If you’re interested in using this feature, please email  support@submishmash.com to request that they’re turned on in your applications.

That said, you should use additional inputs with extreme caution. Studies have shown that for every additional input you add to a form, you lose 7% of your users. (You can see how it’s possible to quickly get to a place where no one will fill out your form.) We (humans) simply don’t like filling out forms, especially if it’s not absolutely obvious how the information will be used. The more complex the form, the less successful entries you’ll have. Often complex forms are just the result of what the developer ‘can do’ and the marketing department ‘finds useful’, rather than what is absolutely necessary for your organization to achieve its goal: accept and review the submitters work or resume. Work as hard as you can to keep the requirements to the absolute minimum. Here’s a nice article about this.

If you have any questions, please feel free to email us at support@submishmash.com

• - Added ability to search and view active, archived, or both in the grid
• - Added “clear filter” link outside of search form
• - Save Draft: Submission form now saves submissions in-progress so info is not lost if user leaves and returns
• - Re-designed submission form file upload UI
• - More internationally friendly address forms: US/Canada region not required and there’s a text input for international “Regions”
• - Added “Cover Letter” and “Region” to export

Thanks!
-Submittable

If you have an existing Submishmash account, you can connect it with your Facebook account, and log in with either going forward.

Nothing will be posted to your Facebook profile, we’re purely adding this to help simplify the login process. The reality is that the majority of the planet uses Facebook and only having to track a single set of credentials does simplify things.

Please don’t hesitate to get in touch with any questions or concerns around this.

Thanks!

-Michael

So, there’s a new interface. It’s blue and clean and hopefully “sexy” (see last post) like all good software should be.

For the most part, there’s no new or removed functionality, but we’d like to point out a few small changes:

1) The export functions have been moved up into the small ‘gear’ icon in the upper right-hand corner of the main submissions list.

2) Dashboard: You can access any role you might have on any masthead via the dashboard in the upper right-hand corner.

3) The View page now opens like a module window. The ‘Full Screen” functionality is missing, but will be back shortly.

Also, in the options menu (little gear in the left-hand corner), you can do the following:

1) Download the original document
2) View a PDF outside the system (will open in your default PDF view or within the browser if you have Acrobat Reader installed in the browser)
3) Change a submissions category. This is often used if a submission came into the wrong genre
4) Delete a Submission (If the status is anything but ‘in-progress’)
5) Archive a Submission

Thanks. Don’t hesitate with questions or suggestions.

Best,
Submishmash

Dang, bloody day for submissions. At least the new @submishmash looks swanky enough to soften the blow.

Just logged in for our first look at 2.0 @submishmash. Very slick. We like.

@submishmash I love the new look and setup!! You get 5 stars from me.

Welcome to the world, @submishmash 2.0!

Much love this evening to the folks over @submishmash. Their hard work makes life in the Super Arrow cabin so much lovelier.

whoa, @submishmash revamped when I went to Lowes. Looks sleek!

@submishmash I love the new look.

@submishmash sexy

The new @submishmash is sexy.

Completely in love with the new version of @submishmash !

Loving the new @submishmash! Much faster and smoother than before. Now all I need is an iPad for their app.

the new @submishmash is lovely but could be greatly improved by the addition of more accepteds

Submishmash has been spruced up. Looks all shiny now.

Submishmash is so swanky now.

I’ve been staring at @submishmash for most of my day. So happy for the new changes.

http://www.nytimes.com/external/venturebeat/2011/07/29/29venturebeat-magazine-geeks-use-social-media-to-make-old-s-6327.html?ref=technology

Submishmash: Can you tell us a little about your editorial vision and goals for the NOR, Chris?

Chris Chambers: My vision for the New Orleans Review has always been to honor the history of the magazine, its tradition of publishing an eclectic range of good contemporary writing, with a particular interest in writing that is unconventional, writing in translation, writing by undiscovered writers, and writing by people we feel deserve more recognition. I have also always believed that good writing deserves good typography and book design, and I hope to see the magazine continue to thrive as a publication that features good writing presented in an aesthetically pleasing object.

SMM: How did you decide to switch from paper submissions to Submishmash?

CC: I decided to try Submishmash in the spring of 2010 based on the recommendation of a friend who knew the folks who developed it. I had been reluctantly considering online submissions. Reluctantly, because I’m something of a Luddite. I tend to distrust technology, and have a real affinity for things like paper and books, paper clips, stamps. I like getting mail and I like the Postal Service. But it was becoming clear that the mountains of manuscripts coming through the mail, the SASEs, the rejection slips, all added up to a lot of wasted resources. It added expense for the writers, and it was a logistical nightmare for us.

The other factor for making the switch when we did was financial. Our budget was cut by Loyola University, our sponsor, by almost a third after Hurricane Katrina, and six years on, it has yet to be reinstated. I am committed to publishing a quality print journal, and one of the things that Submishmash allowed us to do was to charge a fee for submissions.

This was not a decision I made lightly. I polled my staff, other editors, writers. And I did the math, calculating what a writer spends on a typical mailed submission: paper, printer toner, envelopes, postage, a trip to the post office. And I figured that the $3 we ask for an electronic submission is no more than a writer would spend to mail the same manuscript to us.

SMM: Have you met with any resistance in your shift to a fee-based submissions model?

CC: After over a year, we have had only a couple complaints from disgruntled writers, and I have actually received quite a few responses from writers who like and support the new system. With Submishmash, the money they spend to submit their work goes to support the magazine in which they hope to publish, and not to the Post Office. And that support has in a very real way allowed us to continue to publish a print journal without sacrificing quality or pages or frequency.

SMM: What about submissions volume? Has that changed since you began charging a fee?

CC: We receive about 2,000 submissions a year, and I’m guessing that is approximately where we were before Submishmash. With the online system I can track exactly how many submissions we get on a daily, monthly, and annual basis, by genre, and so forth. But with mailed submissions, it was more of a guess, weighing or measuring the pile occasionally.

SMM: What about efficiency? Has Submishmash helped you streamline your operations at all? Can you give us some examples?

CC: Before Submishmash, our managing editor sorted the mail, date-stamped the submissions, and put them in plastic mail baskets (property of the Postal Service): one each for fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. I would go through each day’s submissions, looking at the first page of each submission. Anything that grabbed me right off went into a smaller basket to be read by all the staff.

Of course this meant that each submission could only be read by one staff member at a time. Other staff members had to wait for it to return from whoever had it, so that it sometimes took weeks or even months for all of our readers to read a single submission. And here we’re just talking about the submissions that I cherry-picked from the start.

Those manuscripts that I hadn’t pulled out of the stack in this preliminary way were likewise farmed out to our readers, each of whom always had five to ten submissions. They would either reject these and return them to the author or reassign them to another reader, for another look.

When we had six or so manuscripts that had made it to the small basket and been read by all the staff, we would schedule a meeting to discuss and vote on them. I encouraged everyone to reread those manuscripts in advance of this meeting.

SMM: Wow. Okay, that sounds like a lot of logistics.

CC: It was definitely a time-consuming and cumbersome process. And there was always the risk of manuscripts being lost or misplaced. I remember a former intern coming to me six months after she’d finished her internship with a pile of manuscripts she found in the backseat of her car.

SMM: And how has this changed with Submishmash?

CC: When I fast-track promising submissions, I can assign them to all of our staff, and all of us are able to read and comment on them simultaneously from wherever we are. This means we can read, deliberate on, and make decisions on manuscripts much faster. The system also makes it easier to respond to writers, and I find myself jotting more comments to those whose work came close. Obviously, we don’t lose any submissions anymore.

SMM: Anything else you’d like to say about your experience with Submishmash?

CC: The system is intuitive, easy to use, and seems to anticipate most all of our needs as a literary magazine. And we’ve gotten prompt, friendly, and helpful support from Submishmash whenever we’ve had a question or a problem.

The bottom line is that as reluctant as I was to go to online submissions, after a year with Submishmash I am sold on it, and more importantly, my staff and the writers who submit work to us have embraced it as well. Submishmash is functional and well designed and has become an important part of the machine here.

Carr is a pragmatic and brutally honest curmudgeon. The rest of the Times staff, while hammered by layoffs and declining readership, are mostly just trying to keep their jobs. But Carr is mentally as well as physically bent–my neck hurt by the end of the film from looking at him. He’s gone through jail, single parenting, and crack addiction, and come out the other side to become a reporter at the “newspaper of record.” The film suggests the New York Times might be on its last legs, but Carr isn’t worried about his job. He’s survived worse. In general, Carr is worried about “guns and bats” rather than the demise of “the Grey Lady.”

Throughout the film, he argues against “new” media, against two dudes with a camera, against aggregation, The Huffington Post and the lot, against the removal of humans from the creation of story, and we found this refreshing and entertaining. Story without humans is text. RSS feeds and aggregation create entertaining rabbit holes, but they won’t have anything in them once real news is no longer around to aggregate. Self-publishing, with a few exceptions, makes you a publicist not a writer.

As we walked out of the theater, Catherine Jones, the Submishmash Marketing Manager, was overheard saying, “He’s a pretty good argument for doing a lot of crack.”

Clay Shirky recently claimed in a post that “we need much cheaper ways of gathering, understanding, and disseminating news.” At Submishmash, we think part of that might be guys walking around with video cameras, wars recorded by a crowd full of iPhones, or tweets from an engineer outside Bin Laden’s compound. That is where material will be “created.” But we also need human beings like Carr calling bullshit (the entire point of journalism, no?). With powerful and affordable tools like your favorite submission manager or DocumentCloud, publishers can crowdsource direct-from-the-streets content but still do the essential step of editing and making it story.

“Submishmash makes it easier for brands and pubs to manage the process of soliciting, accepting, managing, and publishing content. Instead of an endless tide of emails, content solicitors get a simple, clean, feature-rich collaboration platform. Use it for sweeps, articles, contests, UGC videos, etc.”

http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/29409.asp