What it means when your story is in Submittable a long time

This is a subject that a lot of blogs on writing have covered. Does it mean anything if your story is in Submittable for a long time before it gets rejected? Specifically, does that mean that the editors thought it over a long time before sending the rejection? If you're waiting on a notice and it's been in there a while, do you have a better chance of acceptance, because the editors are spending time mulling it over?

Generally, I'm going to agree with the community consensus on this and say that you shouldn't make too much out of the length of time something is in the system before you get a notice. But I will differ and suggest that it might tell you something, but only in specific circumstances.

The basics

Submittable is the system by which about 85% or so of literary journals accept submissions. (That's a totally subjective figure based on my own experience. Many of the very high-end journals, however, use their own systems rather than Submittable.) I assume you know this, or you wouldn't be reading my blog, but you never know. Maybe you just like to check in from time to time to see if I've posted any new photos of myself that show the progress of my baldness.

When you submit a story, Submittable gives you a status of "received." Some time later--could be five minutes, could be a year--you'll see the status change from "received" to "in progress." "In progress" means that somebody has done something administrative with your story. Clifford Garstang's excellent blog tells us that merely opening a story does not change its status. Kelly Davio, however, guest blogging for Submittable, so I take it as authoritative, tells us that the only time a story can be opened without it changing status is if the reader closes the browser without first voting, assigning, or going back to the main screen. I've tested this by submitting to a journal where I myself am an editor and messing around with my submission in various ways. I'm actually going to lean with Clifford on this. I think you have to actually make an administrative action to a story. Which means you can't really tell from the disposition status whether anyone has looked at it or not. It all depends on the magazine's own preferred process for going through submissions.


Types of literary journal staff structures

Structure One: Well heeled journal with lots of intern slaves. This type of magazine probably assigns your story very early on, because they have a specific person to assign it to. How long it takes for someone to read it and vote on it from there is anyone's guess, and you won't know when it happens. So unfortunately, with the heavy hitters, you won't have any idea based on time what's going on. Most likely, it'll be a while. The good news is that a lot of the stronger journals will give you an "encouraging rejection" if they liked what you wrote and just didn't have room for it.

Structure Two: Ordered, but small. This is a magazine where everyone knows the drill and the machine is well oiled, but there aren't a ton of student interns to command. Often, there is one editor for fiction, one for poetry, one for non-fiction, and that editor does everything in that genre. Here it's a total crap shoot. It's up to how that editor likes to do things. She might open it up, read a page, then put it aside if it looks like it's something she'll need to give time to later. I do this sometimes as an editor. Some nights, I am just going through the slush looking for bad stories I can get rid of easily. If I find something decent, I leave it for later. Or the editor might never touch the story until she's ready to read it for real. In this case, you're likely to go from "received," straight past "in progress" and on to accepted/rejected in a very short amount of time. There's no committee to talk to. It's just one person, and she reads and makes a decision. In other words, there's not much you can tell from this.

Here's the exception, and the one time when being in the system a while might mean your odds are improving: Let's say it sits there for a while in "received," and then one day it goes to "in progress," but then it waits again for a while. To me, that might mean the editor finally got the story and then had to think about it. So if you submit to a magazine like this, and you're in "received mode" for a long time and THEN you go to "in progress" and sit for a long time, it MIGHT mean something.

Structure Three: Controlled anarchy. There are several editors for each genre, and nobody is really telling anyone what to do. All the editors are free to go in and read what they can, when they can. This is the model on the journal I work with, and I suspect it might be common for journals where the inbox is too big for one person but the staff is still all volunteer.

This is the structure where I think your story sitting in "in progress" mode for a long time is most likely to mean something. This is especially true if it took a long time to go from "received" to "in progress."

We like to have two editors vote no before we reject a story. This isn't always possible, but it's how we like to operate. Very often, once a story gets one vote, someone else jumps on it so we can close the loop. If we don't like the story, it often will go from "in progress" to rejection in days.

So if your story waits a while to get opened, then gets opened, then sits around a long time (say a month), I'd say that with this type of journal, there's maybe a 60-70% chance that it means people were divided on the story. There are other things that might be going on--sometimes, anarchy means that people just aren't paying attention, and a story that needs to be finished up just gets ignored. But I think the odds are that if your story didn't get assigned soon after coming in, and when it finally does get opened it sits for a while, it probably means something. But only for structure three. It could mean that for structure two, also, but it's harder to tell. With just one person, they could have any kind of system.

How do you know what type of magazine you've submitted to? Well, you don't, unless you know someone who works there. But you might be able to form guesses if you submit to the same place several times and start to notice trends.

I really think all journals ought to do a good job of differentiating between rejections. If a story made an editor or editors think before tossing it, they ought to send a different kind of rejection. It ought to be clear that the "encouraging" rejection actually means "we read your story and liked it more than we like most stories we get." That's the easiest way to tell what a journal thought. Well, that, and actually getting accepted.

In any event, for you, the beleaguered author trying to get some acceptances and make sense of it all, I think it's best to heed the majority advice: a rejection doesn't mean a whole lot, and it's best not to try reading tea leaves. Enough journals will actually tell you if you merited a closer look that you should pay a lot more attention to those than you do to time spent in limbo.