The Shotgun Approach
By: Graham Oliver
Tags: Submitting, Writing, Baking

Above: The 2019 That Takes the Cake baking competition showroom.



Friends,



I am sad to inform you that having competed in the above competition, I am not yet an award-winning baker. I think my decision to make a savory spicy chocolate bread was just a brilliant idea whose time has not yet come, and in the near future there will be brunch restaurants centered on the dish (I imagine it served with whipped cream cheese and dense blackberry jam), and over complementary raspberry mimosas people will trade in the rumors of prescient baker Graham Oliver who tried to draw the world’s attention to this flavor possibility. I’ve thrown the recipe up here. I also made a couple of granolas for the competition, which were not as exciting but were still good. Here’s the recipe for my favorite one. Carolina, on the other hand, is now an award-winning baker for the second and third time over. Her pecan coffee cake earned her third prize in that category and her pecan cookies with a whiskey-maple glaze took second prize. You will have to cajole her for the recipes! If you’d like to see some more pictures from the competition and of Carolina’s prize-winning creations, here’s my Twitter thread from it.



Last month I intended to write to you about another literary conversation, but what I had to say about Kondo ended up being longer than I anticipated (irony?), so it got cut! But this is a topic that comes up regularly in the lit world and I think about a lot: shotgun submissions. For those of you who don’t know, when you’re building your career as a writer you have to send out your short stories/poems/essays to a bajillion places, a process known as submitting. Some of the places are online-only, some are print and online. Some are run by universities, some have been around forever, some only publish pieces that include Queen Anne chairs as significant parts of their stories’ plots. That last one is a joke, maybe. This process is infuriating and contradictory, and there’s all kinds of advice out there, an overwhelming avalanche of advice so that it’s impossible to heed all of it.



When you shotgun submit, you blast out the same story/poem/essay/whatever to as many publications as possible, treating it like a numbers game. With the advent of most publications now taking submissions online (often through the ubiquitous, standardized system Submittable), this is incredibly easy. While some publications charge a submission fee, there is still a large segment that don’t. All of this makes shotgun submitting easy, and in fact some people treat it as a goal to submit as much as possible, to get 100 rejections per year, etc. etc. There’s not much of a reason not to if your goal is to get published as much as possible. There’s also the fact that whether or not a story gets published is a subjective process, meaning that your story hitting two different readers at two different times might get two different results. Finally, the process can take so, so long to find out if a piece has been submitted or not (6+ months is common, and I have two pieces I keep in my Submittable queue that were submitted more than two years ago, just for my own amusement).



But this creates problems. Shotgun submissions means that people send in unpolished work or work that is in no way a good fit for the venue, clogging up the queue for those publications. The queue is read almost entirely by unpaid volunteers (or grad students), and as someone who has read for multiple publications there is nothing more disheartening than to go through a string of submissions that are clearly not in any way aimed at your publication. Almost all publications include a recommendation that you “read a few of our issues/pieces to get familiar with what we’re looking for” but writers can only read so much when there are so many publications out there, with new ones appearing every week. So how can editors deal with this? Well, they can reduce the amount of submissions to more manageable levels by using a submission fee or limiting the time period they accept submissions (more and more places are doing the latter), but neither of those improves the quality of submissions, they only reduce the quantity. Some publications still only take submissions through snail mail, which might be a sign of a luddite or might be a practice intended to add an obstacle to try to get a more serious group of submitters. And some just don’t take submissions at all, relying instead on soliciting materials from writers they previously have relationships with.



The reason I’m thinking about this is because I am a submitter and a reader and a former editor and I wish I knew an answer to it, but also because an editor got a lot of flak on Twitter at the beginning of this year for suggesting that submitting 100 times a in a year should not be a lauded goal. It’s a vicious cycle — shotgun submitting makes queues get clogged which means publications responding takes longer and longer which means there’s even more reason to shotgun submit, shotgun submitting also encourages editors to seek more pieces out from solicitations than from slush, again giving more reason to submit to more places since an even lower percentage of slush gets accepted. There’s also a moral component to imposing fees or relying on solicitation; those things privilege a certain group of people and keep the community insular. I don’t know! The internet has done this to many arenas of life, right? Lowered the barrier of entry for everything which is great in many ways and difficult in others. The problem I’ve described with publishing definitely applies to job applications as well.



Obviously this calls for a magical realism short story about a world where submitting a piece of writing for publication requires you also must submit a segment from one of your fingers, thus requiring you to be certain it is a good submission and and solid fit for the publication.



Further reading:

If you went into the Grand Canyon Museum any time in the last two decades, you were probably exposed to uranium! How exciting.

Vincent D’Onofrio is this month’s amusing social media user. Okay, sure, Pierce Brosnan gets a mention too. Also he’s the good guy in Mrs. Doubtfire.

I have stopped regularly listening to This American Life for two main reasons: 1) I’ve listened to enough episodes where the high volume of reruns makes it annoying to weed through and I’m too lazy to figure out how to make my podcast app only download the news ones, but more importantly, 2) I get enough news directly about American politicians through every other media I consume, so TAL’s (and even guiltier, Fresh Air’s) growing emphasis on political figures is not what I want to listen to (seriously, who convinced them that Jeff Flake deserved so much attention?). HOWEVER, I caught up on my regular podcasts so I got a few TAL episodes and I must say, some recent ones hit it out of the park. I especially recommend #664, “The Room of Requirement,” which involved libraries and making you cry, though 668 and 666 were also good.

Are you, like me, a fan of robots and sadness?

Claire making Ferrero Rocher is a classic.

I want to read something good about YouTube’s effects on young people. Recommend me something? Everything I’ve found is fairly shallow.

We’ve gone from 30 degrees to 80 degrees in the span of four days here in Austin. No matter what temperature it is, though, our dog Sasha wants the back door open so she can simultaneously be inside while experiencing the joys of the outside. And quite frequently, despite the bugs, she gets her way.



Be more like Sasha.



-g