You have spent three weeks on a poem. You have read it aloud, cut two lines, put them back, cut them again. Now you want to send it somewhere. Somewhere real, with an editor and a readership and a name you would be proud to say out loud. That step, from finished poem to posted submission, is where most beginners stall. The good news is that the mechanics of submitting to UK magazines are simple once you know them. The etiquette takes a little longer to learn, but it is not complicated either. Here is how it works.
Understanding reading periods
Most UK poetry magazines do not accept submissions all year. They open a reading window, gather work, choose what they want, then close again to catch up. A magazine might read in March and September, for example, or it might open for a single month in spring. Others stay open continuously but warn that replies take several months.
A smaller number run themed calls, asking for poems on grief, coastlines, work, or whatever preoccupies the editors that year. These can be a lovely way in, especially for a first publication, because you know exactly what the editors are looking for.
Two practical habits will save you time:
- Check the submissions page before you draft anything. A magazine that closed last week will usually tell you when it reopens.
- Note the response time they quote, then add a month. Editors are often volunteers with day jobs, and delays are normal rather than personal.
While a magazine is closed, its backlog is still moving. That is a good moment to read a recent issue, work out what the editors actually publish, and revise accordingly.
Submittable, email, or post
UK magazines take work in three main ways. Submittable and similar platforms let you upload a file and track your submission through a dashboard. Email is still common, particularly for smaller magazines, and usually means pasting your poems into the body of the message or attaching a single document. Postal submissions are rare now but a few publications still welcome them.
Each route has its own etiquette. With email, follow the guidelines exactly: if they ask for three poems in one attachment, do not send five across four files. With Submittable, your upload is timstamped, so there is no need to chase it. With post, include a stamped addressed envelope if the guidelines ask for one, and keep a copy of everything you send. Whichever route you use, the guidelines are not suggestions. Read them twice.
Writing a cover letter that does its job
A cover letter for a poetry submission is short. Three or four sentences is plenty. Editors read hundreds of these, and a long letter suggests you have not understood the process.
Include the essentials:
- Your name and where you are based.
- The titles of the poems you are sending, and roughly how many lines each runs to.
- Any relevant publication credits, kept to a minimum.
- A note that the work is simultaneously submitted, if the magazine allows it.
Leave out the apologies, the explanations and the backstory. "Please find three poems below" is a perfectly good opening. If you have no credits yet, say nothing about credits. Nobody rejects a good poem because the writer is new.
Two things do belong in a cover letter: your contact details and your withdrawal plans. If a poem is accepted elsewhere, the editor needs to know quickly, which brings us to the trickiest part of the whole process.
The etiquette of simultaneous submissions
A simultaneous submission is a poem that is sitting with more than one magazine at the same time. Most UK magazines accept them. Some do not, and will say so in their guidelines. Either way, the rules are straightforward.
Never submit the same poem twice to the same magazine, and never keep a poem somewhere after it has been accepted elsewhere.
If simultaneous submissions are allowed, say so in your cover letter. When a poem is accepted, withdraw it from every other magazine immediately, with a brief, polite email. Editors understand that this happens; what frustrates them is finding out later that the poem they were about to accept has already appeared somewhere else.
Keeping simultaneous submissions to a sensible number helps. Three to five magazines per poem is plenty. Sending one poem to fifteen places at once makes the admin overwhelming and means you may end up withdrawing from a dozen magazines in a single week. Staggering your submissions also gives you room to revise between rounds.
If a magazine explicitly says no simultaneous submissions, respect that. It usually means their response times are short, so the wait is not as punishing as it sounds.
Tracking your submissions
Once you have more than four or five poems out in the world, memory stops working. Set up a simple tracking system, whether that is a spreadsheet or a notebook, and record the following for every submission:
- The magazine name and the date you sent the work.
- The poem titles, with a note of where else each one is currently sitting.
- The response time the magazine quotes.
- The outcome, plus the date you withdrew the poem if it was accepted elsewhere.
Add a reminder for when each response window closes. If a reply is overdue, one polite query is acceptable. After that, assume the submission has lapsed. Silence is normal in this business, and it almost never means anything about the quality of the work.
Keep a separate note of acceptances and withdrawals so you can see at a glance which poems are still free. When an acceptance arrives, the first thing to do is check the tracker. It takes two minutes and saves a great deal of embarrassment.
Getting started this week
Pick three UK magazines whose work you genuinely admire. Read their guidelines, read a recent issue, and choose two or three poems that fit. Write a four-sentence cover letter. Record everything in your tracker, send the work, and then start writing something new. That is the whole job, repeated patiently until the acceptances arrive. The quiet weeks between replies are not wasted time; they are when the next batch of poems gets written, and eventually one of them will land.
