'The Digital Slushpile' - After Digitizing, Business Costs Rise
The November issues of "Poets & Writers" magazine (offline only) features an eye-opening article on the "digital slushpile." Literary journal founder Ronald Spatz expanded the writer submissions to his publication by signing up for an online portal called "Submittable." Until that time, Spatz only collected submissions via snail mail. "But as Spatz's experiment illustrates, by simplifying the submission process, online portals are also helping to push slush piles to unprecedented heights, resulting in staffing shortages, delayed response times, and vanishingly low acceptance rates for submitted work at many journals." Spatz said there were so many submissions through his journal's membership with Submittable "I had to shut it down." He said it was unethical to not respond to each submission in a timely manner. Spatz is back to accepting submissions only via snail mail. Also in this article is more evidence of GenZ or i...