Subject: ‘previously published’
really think you should reconsider whether something appearing on personal blogs and social media count as ‘previously published’ and so unacceptable, like Rattle.com does. As they say:
Rattle does not accept work that has been previously curated, in print or online—poems may be self-published on social media, blogs, or message boards, but cannot have been published in books, magazines, or similar collections open to the public. We want to be the first publisher to highlight the poems, but never want to discourage anyone from sharing their poems themselves. For more on this, read “Uncurated: The Case for a New Term of Art.”
Source: personal email, Rattle.com
Why should we write at all if we can’t share them with people? We are not all MFA or PhD graduates, students, or academics. I grudgingly understand my eBook on Amazon’s contents cannot be submitted, in spite of single digit sales, even if I took it down (although it is self-published). But ‘my best work’ has still tended to go up on a blog, or a facebook post. Perhaps you could implement a max follower count instead of a full ban? Or just do what Rattle did. It seems to me that is the reasonable and humane thing to do. And I’m not writing much recently. It takes a lot of time and I have many other concerns and demands on my time. Why write something that is ‘best work’ If I can choose between ten views OR spending immense time trying to submit it 50 times and still getting rejected 100% because it’s just too weird (or too long) for most magazines? Like this or this: https://lostinmist.wordpress.com/2022/04/12/iris-of-the-babbling-brook-loquacia/
https://lostinmist.wordpress.com/2019/08/08/as-you-disintegrate-3/ (although AS YOU DISINTEGRATE *is* in the eBook). And please don’t tell me that open mics are an adequate solution to this problem.
I thank you for your thoughtful consideration in advance.
—
Cooper Dozier
https://lostinmist.wordpress.org
I was on twitter and got pointed to look at these two poems by the authors’ account: https://waxwingmag.org/items/issue29/27_Lukic-Monday.php ::: and ::: https://waxwingmag.org/items/issue29/28_Lukic-Family-Secret.php before writing this, then looking at some other poems, and hopefully, at the submission policy, where I was disappointed.
Photo by Clark Tibbs on Unsplash
My eBook is at https://www.amazon.com/Synaptic-Syntactic-Unbounded-Phases-Entangled-ebook/dp/B0731P2Y5H/ among other outlets you can find from the site menu. It has been accepted by indieauthorproject.com, but no library in my region is a member, although I have requested that, and it has not been accepted for national distribution.
Lost in Mist 