NEW! Understand our backlog and watch our progress with the detailed Statistics page.
Oldest
Median Age
Longest response time, past 120 days
Longest response time overall
Median response time, past 120 days
Median response time overall
Longest response time, past 120 days
Longest response time overall
Median response time, past 120 days
Median response time overall
When we started Spark, we never expected the format or the idea of personal feedback to be so popular. Your enthusiasm is both exciting and overwhelming: We now receive thousands of submissions every year. We are not changing our commitment to provide personal feedback on every submission, but we are having to face the reality of a backlog of four to six months in some cases, even when we’re sending out 10 to 20 responses every day.
Please keep in mind that our entire staff, from editor to first readers and everyone in between, is made up of writers volunteering their time. We know what it’s like to wait and wait for a response, only to be rejected after several weeks. The feedback that comes with our responses is intended to give you the information to decide whether we totally missed the mark, or we’re the wrong target audience, or we’ve actually identified an opportunity for you to revise and make your work stronger.
We’re making every effort to respond to each query and to speed up our response time in general—while also improving the quality and diplomacy of our feedback. Please bear with us as we react and adjust to your amazing support for our simple idea that writers appreciate personal responses and readers appreciate great writing. And don’t be afraid to query after 90 days. We may not have a decision, but we’ll at least reply to your query.
Thanks for your patience,
—Brian Lewis, Editor
Our Submission Manager, powered by Submittable , makes it very easy for us (and for you!) to check the status of your submission. Simply browse to http://SparkAnthology.submittable.com/user to log in and view and manage your submissions to Spark: A Creative Anthology.
If the status is Received, we have received your submission but have not yet read it. It is not lost, but it may be behind a large number of other manuscripts in our queue.
If the status is In Progress, your submission has been opened and cover letter reviewed. We may have also assigned it to a group of readers, but we have not yet made a final decision. (We may not have even read it yet.)
If the status is Declined or Accepted, we have made a decision and responded to you. If you did not receive our response email, you can click on the title of your submission to read the text of our response and view the full history of our interaction with you.
If the status is Withdrawn, it usually means you withdrew your work from consideration. The only exception is in the case of duplicate submissions; this occasionally happens, and we simply mark one of the two as Withdrawn and continue to consider the submitted work.
When the status has been “In Progress” for more than the average number of days shown on our Statistics page, you may optionally inquire about your submission’s status by sending your query to query@sparkanthology.org. We’d be happy to let you know whether it’s been passed on to the editor or is still assigned to readers.
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Spark: A Creative Anthology 