Slush Town

An article on HTMLGIANT yesterday spoke to something that's been bothering me for a while. As someone who works with the slush pile and attends editorial meetings at a well known lit mag, it's frustrating to see the ratio of slush to solicited/lit agent pieces that make it into the magazine. Sadly, slush has a terribly slim chance at making it even beyond the first or second round of readers, let alone into the magazine--at least in my experience.

From the trenches of Slush Town, the outlook is bleak, and yea, it's discouraged me from submitting to many of the better known mags. It takes the stars aligning, some serious karma (and/or determined interns) and damn good writing to get a piece from the slush into the top editors' hands. But when one of those shows up in the magazine, it feels friggin' good. I suppose the point of a slush pile at this kind of high rep magazine is to give the little guys a chance to appear next to the big names... even if it's only once in a while.

Pimping Your Words Out: WordHustler.com

As I was about to submit some poems to a literary magazine today via online submission manager, I saw a third option at the bottom of the page: WordHustler.com. Intrigued, I clicked on the shiny button and signed up. While certain aspects of WordHustler had me tingling in anticipation--smooth submission process, automatic cover letter and project pdf formatting, and submission history organization--the less-than-helpful search engine and the service fee left me rather cold.

The search engine--meant to help you find contests, agents, publications, publishers, and fellowships--provides a seemingly straightforward selection process. You choose a submission type, then a genre and then you click on as many boxes of "market" types (i.e. their predominant subject/reader group) that might fit with your writing. I tried this with publications: poetry, selecting only literary magazines and a few other similar types in an attempt to narrow my search. I still ended up with 392 potential "markets" (WordHustler calls each publication/contest/etc. a "market"). 

Now, perhaps there really are 392 "markets" for my work, however, how am I supposed to whittle that down to a manageable (and affordable) number? Granted there is a small paragraph description and a star rating (which I really don't see the purpose of--who is rating them and on what?) for each "market," but that's still 392 paragraphs to decipher. This may be more helpful if you have a very specific audience/subject: religion, scuba-diving, cowgirls. 

In addition, WordHustler charges for each submission. Signing up is free, but using the service will cost you. I can see using this in lieu of snail mail for those magazines and contests that require an envelope/stamp effort, but there is no point in paying to submit to a review when they already have a free online submission manager...unless you really need someone to organize your submission history for you.

All that being said, I do appreciate the effort on the part of WordHustler's creators. The submission process is a long and grueling one, and dearly in need of a technological makeover. As someone who really hates paper cuts, I will probably look to them as my snail mail alternative in the future.