We are a 100% volunteer-run magazine, often working in our spare time to read, review, and publish submissions. Because we offer feedback, we want to ensure we spend enough time with a submission to create a thoughtful response, rather than a contextless ‘yes’ or ‘no’ (though No Feedback options are available).

But perhaps the best way to understand our response times is to give you an inside look into the review process at Ember.

When you submit to Ember, your story or poem goes through multiple stages before a final decision is made. By reading this, we hope you gain better insight into the inner workings and understand why our process sometimes takes longer than other literary journals and magazines.

First Stage: Screening
When you first submit, your piece will automatically go into our Screening stage. From there, screeners will evaluate the submission to ensure it meets our submission guidelines. Once screened, this toggles the “In-Progress” label (so please keep in mind, though your submission may say “In-Progress,” there is a chance it has yet to be reviewed for publication).

Second Stage: First Round of Voting
Once a submission is screened, it will put be into a first round of voting. In order to maintain our volunteer readers’ sanity, we try to maintain around 10 submissions at a time in the first round of voting. We move submissions chronologically; therefore, your submission may wait awhile before entering the first round of voting.

Third Stage: Second Round of Voting
If your submission makes it past the first round of voting, it will then enter a second round of voting with different readers.

Final Stage: Editor’s Desk
If a submission makes it past the second round of voting, it will move to Editor’s Desk for final review. We will notify authors when their submission makes it to Editor’s Desk. This stage is where the Editor-in-Chief and Associate Editor make final decisions on pieces to accept for publication.

If you are still wishing for quicker response time, you can apply to become a volunteer reader and help us read and review submissions!