Submissions post mortem: Fall 2025

By Joel Troutman
January 2, 2026

It’s been six months since last the flood of submissions submerged our publication, and now it surges again… Our submissions have re-opened! At the time of writing this (a day late – whoops!), we’ve already received 81 submissions. That’s crazy for the first 36 hours! Our open calls are equally the most exciting and daunting parts of our schedule. They give us an idea of how the next two issues of Baubles are going to take shape, but they also require a lot of work to fairly consider if each submission would make a good fit. On our own end, we’ve been changing our guidelines and operations each submission period to make the process easier on us and therefore more stable for all the authors sending us their work. Things aren’t changing too much this time around, but we want to make sure everyone knows how they’re changing and why. 

But before that, we do have one big change to note: our dearest Shane has stepped back from his role as editor for the time being. He did some help reading during our last submission period, but he’s no longer operating as an editor and won’t be for the immediate future while he’s on hiatus. There is a mushroom-shaped hole in our shared Baubles folder, though his cryptid spirit still hovers over us, murmuring about Tom Bombadil and One Piece.

And now, let’s take a look at last summer’s submissions.

Last time on BFB submissions...

Our summer 2025 submission period was our biggest one yet! We received 586 submissions – 100 submissions more than our previous record. Out of all those submissions, 82 of them were poetry, which is a nice increase from the 55 poetry submissions we received in the period before. The poetry numbers continue to trend upwards, and we’re here for it! From those 82 submissions, we ended up publishing 6 poems that felt like natural fits. 

Besides the poetry, there were 504 fiction submissions to wade through. Last time, I gave some insight on the average length of our stories, and writers seemed to have taken that info to heart, because the median wordcount this time was 3700 words – not too far from our publishing average of 4036 words per story. We seemed to get a lot more environmentally-themed stories than we even had before (not a bad thing), and a lot of stories landed on a note of tempered hopefulness, which is pretty much exactly what we’re looking for. Generally, but especially from those we recognize from past open calls, it feels like writers are really beginning to hone-in on what we like. That’s incredibly encouraging! It’s nice to think writers are taking our feedback to heart, reading what we publish, and putting the effort in to actually tailor their submissions to us. All of that effort is certainly making our final decisions more difficult to make! If we had the budget, these issues would be twice the length. But alas, we are flush with good stories and not cash. In the end, we decided to publish 19 great pieces of fiction from this batch of 504. 

Last time around, we introduced more slush readers to our team. The added help was very much appreciated! Shout outs to Julia, Maddie, Elizabeth, and Sarah! Our team of slush readers made first impressions on nearly half of our submissions this last period, which was a huge step up. If we didn’t have their help, we would certainly have been drowning in stories. 

~the fruits of our labor~ love how the cover came together! lucas continues to kill it (cover art by lucas kurz)

Room to grow

The increase in submissions and success of our slush readers are both big wins in our book, but we still have a lot we want to improve from this period. Firstly, we gave all of our writers a hard date that they’d receive a final response by, and for many, we missed that date. For some, we missed it by a lot. Even though we had a slush team, all emails still came directly from Elyse and myself. All 586 of them. Suffice to say, we struggled to send all of them out in an acceptable time frame, and we’re not happy about it. Apologies to everyone left waiting.

Even less happy are we about the feedbacks. Last period, we offered optional paid feedback for writers. We got 22 feedback requests but weren’t able to complete all of them. Even amongst those we did complete, we didn’t return them to authors until almost two months after we’d promised. These feedbacks were a lot to juggle while also sending 586 emails and compiling the final stories for BFB7 & BFB8. Clearly, most of them went splat on the floor. All of the authors whose feedback requests weren’t completed received a full refund. We’re not thrilled with how those went.

On the whole, this last submission period wore us the hell out. We’re just now beginning to feel like human beings again, and the submission cycle is only restarting. We don’t want to quit publishing Baubles any time soon, so we spent some time talking about how to adjust, because it’s clear we need to in order to keep from getting so burnt out again on what’s supposed to be a fun passion project. So we came up with some ideas.

This week on BFB submissions...

Successes and failures in mind, we’ve made some small changes for this submission period. First, we’ve shelled out and gotten ourselves a second email address specifically for submissions. That’s right! We’re a big enough operation to warrant separate inboxes. So fancy. The idea is two-fold: we can now keep our main email address tidy by redirecting submission queries and mailing list sign-ups to our submissions email and our slush readers can help send out responses so Elyse and I don’t have to draft nearly 600 emails by ourselves again. This second part is our main reason for opening the second address. All of those emails drain our souls. Neither of us want to come home from work only to spend our entire evenings sending emails. If we split the work better, everyone should still be able to have some free time. Hopefully. 

Second, we’ve adjusted our expected response time. Last time, we gave ourselves six weeks from the end of submissions to read everything and compile a table of contents for BFB7 & BFB8. We missed that goal by a few weeks. So this time, we’re giving ourselves an extra week for wiggle room, and aiming to respond to all submissions by March 18th. With help on the emails, we hope this date will be more realistic than the last one we gave ourselves.

Third, we’ve simplified our paid feedback requests. We had a long discussion on whether or not we’d even offer them this time around but ultimately decided on giving it one more go – the income is nice to have, especially during the winter submission period when we’re not selling at markets. We’re only offering annotated manuscripts this time but at a higher cost of $12. We realized that there wasn’t all that much of a difference in the two forms of feedback we were originally offering, despite their price discrepancy. We want to give our writers helpful feedback, so we end up spending at least an hour pouring over these submissions as we detail our thoughts. On our side, we split the responsibilities: Elyse did in-line comments while I gave written feedback. When someone ordered both comments and written feedback, we found that we’d often end up repeating each other, and this whole system just proved too inefficient, forcing both of us to spend so much time on one submission. So we’re trying to simplify it so it's easier to deliver useful feedback on time. We’re hoping this system works out. If it doesn’t, we’ll likely scrap feedbacks altogether.

And those are our changes! Almost nothing is going to be different for our writers, but the way we operate is adjusting. We’re still trying to strike a balance for submissions that’s sustainable for us long-term. We feel so lucky to do Baubles! Even though this is a whole shit load of work for us to do on top of our full time jobs, we get so excited reading everything our writers share with us and get giddy introducing these stories we adore to the world. We want to keep publishing for as long as we can, so long as these submissions don’t put us into early graves first.

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 anarchist fishermen, covering his desk in stickers, and drawing northern lapwings.

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