Congratulations! Your poetry, prose, or photography has been accepted to appear in an upcoming issue of the Blue Earth Review. Before you throw a party, there's a few things you should know. Some of this information will appear on your acceptance letter; some will not. Thus, please review this information carefully.
1. Please send us an electronic file of your piece, via email, to us as soon as possible. We prefer Microsoft Word documents, but whatever file you send, please send it as an attachment to blueearthreview@gmail.com. Please title your email "submission for BER" - this will ensure that your submission is found amongst the spam.
2. In the body of the same email, please include a brief (50 words or less) contributor's note that we can publish in the index of the issue. We encourage contributor's notes because they allow fans of your piece to learn more about you, and us as well. Editors and readers alike enjoy knowing who's submitting to us and what else they've accomplished. Consider listing previous or upcoming publications, career(s), etc.
Don't worry if Blue Earth Review is your first publication (for many it is); instead, consider telling us more about yourself - the schools you've attended, your interests, your future plans.
Along with the contributor's note, please make sure that we have a current address for you. This address will be the address we send your contributor's copies to - so if it changes, please let us know immediately. Additionally, try to e-mail us from your primary e-mail address; should an issue arise with your submission, we would like to get a hold of you as soon as possible.
3. You will be paid for your contribution in two copies of the issue in which your work appears. If we had an unlimited budget we'd give you more (well, first we'd pay our editors... then you).
4. By agreeing to let us publish your work, you are agreeing that your work has not been published previously (in any form - print or electronic) or will be soon. (By "electronic" we mean online magazines and journals.) Should your work be published again, you should acknowledge Blue Earth Review. Blue Earth Review acquires first rights for any published work. Otherwise, upon publication, all copyrights revert to the author.
5. Due to budget crunches and time concerns, Blue Earth Review does NOT send proofs to contributors before publication. Although we do our best, and we rely heavily on our eagle-eyed proofreaders, we (like most literary magazines) are a small organization. Thus please do make sure that your electronic file appears EXACTLY as you would like it to appear in print. Please do not rely on Blue Earth Review to spell- or grammar-check your submission for you. If you do notice a typo in your published work, our apologies.
6. Our staff aims to have each issue of Blue Earth Review printed and distributed by the first week of May each year, but as Blue Earth Review is produced solely by six graduate students who are full-time students and teaching or graduate assistants, sometimes our deadlines get stretched. Please limit your queries as to the status of your issue; nine times out of ten, printer delays or other unforeseen circumstances have delayed our distribution. But if several months have passed without any sight of your issue, please do let us know. We won't get mad. We promise.
7. Please consider subscribing to Blue Earth Review. Your contribution would be used to further fund the magazine by promoting it and our writers. Subscriptions help us enlarge our regional and national profile. Learn more about subscribing.
8. Please suggest Blue Earth Review to interested friends, fellow artists, classes, communities, etc. We would love to expand our readership and submissions pool. Blue Earth encourages submissions from any writer or photographer, in particular the previously unpublished. We love to be an artist's first publication! What to tell your friends.