Go Forth (Vol. 17)

Submittable, next to email and international postal service carrier providers, is probably the largest literary submissions platform in existence in current humanity. I think that a lot, if not, at this point, most writers who have submitted their work to journals and contests have at some point interacted with this company, but I don’t know if anyone stopped to ask, What is this thing I am sending my work to? I decided I’m asking. Michael’s cool. He used to edit a DIY/Punk ‘Zine called FAT when he lived in Budapest. Now he does this. I figured if anyone wants to start a publishing related company, they could read about these guys.

–Nicolle Elizabeth

NICOLLE ELIZABETH: Hi Michael. Thanks so much for talking to us about Submittable. How did Submittable start as a concept and get rolling as a company?

MICHAEL FITZGERALD: Bruce and I were friends and thought it might be fun to start a company together. We didn’t know what we wanted the company to be. Neither of us had business experience. (We once made a documentary about alpinists who exclusively scale mountains with letters on them.)

At lunch one day, we made a list of things that sucked. I had just sent out a story the night before to five or so places. The process and tools people were using were sort of scattered and amateur. So, in the list, I added “Sending Out Work.” Bruce asked about it. I said it was a nightmare finding appropriate journals, sending them work on all these different systems and then tracking the submissions. He said, “It’s a Submishmash.” We started writing code that night.  A few months later we tricked our other friend, John Brownell, into joining us.  A year later, we had a few hundred clients.

But we kept running into problems with large universities and businesses. The IT people and administrators were suspect of something called Submishmash. It was always a struggle to get them to write a check, and our bills were piling up. So we renamed it to Submittable. It’s a little soul-crushing, but our revenue instantly doubled. We went almost three years before making a living of any kind. We originally thought it would take two or three weeks.  

NE: Submittable is able to cater to various aspects of publishing, from literary contests to publications. How many active submissions are there on any given day?

MF: Around 6000-7000 files are sent via the platform every day. At any given time four hundred people are logged in reading work or reviewing music or films (The system works with hi-definition video and audio). When I last checked, we were hosting well north of...