We're Building a Submissions Manager (No, not a Robot to Manage our BDSM Community)

How we think we can help & why we're the best birds for the job.

Mar 16, 2023

If you’d like to check out the full breakdown of our plans, we’ve made a landing page (where you can adjust our confidence levels to change the text). If you’re an editor who’d like to participate in the beta, there is a signup form there. And everyone is invited to our new Discord server: I’d Like To Speak To The Submissions Manager.

Five months after starting Chill Subs, my friend admitted to me: "For the first three months, I thought submissions manager was a person."

In the fall, we asked an advertising exec to give us some feedback on our business plan and the first thing he said was, "Change the name. Nobody will know what you're talking about."

And, last week, a woman who used to write for a sexuality magazine I edited, reached out to say, "For the longest time I thought you'd started a BDSM community."

This tends to be the way it goes with everything we do. The indie-lit community is so niche, so convoluted, and so isolated, that nobody has much of a clue what we're doing over here. And when you try to map it out to people, you sound like a crazy person.

But let's give it a try.

So you wrote a poem, story, flash, or whatever. Now you have to go on the internet and search for a magazine that is willing to publish it. But all magazines have different word counts, themes, genres, formatting guidelines, and so on, and they're not always open. So first, navigate the convoluted Google-hell of that (unless you’re already using Chill Subs’ searchable database of 3000+ litmags in which case, you’re welcome).

You manage to find one that looks cool. Then you're redirected to a different website to submit where they tell you to provide a cover letter & third-person bio (which vary by editorial preference), properly format your story (which varies by editorial preference), and remind you that they're sick of prose that's actually poetry, and poetry that's actually prose and you haven't a fucking clue what they mean but cross your fingers that what you've got is actually a Surrealist Literary Prose Poem and not Speculative Slipstream Flash CNF!1

But then you see there is a $5 fee to submit to this magazine and you think, 'well, for $5 I want to know my chances of actually getting in," so you try to find out and are directed to a site with the answers, but, if you want the answers you must pay $5 per month. You do, planning to cancel before the next payment (but you'll forget) and learn that this magazine has a .03% acceptance rate but think: "fuck it" because you've come this far and already paid so now it's time to go back, submit, pay, and wait six months to get a response that says:

"Dear writer, unfortunately, we must decline this piece..."

There is no explanation and so only after asking WHY? WHY!? WHY!? at your cat and wondering if you totally shit the bed on the genre, or formatting, or missed some fine detail, do you realize that your autocorrect had changed the editor's name from "Bart" to "Fart".

I’ll never be a writer! And I’m not even sure what that means anymore!

Then you have a mental breakdown, cry, and spend five years building up a copywriting career while your motivation replenishes until you decide to try to do something about all this...

Random example. No relation.

Meanwhile, if you're an editor looking to start a magazine, you'll have to pay for a website, design it, trudge into the knee-high shit-pile of social media to try and get your name out there, beg, plead, and pay to have your calls for submissions promoted in different places, and then either pay hundreds or sometimes thousands of dollars to use a submissions manager or clog up your email with, if you're lucky, hundreds of submissions which you'll mostly respond to with, "I'm sorry we don't accept poetry, please read our guidelines."

why…don’t…they…ever…read…the…guidelines!?

And as you grow this magazine you're proud of through years of thankless, profitless work, you'll spend most of your time being attacked for not spending even more of it writing nice feedback, or being shit on for having to charge fees just to afford the submissions manager.

All the while everyone in your life is constantly asking wtf you do and then demeaning it because the indie-lit community is so far removed, so self-contained, that not a single person you've ever met outside of it has ever read a single thing that you or any of your colleagues have ever published!

And——

oh fuck, maybe we are starting a BDSM community...

SO WHAT THE HECK CAN WE DO ABOUT ALL THIS!?

Chill Subs is uniquely positioned as both a database AND writing community with author profiles to make the process exponentially easier for everyone.

By adding a submissions manager to our platform we can keep costs low and make everyone’s life easier by creating a totally contained ecosystem for researching, submitting to, and connecting with literary magazines.

Here’s the plan:

Phase 1 (of 5) Release:

Writers will be able to…

…use our existing browse to easily filter for open listings to fit their work
…be directed to said magazine's Chill Subs submissions portal, have all information clearly laid out for them (terms defined, magazine's preferences displayed, helpful prompts)
…submit their piece, have it automatically sync to their Chill Subs tracker
plug their details into a cover letter & literary bio generator
not have to pay fees for information or tracking (mags may still charge fees but we hope our cost-effective model reduces them).
host their writing portfolio on Chill Subs for free
have accepted publications automatically added to our library & attached to a magazine's listing so it doesn't get lost in the mucky-muck of the internet forever.
receive rejection letters with a note from Chill Subs offering up similar magazines that are currently open so writers don't have to repeat the process of hunting down the next one.

For editors:

By creating other paid services on our site, our submission manager will be:

affordable, with different options for large & small teams (with no reduction in functionality, just # of editors).
fully customizable forms, unlimited calls, lower fees, and a streamlined admin panel that we've created after getting advice from several editors of lit mags.
an intuitive submissions portal with info-prompts to reduce unfollowed submission guidelines and an algorithmic review of incoming submissions to flag those with egregiously unfollowed submissions guidelines
a tiered permissions system, and a customizable workflow with fun rating systems, and accessibility features.

We hope this process humanizes the way writers & editors interact, reduces the barrier to entry for new writers, and creates an atmosphere of fun & acceptance (even when you’re getting rejected).

And, of course, we’ll have some fun feature surprises along the way to spice things up.

Phase 2 will be a mobile application with a notifications system. And, after that, well…no spoilers.

As to what's taken us so long to build this thing? Well…

We are real shit at coming up with names. For a long time, we had decided on the name “Sub Hub.”

And then this happened: