Who Is Devin Emke?
Seth Fleisher
8 Comments
If you've submitted short fiction or poetry recently to literary magazines that accept electronic submissions, you've probably noticed that many of these online submissions systems look eerily similar. For example, compare those of One Story, Ploughshares, Crazyhorse, and Fence. They may use slightly different stylesheets, but these are all one and the same system. You'll recognize it from the note at the bottom right that reads Copyright 2008 Devin Emke. The online submission system originally developed for One Story is now used by a large percentage of the lit mags that accept online submissions.
It's true that Glimmer Train and The Kenyon Review developed their own systems ages ago. The Missouri Review and the Bellevue Literary Review each have theirs. And VQR released a custom submissions system last year to very good effect. But magazines without technical resources are jumping all over Devin Emke's stuff in increasing numbers. And for good reason.
The Council of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP) now distributes Emke's Submission Manager at crazy low rates.
So, for $500 or less, a lit mag can get its own fully automated submissions management system? You betcha. And with the recent devaluation of the dollar against pretty much every other currency in the world, that's barely a couple of Euros for The Barcelona Review and just a quid or two for Granta. (OK, maybe a wee bit more than that.)
You'd think editors would be lining up at CLMP's proverbial doorstep faster than middle-aged white guys outside Wal-mart the night before the the new Xbox goes on sale. And lit mags are moving towards it. But nowhere near as quickly as you'd expect. The huge majority of literary magazines still accept submissions only by snail mail. Seems like there are several possible explanations:
- Technophobia: These Web system thingies are just too darn complicated for English literature grads.
- Tradition: If US Post was good enough for John Updike for the last couple hundred years, then it's sure as heck good enough for you.
- Concerns about increases in submissions: This seems the most likely explanation to me. And it strikes me as a legitimate concern. It's a heck of a lot simpler and less expensive for a writer to submit online than to submit by snail mail with SASE and the works. So with increased ease would likely come increased numbers of submissions. But should magazines really make such administrative choices just to avoid adding any further height to their already towering slush piles?
You can probably guess where I stand on the whole thing.
But did you know this: for the past nine years this very same Devin Emke has been the guitarist for the Original Punk Rock Heavy Metal Karaoke band. Not too shabby.
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Reader Comments (8)
I think that door #2 -- tradition freaks -- is the biggest reason why online submissions aren't more widely accepted. Though I'd put it a bit less pejoratively. :) Many lit mags have been doing things the same way for many, many years. Tradition is held up as a guiding principle for a lot of lit mags -- they look back to what they've done in the past to figure out what to do in the future. It's both an "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" mentality and a reverence for history.
There's a bit of technophobia though, again, I'd put it differently. These publications have tiny staffs, and the university publications have just a couple of people who measure their time there in something other than semesters. They don't have the knowledge to figure out something as complex as online submissions. And they certainly don't have the budget to pay somebody else to figure it out for them.
Thanks for the post, Waldo. Makes sense re: the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" mentality. Though in some cases, frankly, the traditional system does seem a bit broke. I can't tell you how many times I've had paper submissions get lost (though if they do finally turn up under a pile on someone's desk, you invariably get a very gracious apology. :)
On the technical issue, I wonder how much support the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses gives to magazines that license the Submissions Manager software. Perhaps not quite enough yet to convert those in camps 1 and 2. :( Btw, why did VQR ultimately choose to build its own system rather than going with CLMP's Submissions Manager? And have you seen a large spike in total submissions since you went online?
It's my understanding that they don't provide any. And rightly so. Selling it so cheaply means that they couldn't afford the resources to be giving technical support. It would be doubly problematic given how technically inexperienced many of these publications are. They'd inevitably be bothering CLMP with elementary technical questions that they ought to be figuring out for themselves.
We wanted a bunch of features that don't exist in Submission Manager. Our system gives us end-to-end process management, by which I mean it handles submissions, reader assignations, reviews, contract generation/electronic signing, collection of tax data, payment calculation and contributor issue/subscription ordering. In addition, our system lets us track print submissions, which Submission Manager doesn't. This gave us a year transition period, and it also lets us track print submissions from those few people who we're willing to accept print from, Joyce Carol Oates and company.
Oh, yeah, it's huge. We started accepting submissions online in September of 2007, but began tracking print submissions in the same database in September of 2006. In 09/06 we received 561 submissions; 09/07 brought 1,189. 10/06 brought 1,105, 10/06 brought 1,465. 11/06 brought 552, 11/07 brought 1,133. It basically continues along that vein, with each month bringing between 50%-100% more submissions than we had in the prior period.
We're totally open with this data. In fact, I've been meaning for the past couple of month to create a submission stats section of our site, where people can see live, detailed data about how much submissions we receive of which genre, what our backlog looks like, etc. We'll even let authors see exactly where in our queue their submission is, giving them some idea of how long it'll be until they hear back from us.
Functionally, authors are our customers. It's our job to provide y'all with the information that will allow you to make an informed decision to do business with us. We're proud of how we do things, so we figure transparency is the surest path to getting that job done.
Thanks for all the info. That really is a radical increase in submissions. Makes sense that small operations would have difficulty managing that level of increase.
On the new functionality you mentioned for VQR, how amazing it would be for authors to get that kind of a window into the whole review process. This would set the bar tremendously high for other publications accepting online submissions. A great direction to be moving in. Muchos kudos.
Devin sounds like a 21st century Renaissance man.
props to seth for posting this.
i just thought i would point out that i do support Submission Manager. we have sold it to about 50 litmags and i have personally assisted many of them in getting up and running. in fact we have one SubMgr buyer for whom we are hosting the system on our own web server as theirs does not have the back end components needed to run it (PHP/mySQL). i often field questions and suggestions from users about new features and try to implement them in a timely fashion with regular updates. i was recently at the AWP conference here in NYC and did many demos for users and prospective buyers and was given a lot a feedback on ways to improve SubMgr.
as seth and waldo pointed out the litmag world is very non-tech and is often reluctant to change. when trying to sell my wares i often need to convince them that this is ultimately a more efficient way of managing this process (and saves trees).
Hey Devin, thanks for stopping by. Very interesting to hear. Question: is there any possibility of some day releasing a hosted ASP version of Submission Manager, which could potentially eliminate the need for a lit mag to maintain any hardware, software, or technical resources in order to use it?
we thought about offering SubMgr as a hosted service but we decided we did not want to have to maintain and be responsible for 100's of different magazine's data.
SubMgr is written in PHP (not ASP). i'm pretty committed to using only free open source tools for web developement.