Submitttable

6/17/2013    Wayfarers – Ransom

6/17/2013    Petrichor Review – Artwork

6/17/2013    Composite – Visual Arts Proposals: Issue No 13 Corporeal

6/18/2013    Atlas and Alice – Poetry, Fiction, Creative Fiction, Visual Arts

6/18/2013    Latin Lover – Tips & Guidelines

6/19/2013    Quiet Lightning – Tues Jul 9 w/The Rumpus!

6/20/2013    Wonder Fair – Wonder Fair Print Invitational

6/20/2013    Barrelhouse – Online Issue: Beach Reads

6/20/2013    Montpelier Alive – July 3rd Parade

6/20/2013    RiverLit – Writte,  Art & Comic Submissions

6/21/2013    Nemeth Art Center – Midwest Multiples

6/22/2013    UAW-LUPA Contests – Print, Website, Social Media Contests

6/23/2013    Entangled Cover Artists – IMPULSE (Embrace)

6/23/2013    Squalorly – Flash Fiction Contest

6/24/2013    33 Officina Creativa - Artist Residency Fall 2013

6/24/2013    Pioneer Works – Seminar – a Clifford Owens Project

6/25/2013    Cobalt – The 2013 Jim Palmer Baseball Writing Prize

6/25/2013    Pollinate Energy – Young Professionals Program (August 2013)

6/26/2013    Philadelphia Center for Architecture - Philly Green Exhibition (Greenbuild)

6/28/2013    Hugo House – Made at Hugo House 2013-2014

6/29/2013    VAO Publishing – La Noria August 2013

6/30/2013    The Burnside Review – Poetry Chapbooks

6/30/2013    Augury Books – Full-Length Short Story, Poetry Collections

6/30/2013    Bartleby Snopes – Photographs and artwork for 10th Issue

6/30/2013    Bauhan Publishing – May Sarton NH Poetry Prize

6/30/2013    Big Fiction Magazine – Novella, Novelette

6/30/2013    Black Lawrence Press – Multiple categories

6/30/2013    Bone Bouquet – Experimental Prose Contest

6/30/2013    Books of the Dead Press – Open for Submissions: Flash Fiction

6/30/2013    Buttontapper Press – Montreal, New York, San Diego Haiku

6/30/2013    Cambridge Writers’ Workshop –  Summer Writing & Yoga Retreat France 7/24- 8/7

6/30/2013    Center for Effective Global Action – Berkeley-IDB Impact Evaluation Collaborative

6/30/2013    Constellations - Poetry, Fiction, Art, Photography

6/30/2013    Dark House Press – Novels and Short Story Collections

6/30/2013    Emergence Magazine – Fiction/Non-Fiction, Poetry, Art

6/30/2013    Environment Conservation Journal – ECJ Submit Journal

6/30/2013    Ginger Piglet – All Things Living

6/30/2013    Great Lakes Commonwealth of Letters – Passages North Inaugural Fiction Contest

6/30/2013    Hyacinth Girl Press – Make it So Again

6/30/2013    Limping Devil Press – Submissions Guidelines

6/30/2013    Made in the Lower East Side (miLES) – miLES Basic, Co-working Member

6/30/2013    Magma Poetry – Magma 57 submissions

6/30/2013    MIEL and 111O – MIEL | 2013 Reading Period

6/30/2013    Missoula Cultural Council – First Night Missoula 2014

6/30/2013    Pagan Writers Press - Taboo II (Paid Anthology)

6/30/2013    Poor Claudia – Chapbook

6/30/2013    Publishing Genius – Chris Toll Memorial Writing Prize

6/30/2013    Red Dragonfly Press - David Martinson Meadowhawk , Emergence Chapbook Series

6/30/2013    Reverse Culture Shock Anthology – Reverse Culture Shock Anthology

6/30/2013    Science Fiction + Fantasy Short Film Festival – Film Submission – Early Deadline

6/30/2013    Seizure - ‘Sport’ issue

6/30/2013    Sink Review – Sink Review is open for submissions

6/30/2013    Split This Rock – 2014 Festival Panel Proposals

6/30/2013    Stealth Fiction – Daylight Dims Anthology Vol. 1

6/30/2013    Tethered by Letters – Short Story, Flash Fiction Contests

6/30/2013    Anthology of Chicago – Pilsen, Logan Square

6/30/2013    The Digital Gryphon LLC – 4 Dozen Anthologies

6/30/2013    The Found Poetry Review – Found Poetry Review – Volume 5

6/30/2013    The Lit Pub – Submit Your Prose Manuscript Here!

6/30/2013    The Offending Adam – New Writing

6/30/2013    Tokyo International Photography Festival – Competition

6/30/2013    What Books Press – Poetry

6/30/2013    Wisdom Crieth Without - Poetry, Short Fiction/Serial: September/October Issue

6/30/2013    Women Who Write – Women Who Write 2013 International Poetry Contest

6/30/2013    Writing Ventures – Single Entry, SPECIAL Fifteen Entries (Usual Price: USD 150/-)

7/1/2013    About Place Journal – EARTH, SPIRIT, SOCIETY INSPIRED BY PATRICIA MONAGHAN

7/1/2013    Ayris – Special Theme: Craigslist

7/1/2013    Chautauqua – Preorder the 2013 Issue: Journeys and Pilgrimages

7/1/2013    December – Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry Submission

7/1/2013    Fictionvale – Episode One: Enter Fictionvale

7/1/2013    Hugo House – Scribes Summer Camp 2013 Intern Application

7/1/2013    Sibling Rivalry Press - Adrienne: A Poetry Journal of Queer Women

7/1/2013    So Say We All – The Far East Project

7/1/2013    Sugared Water – Poetry, Creative Nonfiction, Fiction, Art, Comics & Sequential Art

7/1/2013    Two Words For – Fiction, Non-fiction / Creative Essay, Poetry, Art

7/1/2013    Wharton Esherick Museum – WEM 2013 Woodworkers’ Competition: Birdhouses

Isaiah Berlin: Not a Fool

In his essay “Historical Inevitability,” the political philosopher Isaiah Berlin dissects the widespread human tendency to assume that history is moving in some specific direction, or according to some pattern, that we can discover. Thinkers across parties and cultural divisions and eras–theologians no less than Marxists, Enlightenment philosophers as well as fascists–have attempted to justify or understand present behaviors in the light of various predictions about the future whose truths seem self-evident to them and their followers. What Berlin so persuasively points out is that even the most prodigious minds are capable of making utterly unwarranted assumptions of this kind. People offer brilliant arguments, often based on empirical observation and data, about how we should act in the present, and yet each assertion and piece of evidence is arranged in relation to some resoundingly unscientific conjecture about the future. We all know we can’t predict the future, and yet we fall for these arguments over and over.

Right now, I think, many of us are invested in a number of assumptions driven by the bewildering rate of technological change. We all have plenty of empirical evidence. We see 35 mm cameras give way to digital, dial-up internet to broadband, CDs to MP3s, and then we see mobile phones come in and replace all three of these technologies and then some, changing our entire approach to each of the individual media and enabling behaviors we never could have foreseen. But then as we try to understand what all of this means for the future, we unconsciously edit out that part about how we never could have foreseen the changes brought about by mobile computing. We make projections about the next leap forward based on the last leap forward, though the nature of the leap was utterly unknowable. The more dramatic the leap, the more dramatic our predictions are bound to be. We use laws and patterns that can be reasonably and rightly applied to technological progress itself–Moore’s law, for instance–to make predictions about how technology will interact with humanity.

This is foolish. It is foolish not because the people making the predictions–Ray Kurzweil or Jaron Lanier or Philip Roth or whoever–are foolish. Indeed they are not; to make predictions that anyone listens to, you must generally have some serious intellectual firepower at your disposal. It is foolish because it reduces humans to abstract data points, receivers of input who essentially march along in lockstep with technological change. In the interaction of technology and humanity, there will always be surprises. Humans will continue to bring their psychological needs, their sociological baggage, and their unconsidered instincts into the interaction; and no matter how wired we might be these days, a lot still goes on away from screens. I know this sounds obvious: “You can’t predict the future.” But that’s not my point. My point is that we tend to forget this except when we are in the grip of some chaotic moment, when it becomes undeniable.

So what does this have to do with Submittable? Good question. We are in a privileged position, I think, as a tech company that serves makers of apparently old-fashioned products: books, magazines, and other old-school cultural artifacts. On the one hand we are in contact with programmers and entrepreneurs who believe books are the equivalent of horse-drawn carriages. In their view, the singularity is not coming, it’s already here. But on the other hand we work with people who are making hand-stitched letterpress volumes of poetry, and it’s very clear to us that however archaic this activity may seem, it is not the equivalent of the horse-drawn carriage for our time. As many of you know, it is precisely technology that has enabled many of the makers of hand-stitched letterpress volumes to enter the marketplace at all. Sure, the marketplace may not be what it once was, and it’s definitely hard to make money in it right now, but it’s far from certain that what we’re witnessing is an overall shrinkage of literature or its audience. It is inarguable that the barriers to becoming a publisher have fallen–book bloggers began pointing this out 10 years ago–and we like to think we’re doing our part to empower anyone who wants to charge into the breach. This is what unpredictable humanity looks like. Technology aids the unpredictable elements and the predictable ones alike.

What Isaiah Berlin gets around to, in “Historical Inevitability,” is a fairly simple reminder that we cannot forget the effect of human personalities on history. So far, no regime or philosophical system or thinker who claimed to see the future has done so successfully, and if Berlin is to be believed, this is largely because they have failed to account for the basic uncertainty that humans introduce into whatever they do. Kingdoms and churches fall, but humans emerge from the rubble each time, more or less the same as they always were. Literature, along with the creative arts more broadly, might be thought of as an ever-shifting, constantly growing repository of human personality–a repository of what is irreducibly human in us. And though I have no idea what will happen once everyone has Google Glasses and driverless cars and we’ve reengineered the climate, or once we pass peak oil and all become subsistence farmers and fight wars over water, I would put my money on literature–on human personalities–emerging on the other side of these developments.

5/24/2013    Whidbey Writers Workshop - Emerging Writers Getaway Contest

5/31/2013    American Poetry Review  - Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize

5/31/2013    Baltimore Review – Poems, Short Stories, Creative Nonfiction

5/31/2013    Black Lawrence Press – The Black River Chapbook Competition

5/31/2013    Booth: A Journal – 2013 Story Prize

5/31/2013    Creative Nonfiction – The Human Face of Sustainability

5/31/2013    Horse Less Press – Full Length Manuscripts Open Reading Period

5/31/2013    Lawndale Art Center - Artist Studio Program

5/31/2013    Main Line Writers Group -Main Line Anthology – Fiction/Memoir/Nonfiction/Poetry

5/31/2013    Oberlin College Press – 2013 FIELD Poetry Prize

5/31/2013    Rattapallax – Furniture in Motion

5/31/2013    Redivider – 2013 Beacon Street Prize

5/31/2013    The Backwaters Press – The Backwaters Prize

5/31/2013    The Atlas Review – Express Response to Submissions!

5/31/2013    University of Georgia Press – Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction

5/31/2013    Writing Tomorrow Magazine – WT Short Story Award

6/1/2013      Bloom – 2013 Chapbook

6/1/2013    Boulevard – Poetry Contest for Emerging Poets

6/1/2013    Cambridge Writers’ Workshop – Summer Writing & Yoga Retreat in France

6/1/2013    Contests Sponsored by Spark: A Creative Anthology

6/1/2013    Fairhaven Press – Fiction/ NonFiction/Short Stories

6/1/2013    Gazing Grain Press – Chapbook contest with FFTB

6/1/2013    Hunger Mountain: the VCFA Journal of the Arts – Mentors and Tormentors

6/1/2013    Organic Weapon Arts – David Blair Memorial Prize

6/1/2013    Homebound Publications Poetry Prize

6/1/2013    Pressgang - Pressgang Prize | Contest

6/1/2013    River Styx – 2013 International Poetry Contest

6/1/2013    Sonora Review - 2013 Essay Contest

6/1/2013    Switchback Books – 2013 Gatewood Prize

6/1/2013    TIFERET: A Journal of Spiritual Literature – Contest

6/3/2013    Lynx House Press – Blue Lynx Prize for Poetry

6/7/2013    Drunk Monkeys – Summer 2013 Short Fiction Contest

6/10/2013   Wayfarers – Ransom

6/15/2013    Cambridge Writers’ Workshop – Writing & Yoga Retreat in France July 24- August 7

5/7/2013    Sundress Publications – 2013 Sundress Publications Chapbook Competition

5/7/2013    CUE Art Foundation – 2013 Call for Curatorial Proposals

5/7/2013    The Connective – article/art/misc

5/10/2013    Ruminate Magazine – Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize

5/10/2013    Entangled Cover Artists – Indulgence – Grace Under Fire

5/10/2013    MadHat (Mad Hatters’ Review) - MadHat Annual

5/10/2013    Oklahoma Visual Arts Coalition – 24 Works on Paper Artist Entry Form

5/11/2013    Ox-Bow – 2013 Fall Artist Residency

5/10/2013    Ghost Proposal – Poetry/Creative Nonfiction Submissions

5/12/2013    Hemingway’s Playpen – Fiction/ Nonfiction/ Poetry/ Visual Art

5/12/2013    NPR Three Minute Fiction – Three-Minute Fiction Contest Round 11

5/13/2013    Alembic Literary Magazine – Fiction/ Non Fiction/ Script/ Poetry/ Artwork/ Photography

5/13/2013    Gertrude Press – Poetry/ Fiction  Chapbook Competition

5/13/2013    Yeah Write! – Gothic Fiction/ Magical Realism Fiction

5/14/2013    Linden Avenue – Issue Thirteen

5/14/2013    Ping-Pong Magazine - The Henry Miller Memorial Library Prize in Poetry

5/15/2013    200 Yards – 200 Yards @ Calumet Photo

5/15/2013    Apokrupha – Dark Bits

5/15/2013    Carve Magazine – 2013 Raymond Carver Short Story Contest

5/15/2013    El Mundo Zurdo 2013 - BORDERS

5/15/2013    Engine Books - Novel Prize Entry

5/15/2013    Kill Screen - Editorial Interns! Deadline

5/15/2013    Lost Horse Press – The Idaho Prize for Poetry

5/15/2013    Meat for Tea: The Valley Review – Short Fiction/ Poetry/ Art/ Essays

5/15/2013    Paper Darts - Paper Darts Short Fiction Award

5/15/2013    Pea River Journal – Remaking Moby project: media festival and special issue

5/15/2013    QWF-QAHN – StoryNet2 Mentorship Program for Non-fiction Writers from Quebec

5/15/2013    Slapering Hol Press – The 2013 Slapering Hol Press Chapbook Competition

5/15/2013    Slash Pine Press – Fall Chapbook Submission

5/15/2013    The Atlas Review – Poetry/ Visual Art / Fiction / NonFiction / Cover Art  Submissions

5/15/2013    Wonder – The 2013 Wonder Book Prize

A few weeks ago, the Christian Science Monitor published a cover story on the resurgence of independent bookstores. Though the news isn’t all good–of the sales growth discussed in the piece, a noteworthy amount came from products like wine and summer camps for kids, rather than from books–one comes away from the story feeling that the hemorrhaging has stopped. Indies seem to have enjoyed sustainable levels of profit in 2012, with some reporting their best year on record. E-book sales have taken a bite out of print but not a fatal one, and many analysts are suggesting that most of the people who are likely to switch to e-readers have already done so. Meanwhile, booksellers have benefited greatly from the buy-local movement and become one of the most reliable quality-of-life indicators you’ll find. A town without an independent bookstore is a town that is likely to have other problems.

Less than two weeks after the Monitor piece came out, though, the Death Star struck back: Amazon bought Goodreads. The response from Goodreads users on social media has been disproportionately negative, and Authors’ Guild President Scott Turow called the deal “a textbook example of how modern Internet monopolies can be built.” Rob Spillman of Tin House probably speaks for many small publishers and authors in this piece for Salon, in which he bemoans his naivety, his willingness to believe that there could exist a social-media site built around disinterested enthusiasm for books rather than commerce. It is a measure of how well Amazon plays the game that an acquisition no one saw coming suddenly looks like a no-brainer. If the company did nothing else, it bought a lot of valuable data and eliminated a potential competitor. But I would bet that they did something else, too.

One thing it looks like they may have done is take yet another step toward eliminating independent bookstores. I haven’t seen any statistics on overlap between Goodreads users and independent bookstore customers, but it stands to reason that the overlap is substantial. Both Goodreads and indies cater to the most knowledgeable subset of book buyers, and those most disappointed with the merger seem to be owners and patrons of small bookstores.

I wonder, though. I don’t see any of those trends in the Monitor piece being materially altered by the Goodreads deal. I have a hard time imagining the customer of an independent bookstore who could be lured to Amazon by social media at this late date in internet history. Those of us who don’t close our Goodreads accounts may be helping Amazon refine its business by donating our data, and I certainly understand why that alone would be reason enough to quit the site. But I’m not sure we’d be helping them sell books at the expense of indies.

What seems more likely is that Goodreads will help Amazon get better at selling books to the people who already buy exclusively from Amazon. Though we tend to think of economic competition as a strict zero-sum game, it is not always so. It seems possible that with this acquisition, Amazon is not taking yet another piece of the same pie but making the overall pie bigger.