Guidelines for Submitting Work

Because of the number of submissions we receive, we cannot comment on an individual piece of work, nor explain why it was not accepted for publication. But it might help you in preparing for future submission to know some of our most common reasons for rejection. Note that whilst most of these comments apply to written pieces, several are relevant to artwork too.

1. The work did not follow the submission rules: We select work ‘blind’, so it's essential that you complete the prescribed cover page for each category of work submitted, and ensure that the actual piece does not contain your name. Length limits help us to present a varied mix of work to our readers, while the requested formats are designed to make the job of the selection panels as straightforward as possible. All our team members are volunteers, working in their own time. Time we have to spend, say, deleting names, or converting file formats or arcane fonts, is time we would rather spend appreciating and assessing the work itself. Give yourself your best possible chance right from the start.
2. It missed the deadline for submission: We are working against a fixed and tight production schedule and delaying the selection process to accommodate late submissions would have a knock-on effect right down to the launch date. We can't afford to disappoint our readers or the grant-awarding bodies who help to fund us.
3. Prose piece was structurally flawed: E.g. work that starts strongly and peters out, unresolved; work that heaps on the minor details yet skates over the important bits (perhaps to keep the length down); work that ends strongly but started so vaguely that the reader had lost interest; work excerpted from a longer piece that doesn't stand on its own: these are problems we see a lot, but could have been fixed before submission.
4. Prose/poetry — had potential, but was poorly prepared: Amazingly, every year we receive submissions that are full of typos, errors, inconsistencies of spelling or syntax (if you're bending the rules, it has to be done consistently enough for the reader to know you're doing it on purpose) and things that are just plain incomprehensible — all problems that would have been caught by judicious use of the PC language tools and a good final proofread before submission. If you don't care how your work presents itself, why should we?
5. Prose/poetry — had potential, but it was marred by cosiness: This is a particular temptation for dialect writers, and it's easy to see why — there's a long tradition of using so-called ‘incorrect’ English only for comic or sentimental subjects, and tradition is hard to break with. But we believe Scots and Doric can be used for anything — and should be!
6. It had potential, but it was marred by sensationalism: Nobody wants art to be merely comfortable, but shock for its own sake is getting to be as hackneyed and obvious a tactic as anything in the Kailyard School — and so is that sudden twist in the tail, if it hasn't been well set up. Our readers come to us to be entertained, seduced, unsettled, surprised, and above all given something to think about — when they want cheap thrills, they tend to read a newspaper, and so do we.
7. We liked it, but it was one of twenty submissions on that theme: There are some themes we see a lot of — in writing: childhood, midlife crisis, crime, marital discord; in artwork: landscapes and seascapes. Good as your work may be, if it is on one of these themes, it's immediately up against stiffer competition for a place in the magazine: we like to present a varied mix of work to our readers, so we can't pick too many similar pieces.
8. We liked it, but we just didn't have enough space: This is the rejection that we hate most. Like every magazine, we are faced with a trade-off between how much we can include and how much the magazine costs to produce — beyond a certain point, more content means a higher cover price and fewer sales. Every year there are more submissions we like than we can include in the final layout, and it could be that your work was one of those — assuming it didn't arrive a fortnight late, in six-point purple Haettenschweiler, and finish ‘and then I woke up!’ of course....

At any rate, don't be discouraged by rejection — it happens to every writer and artist. Keep writing/painting/printing, keep revising your work, and keep sending it to us. If it's good, we want to see it published as much as you do.