Submissions Etiquette

Generally, we try to look past any personal misgivings and will judge submissions purely on their quality and suitability for Fuselit. The following is not a tick list of misdemeanours that will cause us to simply ignore your work. However, it will be of immense help to us, and to you as well, when submitting to other literature journals, if you take the following into consideration:

• Sending exactly the same submission to several magazines at exactly the same time is simply rude, no matter how eager you are to get your work out there. In submitting, you are asking the editors of these magazines - who are often, like us, unpaid - to put in the time and effort to read and consider your work, so you should be equally prepared to put in the time and effort to consider each publication separately and put together a submission that is uniquely suitable for them.

It may be that some poems will fit equally well in an array of journals, and many will allow a degree of simultaneous submission. What is unacceptable, however, is simply filling the 'send' box of your email with the addresses of a dozen different editors. Even if you use the 'blind carbon copy' function, a dead giveaway is when the publication is not addressed by name and, in our case, when the name of the issue you are submitting to is not mentioned. It should also be noted that this first point is the exception to what is said above, ie. it will cause us to disregard your work, since it means you have not complied with our guidelines.

• Sending further submissions before we have had a chance to reply to the ones already under consideration is likewise to be avoided, unless you are proposing them as a replacement to your first batch. Sending a new submission every day or couple of days is unacceptable and will not increase your chances of being accepted. Rather, it betrays a lack of confidence in the quality of your work.

• While we are happy to deal with enquiries where our guidelines are ambiguous, it's preferable that you don't write in to try to persuade us to make an exception for you. We well understand that there is pressure on artists and authors to try to get into as many journals as possible as expeditiously as possible and that shortcuts are tempting, but we wouldn't have put the guidelines up in the way we have if that wasn't the way we operated.

• Boasting about being published in x amount of journals and publications prior to us can have completely the opposite effect to that which you intend, particularly if you're into triple figures (yes! Some people are!) For one thing, quantity does not mean quality. For another, we like to think we have a somewhat unique approach, and the idea of publishing the same work everyone else in the world is publishing is unappealing. For a third thing, to be quite blunt, it makes you look like someone who spends far, far too much time trying to get noticed. For a fourth, we don't want to be just one more notch in your bedpost. Nobody likes to feel used! Believe us when we say we are just as likely to take a strong piece of work if it comes from someone previously unpublished. These are the kind of people Fuselit started off publishing and we plan to continue the tradition.

• Please don't use the editor's personal email address except in the situation described on our guidelines page. It won't mean we reply to you any sooner.

• As a final point, don't place copyright labels at the end of your pieces. It carries no legal weight whatsoever and therefore seems a teeny tiny bit precious.