading.
Does the story feel complete? Does it feel like it stands on its own, with a beginning and an end? Even if a story has unresolved threads, or unique formatting, I need to come out of it feeling like something has been completed, like I have some kind of closure.
Does the story have a spark? This is the hardest to define, because it’s the most subjective. Whether it’s a unique voice, a format I haven’t seen enough of, a new take on a trope or a setting I’ve never read, there’s got to be something about it that makes it stick in my brain.
In that first round, I read every piece and forward approximately the top third (about 200 pieces) to the rest of the team. We each have our specialties: Cameron on fiction, Olivia and Alex on poetry, Riley on art, and Ari on nonfiction. We meet weekly to go over about forty pieces at a time, pick the pieces we each want to champion, and do our best to not forward everything to the next round.
Once submissions close, it’s time for the final round–ideally, we have fewer than eighty submissions in that one, winnowed down from our original hundreds! Every single one of these pieces is perfect for Wizards in Space, and every one of them has been read by all of us at least once at this point. Now we have the hardest part: taking eighty pieces we love, each of which has an editor fighting tooth and nail for it, and cut that down to the 25 we’re going to publish.
This meeting is always a long one. It sometimes has tears. It ALWAYS has spreadsheets and digital post-it notes and a whole lot of arguing. Here’s where we pick the poem that’s going to start the issue, the art that’s going to close it out, and the big pieces of fiction that are going to anchor the book’s arc. Once we’ve picked those, we’re off. We go through the pieces we have one by one, and whoever feels strongly about a piece argues for it. If nobody has it on their mental shortlist, it’s cut. Finally, when we’re down to 30-40 pieces, we get the post it notes out and start trying to build a story from the pieces we’re looking at. Here’s a look at our Jamboard for Issue 06 (with the pieces we didn’t take not included - there were about 10 more pieces in this final round):
We picked our starting piece first: The Heartwood and Not the Bark. This poem, we felt, set the tone for the issue–soft but sturdy, remembering who we are in adversity, resilience and selfhood. The City and its Creatures was a natural next piece, filling many of the same themes without feeling repetitive and adding a spark of magic right at the start. In the same way, at the back end, Gathering Stardust gave us a feeling of freedom and safety that we loved. After those are set, we have a feel for the arc of the issue and we start finding pieces that fit together - not putting long fiction pieces side by side, trying to pair pieces that have similar themes and energies but not having strings of pieces that feel relentlessly hard.
Some are easy, obvious fits in content, like Survival Kit with Our New Artifacts; some just have a similar energy, like the witchy vibes of Hedge Witch Notes, Mountaintops; or, seven items to save a life, and Blackberries. In this vein, we make little groupings that feel like complete sentences, and start to merge them into a coherent arc.
Bit by bit, they come together…
We find more and more connections, weaving threads of theme and vibe... until finally, we’ve got it!
After a well-earned night of sleep, we send out acceptances, as well as personalized rejections to everyone whose pieces made it this far. Once they accept our offer of publication, the next stage begins: editing by all of us, intro by Olivia, cover art by Riley, layout and table of contents by Cameron, design, printing, and then shipping from my house to all of you!
Putting an issue together takes a lot of work, a lot of money, and a lot of time. We do this because we love seeing your work and finding it an audience, and because making things is good for the soul. I hope you enjoyed this peek behind the WiS curtain, and I can’t wait to show you what we’ve got in store for you with issue 07 this fall! Preorder it today, and keep up with us on Twitter and Instagram (and find me on Twitter @ghostalservice)!
P.S. A few tips to help us to love your submission:
Title your submission with the title of the piece, or in the case of a submission with multiple pieces, the title of the first piece in the collection! This really helps us identify your piece and remember it as it makes it through the rounds. Titles like “Submission” or “Poems” or “Wizards in Space Art” mean we have to remind ourselves every time we look at it what piece it is, and that makes it harder!
For prose: use an easy-to-read font, in a reasonable size (10-12 pt), without text colors or background colors or background images. My personal preference is something serif like Times New Roman or Georgia or Garamond, but an Arial or Helvetica or Calibri is absolutely fine as well, or anything similar to those! I do most of my submission reading on my phone (at work, shh, don’t tell my boss) so this really helps me out. (Also, I have an unreasonable hatred of Courier. I will still read your submission in Courier and judge it on its merits, but...).
Once again, please don’t put your name ANYWHERE in your submission except your bio! We can’t see the bios until we are ready to send acceptances, and that keeps me from having to feel weird about rejecting a friend or a famous person.
Make sure you have resolved any comments/track changes edits. We frequently get pieces that still have edit marks or long comments from beta readers and editors, and you don’t want us seeing those!
Use the background field! We love to hear your personal connection to the piece, whether it’s that you love whales or your drove through Omaha and were inspired by a billboard, or that you’re an astrophysicist from Romania who lives in a submarine just like your character. What we don’t want to hear in this field? “I don’t think this is good enough.” Don’t tear yourself–and your work–down before we even get a chance to read it!