River River Books Summer 2022 Reading Period Report

Well, y’all, it’s a good thing we love to read.  

River River Books’ first-ever open submissions period has just closed after being open during June and July, and we have a whopping 254 manuscripts to consider as we choose our first two titles. (We received 262 submissions, but eight have already been withdrawn, mostly because some other presses snapped up the books before we got to them. A hearty congratulations to those poets! We love that for you.)

We think that total is pretty darn okay for a brand-new press yet to publish its first book. We made the choice not to spend any money directly on advertising — a classified at NewPages, for instance, or in Poets & Writers. Instead, to save dollars, we relied on our own social media circles, our presence on DuoSuma, and word of mouth. It’s likely there’s a tradeoff in that choice that reduced our visibility outside of our own communities and connections, and it might well be that it resulted in a less diverse pool of poets and manuscripts to consider. It’s something we’ll think about as we read, something we will revisit as we move forward and our reach hopefully grows. But in these early days, with limited funds, limiting expense was a necessity.

We accepted submissions with a pay-what-you-can tip-jar option, and our submitters were generous. Approximately 65 percent of submitters left a tip, with a total raised just over $2,000. That money will go toward the cost of our initial print runs for our first two titles; based on estimates we’ve run with the printer Bookmobile, we expect print costs alone for the two titles to run around $3,000. For a brand-new press, this tip-jar approach has been an absolutely essential method of fundraising to help us get started; we are incredibly grateful to those of you who gave. And of course, whether a writer tipped will have no bearing at all on our reading and selection process.

A few notes:

• About 10 percent of the manuscripts came in on the first day of the reading period, and about 10 percent came in on the last days. Between, it was a pretty steady stream, with bumps here and there when one of us or someone else boosted the press on Twitter.

• From our side, DuoSuma seems to be an efficient way to receive submissions. We had a free trial month in June, and then in July tip-jar submissions cost us 18 cents each, which feels reasonable (plus we paid transaction fees at Stripe, which links to Duosuma).

• Sort of randomly when we were setting up the submissions portal and testing the interface options, we included a question of each submitter: What’s your favorite river? We are so glad we left that in. It’s delightful to read those answers as the manuscripts came in. Lots of y’all love the Ohio, for sure. We’ve pledged to our submitters and to ourselves to finalize our decisions by the end of October, which means we have a boatload of reading ahead in the next few months. What joy to see all these poems, and what an honor to be trusted with these collections. We are so, so excited to discover the two books we will publish in 2023!