Using Duotrope in the Submissions Game

In today’s episode, I’m going to talk about how I use Duotrope, a popular site for writers tracking their submissions to literary magazines, and give some general submitting advice/etiquette.

https://duotrope.com/

Transcript

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Hi, and welcome to Tula to Quit, the podcast for literary writers. Tula to Quit is an educational podcast documenting and commiserating on all things literary and writerly. I am your host, Terry Lynn Davis. Today's episode, I'm going to talk about how I use Duo Trope, a popular site for writers tracking their submissions to literary magazines. The Duo Trope is a site that I use daily. There's a few reasons why you might be interested in Duo Trope. First off, I would like to just say that I'm not getting any compensation from Duo Trope. This is just a website I recommend because I've found it really helpful. So there's no ulterior motive. Just if you're interested, I think Duo Trip works pretty well. It is a service you pay for, and I pay $5 monthly for the services that I'm about to go into. So what happens when you start submitting your work? You may not be there yet, or you might be a seasoned pro at submitting work. Maybe you haven't heard of dealer Trope yet, and this will be helpful for either of those situations. So for those not familiar so much with submitting work to literary magazine, when you first start writing, you may have, like, one or two stories that are good enough, in your opinion, to be sent out to literary magazines. Eventually, as you keep writing, you're going to have a ton of work, like, lots of work that you're going to want to perhaps submit once you're ready to literary magazines or contests or whatever. I think Duo Trope works best when you're submitting to, like, a literary magazine monthly or yearly issue. It's a little bit easier for that format. So let's say that you are a writer and you've got a bunch of writing that you would like to submit. And you may be wondering, how do I even find a place? My first writing was submitted to my colleges literary magazine, and they published, like, five poems of mine. So that was pretty simple. I knew that they were looking for work, and I ended up submitting, and luckily they published it. But it wasn't like I sought out any other literary magazines, and I didn't really know of too many literary magazines when I first started either. So that kind of made it easier for me. I just knew that my school had one, and I knew people that were in it. So that was a great start to kind of get into the submission process. Submitting out into the wild is a little bit different. So when you start submitting work, you might have, let's say you have a bunch of work to pull from. When you start sending out a bunch of work, it's hard to keep track of who you send things to when you sent them to, like, what pieces of work did you send to who? It gets a little complicated. So that's where a place like Duo Trope might come in and be helpful for that particular situation. Something you definitely don't want to do when you're submitting is that you want to first check. And we're talking here about submitting to multiple literary magazines and contests, okay? So one thing about the submission kind of game is that one rule is that there are two types of submissions we're talking about. We're talking about submissions that don't accept simultaneous like, they are not okay with simultaneous submissions. Which means that you submit, say, one story, and you do not submit that story to any other lip mag until you get an answer from that magazine that is just so that they don't have to worry about people pulling the story they like and dealing with that. Not a lot of people do that. There are some that still do this, but for the most part, literary magazines, unless they have a very short turnaround, they completely expect that you're going to send work to other literary magazines just because a lot of times literary magazines take 30 plus days, if not 60 to 90 plus days. There are places that take like a year to get back to you sometimes. And you're more than welcome to not submit to those places that take a year. There are plenty of literary magazines that don't do that. So that's one thing you have to understand is that if you have to look at the literary magazine kind of directions, everyone's going to have very specific guidelines is what they're called. Guidelines. If they say no SIM subs or no simultaneous subs, that means that you send one story, a few poems to them, whatever, and you send them nowhere else until you hear back from them. For the most part, simultaneous subs, okay, means you send them like, a bunch of poems, okay? Send whatever you want anywhere else. Just let them know if another piece like your work gets picked up somewhere else. And that's where Duo Trope is helpful. One aspect of how I use Duo Trope is to keep track of when I sent a sub, a submission. I'm saying sub to shorten it. I keep track of when I sent the sub, how much I perhaps paid for a sub, and which pieces of work I sent to that sub to. Because if I hopefully got an acceptance on one of these pieces of work I've sent out, that means that I have to contact every single place that I subbed to with that particular accepted piece of work. And I have to let them know that it was picked up and it can't be under consideration anymore. And that's expected. So if you don't do that, it looks unprofessional. Which is why Duo Trope is so helpful, particularly for me because I have had, like hundreds of subs out at one time sometimes. And it's tedious to go back and, like, email people or go back on submitable. It's tedious, but it's necessary. The magazine World is pretty small. So besides Duo Trope, so people that don't use dual Trope, a lot of people might use an Excel spreadsheet where they keep track of where they send their work, to which pieces of work they sent, when, and then whether it was accepted or not accepted. So an Excel worksheet also works fine and it's free. But dual Trope has other aspects of it that I like and that's why I use Dual Trope. So an Excel worksheet works is like perfectly fine for these kinds of purposes, but Dealtrope has just a little bit more information and data that I like to peruse. Another place that I know of that I don't know a lot about is the grinder. The submission grinder. And the submission grinder. Grinder is just a submission tracker and market database for writers of fiction and poetry where you can find like a home for your work and also see like, get some stats on how fast some subs are getting accepted or not accepted. I use that submission grinder sometimes. Duo Trope is definitely my thing though. I definitely prefer Duo Trope and I think it's just more established is what it is. So I will just read their little bio, I guess, their intro to why you should use Duo Trope. So it says, Duo Trope is a resource for writers that offers an extensive searchable database of current fiction, poetry, nonfiction and visual art publishing projects, a calendar of upcoming deadlines, submission trackers, and useful statistics compiled from the millions of data points we've gathered on the publishers we list. So that's what duo trope is for. They have like a ton of reports. And again. I use Duo Trope every day. When I first got on Duo Trope, I really didn't know any literary magazines and honestly didn't read literary magazines at all. Like, I had anthologies that my professor gave us. How Duo fits into your submission process there are so many publishing pages that you can even look at, like publishers and agents, I think, on this. Obviously I don't use it for that, but you can look at what's open now. The search criteria is like, you can get very specific about what kind of writing you right, and you can search by that kind of writing. You can look at what's open right now. You can look at like, if something allows simultaneous submissions, you can search by that. If you don't want to mess with the no SIM subs, you don't want to mess with those. So you can kind of filter your search by that. As you get more into the literary world, you'll start to know literary magazines that your work could fit into because that's another important thing that I won't talk about so much in this episode is that you should gear your submissions towards literary magazines that, one, you respect and two, that fit your writing because otherwise your work might be amazing. And if it doesn't fit the aesthetic of the magazine. It's pointless to send it there. There's nothing they may like it. They're like, okay, cool, but it doesn't fit with the magazine, and thank you, but no thank you. We can't use it. That's also something I didn't know when I first started. So yeah, you can look for publishers and agents. Again, I don't use it for that. I just use it to look up publishing magazines, like literary magazines. That's all I need it for. With Duo Trope, I'd say most places have a dual trope page. So, for instance, I'm an associate editor of Five South, and I'm just going to look at Five South. You have an about, and it explains what kind of writing they like. It gives like, a fee notice. You can filter by fees, and if a place charges, you may be okay with that, or you may just want to do things that are free, and that's completely fine. You should do whatever you need to do. And then they also sometimes do interview with the editors, and not all magazines do that, but I think it's always really helpful. I always love reading the interview with the editors just to see what kind of stuff are they more likely to accept. And it's really helpful because you don't want to waste your time. You don't want to waste anybody's time, really. I mean, so if your work isn't a fit for this magazine, you would probably find out by looking at their work, look about me, their description, look at the interview with editors, and then it also will tell you when the magazine was established. A lot of literary magazines fold pretty quickly because it's a lot of work. A ton of money goes into creating literary magazines, and there's almost just I mean, you really don't get any money back. You're really just pouring money into this. It's volunteer based, unless you're like a university or you're big enough to support it. Five south was established in 2020, but a lot of places fold within, like, two years. So if you're interested in when a magazine was established, a dual truck publisher page will tell you that instead. It's not to say that an older magazine will not fold or anything, but if it matters to you, I see that happen all the time. Unfortunately, you can also filter by, like, is this an online magazine? Do you want a print only magazine? A lot of places are online only, but there are people that just love the print stuff. They love to have their name in a book, and you could do both. It doesn't matter, but it tells you the publication medium, electronic or print and frequency. For Five South, we publish like, twice a year. You would have more of a shot at getting published by a place that publishes things, like, every week, for instance, or every month. Some places only publish, like, once a year. That could be a lot of the college magazines run by universities. And then as you go down the Duo Trope page, when you find a publisher that you're interested in it'll tell you what kind of work they accept. Like for instance on Five South you'll see fiction. You'll see we accept poetry and that's kind of it. We accept short fiction and flash fiction which we see is different and it'll tell you if things are temporary closed. It has a little tag on it. They'll say if it's open or not. So that's really helpful. I use this so much I feel like Dealtrope is like an old friend and honestly you don't even have to go on the website sometimes to get all this information. Under, I'll say poetry. I'm the advisory editor for Poetry so I know poetry just a little bit better for Five South. But it says for instance, on date, under the Poetry section on Five South Duotrope page it says we will be open to submissions from September 1 through September 30 and it even says approximately 35 days from now. And it looks like you can also track, you can also do your track deadlines and right under that date it says track and you can kind of keep track of those too. So audience, it says open to a broad audience. Under genres it says general. If you were like Sci-Fi or something you might want to search or filter for science fiction or fantasy or whatever you write. Then it'll say like poetry form styles, topics that five self accepts and it's like all open to all styles. And another helpful thing is types length. There are no line limits, it says on this page and you can submit up to five pieces which is also a thing that you should keep track of. You should just make sure of what they accept. There are some places that will only accept like one poem and if you send five you could be completely disregarded. You're like, well they didn't follow submission guidelines. Like I have a lot to read and these people, this person is out the running right away. So that's why it's stewardship is pretty cool where it gives really specific information. And also you can also filter by magazines that pay. So we pay a small amount and that's something that if you're interested in, you can definitely search and filter by. And like for submissions it says electronic submissions are okay. No mail, no snail mail submissions allowed, no reprints. Which means that most websites, unless said otherwise, will not accept a previously published piece of work. So don't try to republish unless that magazine is looking for that kind of thing. Simultaneous submissions are okay. So that's kind of what it says. And then my favorite part of Duo Trope is the 5000 submissions statistics. And this is what I do all day long sometimes when I'm really excited about some submissions and I haven't had an acceptance in a while. I'll look at and it's all on the same page. It's just like a long page under a certain publisher. This could be any, like, LitMag or publisher. I'm just, again, looking at Five South as an example. So five sales submission statistics, this is what I stare at sometimes with the statistics, you're able to see how fast submissions are being accepted. So, like, accuracy, right? It says the data Duo Trope uses is user data. So if you're a user of Duo Trope, you would have to report your statistics on each publishing or, like, each acceptance or rejection. And that's how they get their information. So, for instance, we have like, 301 reports from members, so it stays reported for a submission. So we'll say that you submitted something and you might look at 5000 page and you would go up and you would, like, submit. There's like, a report part, and you would click submission response, and you would add any work you sent to them, and it would keep track of it down in, like, submissions statistics. Under days reported for Five South, it says two minimum, which means that someone got a response in two days. And the mean average of before an answer was reported was 72 days. And the max day that someone reported, like, the longest amount that they heard back was 221 days. It's saying that 90% of people got a response. And that doesn't mean that Five cell didn't respond to them. It just maybe that people didn't come back and report it. So for acceptances, this is another thing that I kind of always look at. So it says that 1.66% of submissions were accepted. The higher the number, the easier it is to get into the literary magazine, the lower the number, obviously, the harder it is to get in. And it says also, next to submissions accepted that there was an 81 day average if you were accepted. I was like, look at that too. Because as you're clicking, as you're like, going up in number towards, like, as you're going up in the submission day, like numbers, you're kind of like, okay, I haven't got a response yet. It's 80 days. A lot of people apparently that were accepted and had an acceptance around day 81. So you just kind of like, watch it. I feel like this is probably not great for people with anxiety. Or maybe it is great. I don't know. It's like an itchy scratch a little bit. So use this with caution. But I'll just be honest. I do this constantly. I do this multiple times a day. For rejections, 88% of people got a rejection. And then also, it's interesting due to trouble, keeps track of all of your acceptances and rejections. So it says that Five South sent out personal rejections were like, 17% of the rejections people received from Five South, 53% of them were form, and then 29% were like unspecified. So the thing about personal and form rejections is that a personal rejection, a magazine might write you and say, thank you for sending this work, it doesn't fit right now, but I really like these pieces in particular and please send more again, which means like, okay, you're on the right track. This is like the right your writing is the right style for this magazine. So you want to keep track of personal rejections just because you would want to submit to there again, form rejection just means that the magazine was busy and it just sent like its form rejection which was just basically like, thank you for sending this, it's not a good fit. Thank you for sending this, it's not a good fit, thanks for trying and buy. And that's typical because magazines don't have time to send personal objections to everybody. A personal rejection is generally pretty, not only is it specific, but it's encouraging. And you should definitely keep track of personal rejections for your own motivation, but also just to know that your work is actually appreciated at this particular place. And also you can see how many people places are pending. Like for instance, there's like seven figure responses pending according to dealer Trope and then other information that says the editors will try to make a decision within 180 days. And the most common submission fee paid is $3. So that's another thing that you could keep track of in duo trope. My favorite, favorite part is to under other information. Under the statistics, you can see view report of recent responses from this market and that's what I obsessively go to. So the most recent response was July 22 for Five South. Today is July 27 by the way, and it says underneath that responses have been received for submissions since briefly as June 29. So I'm like, oh, that's pretty soon. Let's see. So I'm under poetry right now for recent responses from Five South. And it says that there are a ton of it keeps track for 30 days. You'll see that if you look, there's a 40 day rejection from Five South on July 26. And if you look down a little bit more, there's a 33 day personal rejection from Five South on July 19. And then you would also, as I kind of travel down there's, 117 day acceptance from south on July 17. So what I do is I look to see are they responding, are they sending out rejections or acceptances today? So that's why I obsessively look at it. So that's what I look at. I say like, okay, most recent response reported, is it today? Let me see, what was the response that they send out rejections today? Is it earlier than mine? Like, they say I'm on day 40 on my submission and they're sending out rejections on people that have only sub 20 days ago. It makes me think like, maybe I'm still in the running and that's how you can kind of get yourself into you can see how you could use this. Then another thing that's kind of cool is that work submitted here was also submitted to Blink Blank Blink. So you can kind of see similar magazines that other submitters, other users do a Trope users submitted to. And then you can also see like, members accepted here also had work accepted by these other places. So it's just like a lot of cool stats on here. I just get so into it, especially if I'm really excited about like a magazine or some pieces that I've subbed. I'm like, I really want to know. It's just going to happen. Like, me monitoring it almost makes it feel like, okay, I have some control over it, which is not the case at all, but it's just like entertaining to me. Again, like an issue scratch. But yeah, it has a link to the publication's website. It has all sorts of stuff like that. And that's how I use it. Okay, so say you have like an account here you would go to like your submissions. And for instance, I have, let's see, I have eleven things out on submission right now, which is actually pretty low for me. I usually have like a ton of things out on sub. The longest thing I have out on sub is like 206 days and the shortest is like two days. So it has the listing of LitMag, it has the day sent, it has what poem was sent where it's pretty organized in like a table. And then it also has a pending status. So the P stands for pending. And if the P is like red, it says that it shows you that, okay, the days out are a little bit higher than they usually are. So they would usually send a response before this day. So something is up. Either they're backlogged or maybe they're considering you. You can never be sure, but you can sure speculate like me. So I stare at that. You can also update under that same table, you can update it. And if you get a rejection, for instance, you would put the day you were rejected and you would say, is it form or personal? And it's good for all of Duo Trope. It's good for everybody. So if you like accurately port, like when you send things, what got accepted, et cetera, then it's just helpful for everybody. And it helps literary magazines too, because it accurately reflects when they're sending out acceptances rejections. Because there's like a lot of pressure to not take too long because it sucks to wait. You can also look at your statistics. So far, for the past twelve months, I've sent out 157 submissions and I have paid $30, which I've paid more, I've definitely paid more. But chat books and manuscripts, they are not as easy to track on Duo Trip. That's something you might have to track on your own or on submitable if they use that. But for literary magazines, like everyday kind of literary mags, dealt is great. So it says my acceptance percentage is only 2.5%. My rejection percentage is 88.1%. Let me see like all time. My all time acceptance is it's worse, 1.6%. So it has been tracking since May 2019 when I first started submitting. So that is three years I've been submitting. Seriously. So yeah, my acceptance percentage is 1.6%. And to be honest, that makes sense. It feels like that I don't publish a lot. It's because I don't necessarily think it's because I'm like bad. It's just I don't write a ton and I take my time kind of publishing a little bit. And so I've also done a lot of trial and error. I may have sent originally magazines that could never take my writing. I've probably sent them subs and stuff like that. It's honestly my fault too. So it's not as bad as it looks. It might be, I don't know. But they also have cool reports, publication response statistics. So again, I'm like a little bit more familiar with poetry, but I clicked on reports and I did publication response statistics and Duo Trope has compiled a list of markets that you might be interested in. Some of the categories are top 100 slowest to respond, I don't know why you would want to go there, but then the Top 100 Fastest to respond, which I have definitely clicked on before because I am impatient. The Top 100 most challenging, which means the lowest acceptance rates. So that would give you the 100 lit mags. The top 100 lit mags with the lowest acceptance rates, which doesn't necessarily mean they're like the best. That's a slippery slope right there. But Top 100 Most approachable, which is highest acceptance rates. The most personable, which is like most likely to send a personal response. The most non responsive, least likely to send a response, which probably means that you just don't want to click on those to see who you avoid. The extremely challenging, which means no exceptions and at least 100 submitters. So those are kind of like fiction, publication, poetry, publications and nonfiction. They have those categories and you can check out the list for that. So yeah, that's kind of how I use dual trope. Like when I first started submitting, I had no idea where I would submit. So I searched Duo Trope and I found places that maybe I filtered by let me see, you can even save your search. So I did search for publishers and then I searched for publishers of poetry and there's like a guide to searching. They have a ton of guides on this. It's pretty good. And I don't have a general. I would search general. You can search by poetry like form, genre, you can do like style, topic length, minimum payment, submission type, which means like postal, electronic, except three prints, which is already published. Or you can say, allow simultaneous submissions, accept multiples, which means that you might send multiple packets of poems or pieces of work. So a lot of places only want you to send, like, one submission per reading period. So then that's something you might filter. So that's how I found, like, a ton of places when I didn't know anything about anything. That's what I did. And I keep going back and it'll tell you what's open and what's not open. Magazines are open randomly. Sometimes you'll find magazines open at any given time. But I don't know, I haven't really tracked when places closed or open. A lot of the colleges lip mags don't open again to the semester. That's how I found them originally, and that's who I submitted to. And as I got more into the literary world, I knew who I wanted to submit to and who I didn't, or what places were not a fit for my work, or what places took forever and I didn't want to deal with that, or places that took or just, like, would not allow simultaneous submissions. So I'm like, forget it. Like, I don't want to wait that long, or I don't know. So you keep track of where you submit things to. You also keep track of the pieces that you have. Like, I have your list of pieces. You can say, like, what they are, like, what genre, like, what the title is. You can retire it when it's accepted. So there's just, like, a ton of different things here. Underneath, there's a theme and deadline calendar that's sometimes, like, a lot of fun. If you're feeling a little, like, uninspired, there are some literary magazines that will pull out, like, a theme for their issue, and then that might get something started in your head, and you might write something for that. So that's why I use dual trope. Again, it's just professional to be organized with your submissions. What Duotrope is great for is just you see where you submit. So you got an acceptance. Great. You have to go now and tell everyone that has that particular piece, that it was accepted elsewhere. You don't have to pull the whole thing, but you have to pull one piece because there are other people that might be considering it, or it's obviously a pretty good piece if someone else wants it. So to avoid that awkward interaction of having to be like, no, I'm sorry, that was actually accepted elsewhere, I forgot to tell you. And looking unprofessional, do a trophy organized that a little bit more. And then also you can kind of stock mag a little bit and see, like, their submission reporting statistics. You should never bother them about it unless I think they say every literary magazine has a day that you should wait to contact them by. Some places are like, you can contact me at 180 days past when you sent it, and if you. Have not heard anything, then maybe it got lost and you can kind of check on the status. But otherwise, especially if they're used submittable, it usually doesn't get lost. Your sub doesn't usually get lost. They either are maybe considering it. There's something they're backlog again. These are mostly volunteers. They're just people. And it's just use this for your own entertainment, not to harass people, please. Okay, so I think that's it. That's why I like Duotrope again. I would not recommend it if I did not really use it all the time and love it. There are other places you can go. Submission. Grinder is another one. Use a spreadsheet if you like, but Dealer Trope has other features that I think make it work worth it. That's all I got. So if you have any questions, you can email me. You can find me on Twitter. You can go to my website, send me an email, whatever. But check out Duo Trope if you're interested. I think it's super helpful. It has a lot of cool guides on there that you might find interesting. And that's it. That concludes this week of two. Let's go quit. If you like what you heard and you want to hear more, be sure to subscribe, rate the podcast and share with your friends. As always, I'm your host, Terry Lynn Davis, and we'll see you next time.