Submitting Multiple Pieces: What to Consider

Submitting poetry and flash can be tricky. Most (but not all) journals will consider multiple pieces in a single submission. Some journals allow you to send two flash, others three. Some will read three poems (but no more than ten pages), or five one-page poems, or only poems with fewer than ten lines. Occasionally, there are no limits at all.

This can send writers (I’ll be honest, I’ve been there) into a tailspin. Should I put my strongest piece first to catch the editor’s attention? Or last, to leave a memorable impression? Should I choose a group with similar themes? Or a collection that shows the expansive breadth of my style and subject matter? Short to long? Long to short?

The truth is, I’ve seen each of these strategies work. The most important thing is to put in the time, write the best pieces you can (hint: revise, put them away for at least a week, revise again, repeat). Then, when you’ve polished them to the best of your abilities (optionally, with the help of an editor), send them out into the world in whatever configuration feels good to you.

That said, here at Submitit, there are a few technical (and artistic) things to consider with a multi-piece project.

A Quick Summary

Before doing a deep dive, let me give you a quick summary:

• Uploading stronger pieces first will likely improve your chances of getting published.

• Uploading shorter pieces first will open up more journal opportunities for your project as a whole.

• On average, you’ll probably have more success if your submission package has a cohesive flow, style, and theme (but it’s worth reading more about this below, if you have the time).

Logistical note about uploading pieces to our platform: At Submitit, the hard and fast rule is that your submission package will be built in the order that you upload your pieces when you sign up. The first piece you upload to your project will be the first piece of your submission. The last piece will be the last.

Now, for those who like to dig in, let’s get into it.

Flow and the Reader Experience

The first thing I usually like to think about when building my own submission project is how the pieces flow. How do I want the reader to enter my literary space, what kind of journey do I want to take them on, and how do I want to leave them in the end? In an ideal world, I don’t want my submission to feel like a handful of random pieces I happened to find lying around. I want it to feel like an experience—a tiny, well-crafted chapbook, if you will. In an ideal world. Sometimes, I have a few loose poems I want to send out, and I marry them willy-nilly and hit Send. To be perfectly truthful: both approaches have worked!

Strength and the Realities of Prioritization

As I mentioned at the start, there is no standard guideline for multi-piece submissions. If you send Submitit a project with five poems or three flash, we will prioritize journals that consider five poems or three flash, but we can’t guarantee that all the journals on your list will allow that exact number of pieces. If our algorithm matches your project closely with a promising journal that has a limit of only three poems or two flash, we’ll send them your first pieces—in the order you uploaded them to your project.

For that reason, you might decide to build your project with the strongest piece first. This means that even if a high-match journal considers only one piece at a time, your strongest will be sent. This approach also has the benefit of grabbing an editor’s attention right from the start.

Style and Theme

When we run a multi-piece project through Submitit’s algorithm (which now works with poetry as well prose), we analyze the pieces collectively. (Curious about the ins and outs of the algorithm? Read The Submitit Algorithm (a Brief Origin Story).)

Let me run through how this works (and how it might affect your submission strategy). Say you send us a pack of three poems or flash:

1. We (humans) carefully read each piece individually.

2. We (humans) manually analyze and score each piece individually.

3. We (humans) manually create a project score that reflects something of an average of all the pieces.

4. The project score is what we run through the algorithm to find the best journal matches for your submission as a whole.

Why does this matter? Say you upload two poems that show your (wildly unusual) range: (1) a two-page complex diagram poem that explores school shootings and (2) a cheerful sonnet about butterflies. Since your project score is an average of the two, your submission will not be highly matched with journals that have an exclusive preference for experimental and/or dark work. Nor will it be highly matched with journals that strongly prefer form poetry about nature. It will likely match with journals that either fall somewhere in the middle, or that (like you) are open to a wide variety of styles and themes (luckily, there are many of these).

If you prefer to place your experimental work in an experimental journal, consider building a submission project that highlights that particular strength. You could submit your formal poetry in a second project targeting journals that love form. If you feel strongly about showing your breadth, by all means, diversify.

It’s up to you, but if you’re on the fence, I recommend choosing pieces that could sit comfortably next to each other in a collection. This is often more about your voice and style than the subject matter. Choosing pieces that are similar in form will help the algorithm target journals that are particularly inclined toward that style. If you have any doubts or questions, please reach out. We’re always happy to hop on a consult call or answer a quick email.

The Length of It All

(Psst … Flash Writers! All you need to know in this section is that at Submitit, flash pieces must be under 1,000 words.)

(Psst … psst … Short-poem Writers! If your poems are always one page or less, you’re good. Move along. I’ll catch up with you in the next section.)

Okay, Longform Poets, it’s just us here. Conventional wisdom tells us that short pieces are easier to place than long pieces. Journals (especially those in print) have limited space, readers have limited attention spans. Some journals have a hard limit: no poems over one page. Even more journals have a preference: poems under one page, please.

But here’s the thing. I’ve scored hundreds of journals for our database this year, and there are plenty of long poems being published. Sure, way more are short—a quick look shows that 84 percent of the poems I scored are under one page. But 16 percent were longer. That’s not nothing. I happen to love writing cycle poems, and it took a lot of patience, but I recently placed an eight-page cycle about Rachel Carson with Rustica (hooray!). It can be done.

If you write poems longer than one page and use Submitit to help find a good home for your work, here’s what you should know:

If you upload your long poem first, the algorithm will prioritize journals that are a good match for that poem. (Let’s be honest, if you have an eight-page poem cycle, this is not going to be a massively long list.) If a promising high-match journal (let’s call it Great Poetry) considers long poems but will only allow a max total of ten pages (a common poetry guideline), Submitit will definitely send them your first (long) poem—plus, the next one or two poems in your project, up to their guideline of ten total pages.

If, in a four-poem project, you upload your longest poem last, Great Poetry may very well still appear on your high-match journals list, but other journals might show with even higher-percentage matches because the algorithm is now prioritizing your (shorter) first three poems. In other words, you’ve opened up more possibilities for your project overall. The trade-off is that a lengthy last poem (my eight-page cycle) won’t make it into every submission (Great Poetry, for example, which has a ten-page max). But it will be sent to Amazing Poetry, which has no page limits—and maybe Great Poetry will fall in love with your sonnet instead. Win-win!

Bottom line, if you’re a longform poet, you already know this is not the easiest path to publication. You also probably have a lot of patience and care more about the process than about potential rejection. Yes, it’s harder to publish long poems, but if external validation was our only measure of success, we’d pick another craft. We’re resilient, and we’re in this for the long game!

What else is there to worry about?

Sure, there are plenty of other complexities to multi-piece submissions. But with Submitit, these are not your problem. We’ll carefully submit your project according to each journal’s unique guidelines (some want all pieces in the same document, some want separate documents, .pdf, .docx, pasted text, attachments, online forms, etc., etc., etc.), and we’ll adjust cover letters and title lists accordingly, depending on the number of pieces. You don’t have to worry about any of this. Leave the complexities to us and go start working on your next piece! We can’t wait to read it!

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