Editor Interviews
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Read all the editors' answers to Duotrope's interview question: What do submitters most often get wrong about your submissions process? Learn more.
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Here is a small sampling from our recent Editor Interviews. We have interviewed over 2,125 editors.
Q: What do submitters most often get wrong about your submissions process?
A: They try to offer too many words/pages--stick to the 5,000 word count limit, please.
A: So far, not much? We have a tip jar optional submission window in June and July. Pretty simple. Folks tend to send us a note through our website contact form if they have questions.
A: Sending an incomplete manuscript. We need the whole thing, and we will most likely not be reaching out to you if we do not have it. If you are writing an illustrated children's book or a comic book, we would like to see the illustrations; that is a majority of the work.
A: Not reading M58 before submitting and sending material that won’t be a good fit.
A: I don't think there is one consistent thing people do wrong here. I think that many folks would benefit from reading a recent winner or two, maybe googling a few of our finalists and their work.
A: We only publish through the Gatewood Prize, which is always open during the first three or four months of the year.
A: Not taking their name out of their submission file. We like to read all submissions anonymously but a good percentage of submitters still include their names within their story or poem file. We prefer not to see identifying information about the submitter until after we've made our decision based solely on the work itself.
A: In the Literary segment, submitters sometimes do not adhere to the word count mandated in our guidelines. In the Visual Art segment, submitters often send just a couple of visual art images. We need 6-8 artworks/photographs/graphic designs for the Visual art segment.
A: Most people get it right, but sometimes we get submissions that are just about literature and have nothing to do with anthropology, or very conventional articles that would be better suited to a more traditional anthropology journal.
A: They don't read the submission guidelines.
A: Not submitting work as a separate attachment
A: We don't consider .pdfs because of some formatting mishaps we've had in the past. Nevertheless, we get a lot of .pdfs.