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Writing on Writer’s Bloopers


Submitting Short Stories to Publishers

Submitting work to various publishers/ journals/ magazines is a daily chore for a writer, especially for a beginner writer like me.

Today I read a post by an editor that helped secure one of my decisions: whether to use an added spam blocker or not, in fear of losing a publication opportunity , or even a rejection letter.

Turns out I was right to be afraid: spam blockers on my main contact email that I send to publishers would be detrimental to my writing career. The editor has this to say, and I’m in perfect agreement:

Theoretically, writers who submit their work for publication want to hear back from the publisher. So I was surprised, a while back, to come across a writer who had set up an email spam blocker that would only accept incoming mail from an approved list — our response to a query generated an auto-reply email asking us to click on a link and “fill out a short request form to be added to the list of approved senders”. The automated email noted: “I apologize for this one-time inconvenience”. Did we click on the link and fill out the short request form? No, we did not.

Read the rest of the post here to find out how sometimes writers make it impossible for publishers to get in touch with them.Lesson learned. Back to work.

Damyanti Biswas

Damyanti Biswas is the author of You Beneath Your Skin and numerous short stories that have been published in magazines and anthologies in the US, the UK, and Asia. She has been shortlisted for Best Small Fictions and Bath Novel Awards and is co-editor of the Forge Literary Magazine. Her literary crime thriller series, the Blue Mumbai, is represented by Lucienne Diver from The Knight Agency. Both The Blue Bar and The Blue Monsoon were published in 2023.

I appreciate comments, and I always visit back. If you're having trouble commenting, let me know via the contact form, or tweet me up @damyantig !

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2 Comments

  • Damyanti says:

    That's an idea….but I guess I'll stick to one official mail for now, or I'd be wasting time obsessively checking the 'submissions only' email for replies! 🙂

  • Interesting. Thanks for sharing.

    I guess you could always set up a gmail account that was just for submissions, but wasn't your main account. That way if it got spam, it wouldn't be that bad.

    strugglingwriter