Editor Interview: Blood Tree Literature

Evocative literary arts

Some of the publications we most admire include Wild Roof Journal, The Adroit Journal, Anodyne Magazine, Wellspringwords, and Fifth Corner Journal. We also highly admire indie presses like Unsolicited Press, Dzanc Books, Quilted Press, First Matter Press, and more. This list could honestly go on forever; we're extremely grateful to get to be in such a diverse and amazing literary community.

We publish writing in all genres as well as feature art. I couldn't play favorites with our previous contributors, we have so many incredible talents in our pages. Some examples of writers whose work aligns with what we favor publishing would include Haley Wooning, tommy wyatt blake, Margaret Renkl, Tomas Baiza, Ian Hall, Wanda Deglane, Ali Choudhary, Ross Gay, Rios de la Luz, Khodi Dill, and Rolli. Some artists in the same vein would include Donice Bloodworth Jr., Lindsay Payton, Cayce Zavaglia, Jini Kim Veenker, Yazz Atmore, Steph Hennessy, and Luke Dorman. Again, these could be two loooooong lists!

One of the stand-outs of Blood Tree Literature is our slant toward hybrid writing. Cross-genre, omnigenre, undefinable, and otherwise experimental literary arts are finally getting their due in the literary world these days and I'd like to think BTL is helping put that focus forward.
The other big thing that also defines Blood Tree is our commitment to honoring our contributors and the care they put into their work. We have dedicated webpages to their books, publications and programs they run, and we've recently established Book Reviews and Author Interviews that focus only on them. It's so important to us that we represent their work accurately in our magazine and celebrate their external projects to our audiences.

Besides the standard "make sure to follow the guidelines" adage, I'd say that writers considering Blood Tree Lit as a home for their work should play with their pieces. Stellar writing is stellar writing, but are there any other little experiments you could be testing that could take the piece to the next level and really put your stamp as an author on it? Maybe the answer is "No, the piece has reached it's full potential," but sometimes the page can surprise you (and delight us).

Unfortunately, we tend to get too many submissions that go way over our word-count limit. The other big one is submitting to the right genre form -- we'll often get standard-style poetry submitted to our hybrid category (sometimes other genres too, but mostly poetry). Not only does that make properly processing honorariums confusing (we pay certain flat amounts by genre), but when this happens during our Fee-Free Submissions Week that has caps per genre, these mis-submitted subs are also taking away a slot for a writer in that correct genre.

While we ask for a short bio and pronouns with submissions (and book blurbs if applicable), this is really just to make the asset-collection process easier on our end for accepted work. Every once in a while we'll look to the bio in case it helps us understand a submitted piece better; for example, we once received a story that felt very tonally off until we saw in the author's bio that they're primarily a humor writer, and once we read the story in the lens that it was satirical / supposed to be funny, it improved our reading of the story. But ultimately, the identity and any past publication experience does not matter to us. Blood Tree makes its values and stances very clear across our website and platforms, so I feel like anyone who wasn't simpatico just wouldn't be submitting to us anyway.

There are very few times that a piece is super wrong for us from the jump. We generally read every submission to the end, because you never know if a later part of a piece could completely change the game. We sometimes do "Accepted On Condition of Edits" for instances like that.

Now that we have a full-sized team behind Blood Tree Literature, the editorial process has a few moving parts. Submissions of each genre are divided equally to members of each genre team to read and vote on, then positively voted pieces are passed to the other members, then we meet to discuss all the net-positive-voted submissions. Some submissions are quickly decided on, some take multiple discussions. We try to let authors know their acceptance status as quickly as possible so that we don't miss out on pieces under simultaneous submission. Then between the time of acceptance to the issue's release day, it's mostly admin from there: collect their signed publication contract, process their honorarium, work through any edits with the author, draft the piece's webdesign, get any of their books or literary businesses added to our Contributor Books and Publications/Programs pages, get the webdesign approved by the author plus any final edits or bio updates, then schedule the issue and its promos to go live! Besides the initial announcement to our newsletter subscribers and on social media, every piece in an issue gets its own Instagram post with an excerpt, and paired with one of our featured artist's pieces (which I try to pair by vibe LOL).

This varies piece to piece, but we try to accept pieces with minimal editing needs since we have to choose between so many great submissions already. Some pieces are fully publication-ready and zero edits are made at all before publication. Some undergo some basic technical edits for typos and errant grammatical choices, as needed. Some get light-to-moderate developmental edits that we'll work through with them, usually to pare down an excellent piece that's a little too long or that could use just some structural rearranging. A few are only accepted on the condition of certain, moderately developmental edits being made that we'll work through with them. Authors get final approval of any and all changes, and it's important to us that the author's vision and intentions for the piece are honored on the page and accurately represented by the webdesign.

Yes! We nominate for Best of the Net, the Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions Anthology, Best New Poets and Best Microfictions when we have eligible work, and the Genrepunk Awards.

The vast majority of our funding comes from submission fees, which we're very grateful to receive enough of to float almost all of our technology fees, contributor honorariums, philanthropic donations, and now offer a fee-free submission week. Sometimes people kindly donate to us as well. We do also have a Merch Store, but that pretty much doesn't factor into our funding in practice. All uncovered expenses are just paid by me. I'm hoping to start applying for grants in earnest soon, but funds are notoriously tight in the literary arts industry so future growth is a bit nebulous at the moment.

Besides being on listed on hubs like Duotrope, ChillSubs, CLMP, etc., we have an email newsletter that sends out a couple times per season with Blood Tree news plus new books from past contributors, as well as a Facebook page that we post big announcements to. Our primary promotional network outside our website is Instagram, since the literary arts community is so large on there and it allows us to visually showcase our artists alongside our authors. (As much as we hate Meta, at least it's not Twitter, y'know?)
The biggest promotional tool is our website, where we have webpages dedicated to our contributors' books, presses/journals/programs they operate, exclusive reviews of their books, and exclusive interviews with them. Behind-the-scenes, we're also ideating things like a Substack or a podcast, so stay tuned!