A New Way to Submit Your Work

Salvation South has just opened its new submissions system. Here are the details.

By Chuck Reece

Aug 31, 2024

Southern storytellers of every sort—journalists, fiction writers, essayists, poets, photographers, and filmmakers—have a new way to submit their work to Salvation South.

If you hit the “Submit” link in our homepage menu over the last month or so, you encountered a message telling you we were moving to a new submissions system. Since we began, we’ve been on the Submittable platform, which is one most writers who submit their work to publications are quite familiar with. But Submittable isn’t what it used to be.

Unlike a decade ago, Submittable today caters mostly to grant-making institutions, and its tools are built especially for universities, foundations, and research institutions. The submissions they get are grant applications, not stories or poems or pitches from journalists. In the process, sadly, Submittable has priced publications like ours out of the neighborhood.

Submittable, at the level we could afford, made us shoehorn every kind of submission through a single submission form, which was limited to only six questions for submitters. We wanted a system that would allow us to build separate submission forms and rules for all our varied contributors, because poets don’t operate like journalists don’t operate like photographers, etc. So, a few months ago, we decided to search for a new platform that would give us more flexibility that we could ever afford through Submittable.

We’ve found it in a platform called Duosuma. On our new Submissions page, you will always find calls for submissions in the following categories:

Essays
Fiction
Journalism
Photography
Poetry
Video/film: short docs
Video/film: short narratives

The new system also allows us to create time-limited calls for special projects, such as essays or poems tailor-made for special times of the year, such as holidays or the turn of a season. As we approach this year’s holiday season, be on the lookout for such calls.

Because we want to make the ability to tell a story through Salvation South accessible to as many creators as possible, we have opted—unlike other small publications and platforms—not to charge fees for each submission. That said, within each of our submissions calls, you will see an old-fashioned but high-tech “Tip Jar.” If you want to throw in a buck or a few, we’d appreciate it.

—“Meet Me There”: new fiction from bestselling Louisiana author M.O. Walsh
—“Road Trip to Texas”: a new poem by Terry Kirby Erickson
—“The Wind Is Lovely on August 31st”: a timely poem by Gary Grossman

Just like on Submittable, you’ll need to create an account to submit your writing or your visual work or your story ideas, but doing so is easy and free.

Because this new system will be easier for us to manage, I and our small team of volunteer readers hope to be able to reply to all submissions within ninety days. If you have questions or ideas on how we might improve this new system, just email us.

Check out our new system here.

Chuck Reece

Website

Chuck Reece is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Salvation South, the weekly web magazine you're reading right now. He was the founding editor of The Bitter Southerner. He grew up in the north Georgia mountains in a little town called Ellijay.