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Essay · Publishing

I Used to Send Stories and Poetry in Envelopes for Your Consideration

From the SASE to online portals and the impersonal void of a digital submission. A working writer on what we lost when literary submissions moved online and what ‘published’ means in a world where everyone has a CTA button that once clicked, puts their work into the world instantly, ready for the now generation to devour, if SEO optimised for visibility.

David MoranMay 2026Essays & Culture

In 2000 I had established a daily writing routine. Take sounds and actions and conversations from the streets I travelled and later, work them out in a moleskin until a story or poetry took shape. I would then take these words to a desktop computer that hummed, open a word document, and begin to iron out something I eventually felt read complete, was worthy of someone’s time. The process was simple but required attention and dedication. Writing first in ink or pencil slowed my mind enough to think about what the phrase or rhyme or sentence was trying to achieve. This process made me aware that with story, you have to push things forward. Once complete, I would print the story or poem at a local library that charged ten pence per page. I would have three copies by the end of the process. One for the literary magazine or anthology I was looking to submit to. Another to keep for myself in a folder I’d look back on years later with fondness (sometimes). A third copy I would put in a separate envelope, sealed and unopened, I then stamped and posted it to myself as a form of copyright.

People called the third envelope the poor man’s copyright. To this day, I’m not sure if copyright works this way. You couldn’t exactly take a sealed envelope into a court and prove you wrote anything, one supposes. But aspiring writers I met at open mic nights said they did it. The act gave the work some weight and made my words feel valued, like a handshake at the end of a meeting. And it added a form of punctuation to the process. The copy that went to a literary magazine included a covering letter (not bio under 100 words) typed out on paper.

If my work was going overseas, usually to America, two stamps for Air Mail were included. And of course, the self-addressed envelope. Without an SASE, there would be no reply. But with it, an editor would often write back with some brief feedback if rejected, a witty remark about friends over the ponds. Em dash abuse jokes at the expense of Emily Dickenson or a quote by Dickens or Shakespeare to close. There was a nostalgic romanticism about the whole thing. It was a process that I enjoyed. It connected me to humans working in publishing, made me imagine them burning the midnight candle, overdosed on caffeine and nicotine in a dark room full of piles of paper. Back then the process put the art form in a physical world that required movement if wishing to be read or considered for publication. The submission left my desk and travelled on a road that either landed on an editor’s desk or slush pile. I waited for more inspiration than a response. Back then volume mattered, as a young man I understood cutting your teeth as a writer meant a million bad words.

How the goal of publishing fiction and poetry used to work

Back then, at the turn of millennium, you sent stories into the world and looked forward to seeing the postman. But only after going near blind trying to read The Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook tiny font. You carefully looked for sentences like ‘interested in literary fiction’ or ‘accepts a handful of poetry’. When I found sentences like these, I underlined the magazine or agent or publisher’s name and told myself, ‘this could be the one’. This yearbook was the holy grail of publishing contacts back then. It shit on the countless top 50 literary magazine websites and had an aesthetic that reminded me of newspaper ads. Black and white functional language, almost keyword in nature. This thick red brick full of agents, publishers and magazines took solicited and unsolicited work from established and aspiring writers. It saved a writer time by allowing editors to simply state what they didn’t accept for consideration. The Granta entry was always near the top of my wish list. So was Magma, Ambit. American magazines were there too, if you could justify the postage: Glimmer Train, NYQ, The Paris Review (lottery ticket). I began to understand the prestige of these magazines through the writers I admired who had first published there. Giants like Chekov and Hemingway. Literary...