If you’ve been reading our publications for a while, it might have occurred to you that you’ve got something haunting your Google Docs and itching to be published. But how do you do that? What happens after you send your piece or poem into the void? Well, fear not—here’s a step-by-step list of how to submit and what happens after.
- Submitting
You’ve already done the hardest part—going through the whole writing and editing process. Now it’s time to submit. At Inscape, we use Submittable. You can find the link on the home page of our website—it’s the big button that says “submit.” Easy peasy! You can submit to whatever contest we have going on at the time or make a general submission to be considered for our publication. Some submissions might require a small fee. Our website has more information about formatting and copyright (see the link below!), but for the sake of this article, we’re going to continue to walk you through where your piece goes next.
- Review
First, your piece goes through multiple stages of review. Our lead genre editors take a look at all of them to screen for appropriateness. Because we are a BYU publication, we do not accept anything explicit, but we will let the occasional cuss slide.
Then, pieces are read and discussed to bits in genre group meetings with a group of about ten or so readers. Then, we take a vote on whether to send it up to the editorial table, if it needs a bit more work, or if it isn’t a good fit for our journal.
At Inscape, we’re grateful for any artists willing to share their work with us and want our journal to be the best that it can be, so these discussions can get quite lively! Any pieces that aren’t chosen will receive a rejection letter, but some of these letters will be personalized so you can get your piece ready to submit next time. Assuming it does move on, let’s hop on over to the editorial table.
- Editorial Table and Beyond
Pieces that move on get read by all genre editors, the editor in chief, and their assistants. If the majority of them love it, it gets officially accepted! From here, the accepted pieces get sent to the copyediting team, where the pieces will get cleaned up, with their commas put in the right places and whatnot. This is also where they get sent to the web design team, where they’ll be formatted for our website. There’s nothing more you need to do; we’ll let the computer-y people handle this part.
- Ta-da!
Congrats! You’re published! If you’re accepted to our student selections, you can expect to see your published piece soon—we publish those pieces weekly. If you’ve submitted to one of our monthly contests, you can expect to see your shiny, published piece about a week after the contest period ends, and as our winner, you’ll get your cash prize about a month later.
All of our general submissions that get accepted will be published in the end-of-semester issue. Beginning in Winter 2027, we will be paying our contributors. You can read more about the nuts and bolts here. See, Dad? Told ya that English degree would pay off! All that’s left for you to do is to go and get yourself some celebratory ice cream!
by Elizabeth Rampton, Inscape Staff
Header image by Sabine Fischer, pexels.com
