Reshaping submissions

By Joel Troutman
July 2, 2025

Submissions re-open today, so I thought it’d be a great time to look at stats from our previous submission windows and explain how these findings have shaped the way we receive writing. Also, it’s an excuse for me to look at data and maybe even make graphics, which I love. This is also going to be a bit analytical and in the weeds, which will either be interesting, if you care about the numbers of writing and publishing, or akin to reading an academic analysis. You’ve been warned (or intrigued?).
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Quick stats to rattle off! So far, we’ve received 1362 submissions across three submission periods. After BFB6 releases, we will have published 63 pieces of writing, meaning authors have a 4.6% chance of publication whenever they submit to us. According to the Submission Grinder and Duotrope, that isn’t too far off of what writers can expect from other semi-pro venues like Inner Worlds Zine (2.6%) or Solarpunk (6.6%) and even some larger publications like Beneath Ceaseless Skies (3.2%) or Abyss & Apex (5.3%), but it is more welcoming than most other professional markets who receive thousands of submissions each month and accept less than 1% of them (the amount of slush reading going on there gives me a brain freeze). We’ve also managed to catch the eyes of writers from over 30 countries across the world and every continent but Antarctica! The USA easily accounts for the largest share of writers, but the past year has seen us publishing almost an equal amount of international writers as American ones–a fact that I find wickedly cool! Next on my publishing bucket list is translations.

Shifting guidelines

Long-time BFB submitters may notice that our guidelines have changed since the first time around, as well as the second and now the third. We’ve been adapting! Learning from past experiences, getting better (we hope) and trying to find a balance to submission time that works well for writers and is sustainable for our team. 

One of the very first changes we made was lowering the max word count for fiction from 10,000 - 8000. 10,000 words is a lot of words. Even 8000 is a lot of words. Out of the 46 stories we have published/slated for publication, we’ve only accepted 5 stories over 7000 words and only one of those is over 8000. Long stories are a hard sell. All of those 8000 words have to be compelling in order for us to be willing to devote about 1/5 of an entire issue to that one story, and it’s much easier to take a chance on a few shorter stories than it is to go all-in on one big one. After the first submission period, it became abundantly clear that it just wasn’t worth the time (for us or the writers submitting to us) to read 10,000 word stories when we were so unlikely to ever publish one of them. Overall, it’s been a great change for us that’s made the submissions as a whole easier to tackle.

What’s the sweet spot, you may be wondering? Across 46 stories, we’ve published ~185,700 words of fiction, leaving the average published story with a wordcount of 4036. For reference, that’s only about 100 words less than Dana E. Beehr’s “For Want of a Nail” from BFB3. It’s a safe length! However, the best length for any piece of writing is however long the story needs to be. “The Songweaver” by Andrew LiVecchi, from BFB4, needs all 8300 of its words and would not be publishable if it were half the length.

800+ page "Dune" stacked against BFB Issues 1-5 for comparison. Really puts into perspective how much we've published!

After the first window, we also raised our payment rate for poetry. Our poetry turnout wasn’t quite what we wanted during that first window. There was great poetry there, including Rhysling Award Finalist “The Oarfish Bride” by Amelia Gorman (so cool!), but we didn’t get the volume we were looking for. So for the second window, we raised our rates from $6/poem to $10/poem, and since then have seen an increase in poetry submissions! Last period, we got work from 55 poets, up from the 40 of the period before that, but still only 12% of our total received submissions. We love reading poetry, so we hope that number continues climbing!

We began offering paid feedback last submission window. This is something we’d talked about since the first reading period but actually just last time decided to give it a go. The goal was to offer writers the option to get detailed feedback on their stories for $5-20, depending on what they wanted. We get to help a writer grow their skills, and we receive some funding for future issues. 19 writers paid for feedback, and from those critiques, we were able to pay for the cover art of BFB5.

Giving feedback has an added bonus: it just feels nice to connect with more authors. During the editing process, we get to work one-on-one with the authors we’re publishing, which is really gratifying! Getting to know the writers we’re working with and building those relationships is one of the joys of this project, and we’re so happy to have made some writer friends in the process. Ideally, we’d like to be able to give every writer that sends us work a personalized response with feedback on their story to make those connections happen naturally. But unfortunately we are just three people, and if we sent a response like that to everyone, then we wouldn’t have any time left to actually publish Baubles. By offering paid feedback, we’re able to make more of these connections and help writers improve their work at the same time. We want to find new voices and nurture the next generation of writers. This is a way to help make that happen.
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We’re offering paid feedback this time around too. Elyse and I agreed that the additional workload that comes with the feedback teeters upon unmanageable, however the revenue it generates the zine is a healthy incentive. We do need to work on our delivery dates (some of the last critiques went out later than we wanted), but we’re hoping that the addition of some slush readers will help lighten our loads. Speaking of which …

Shoveling slush

Across the last three submission windows, we’ve averaged 454 submissions per period! We’ve been blown away each time by the volume of writing we receive as well as the quality of it. It’s wildly exciting that so many writers want to share their work with us! It is, however, a lot of reading for three editors. It burns us out. Which is frankly unsustainable for how small our team is and how little downtime the publication gets. If you read my blog post from the end of our first submission window, you can see how fried our brains normally get by the end of each reading period. It’s not great.

So we got some help! Last submission period, our friends Julia, Elizabeth, and even social media manager Caroline stepped in as slush readers. We gave them a rundown of what to look for and how our process works, and they helped give first impressions on some submissions. They weren’t on in a full capacity this last time around and only read 10% of the submissions, but their help was felt! This submission period, they’ll have a bigger role as slush readers and will be joined by another friend, Maddie, to help spread the effort around even more. The hope is to keep submissions manageable for all of us here at Baubles so we can sustain the effort for the foreseeable future.

With this submission window, we’re hoping to get things under control. We know that writers are interested and that we can find an audience of passionate readers, but we need to make sure that we, the un-paid editorial staff, don’t have to work ourselves silly every six months in order to keep the publication alive. Because we love putting together this zine and getting to share fantastic, new writing with all of you. And on that note, I can’t wait to see what we get this submission period! I hope there’s a frog somewhere.

From my pond to yours,
-Joel

​~ Joel Troutman ~

Joel Troutman is not part-fish, but, some days, he wishes he was. Instead he’s a writer and editor from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania who makes a living by stocking grocery store shelves. In his precious free time, he has fun writing about worker revolts, buying more stickers than he uses, and drawing pixel art fish.

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