Last week I wrote about Tin House's plan to only accept submissions if they were "accompanied by a receipt for a hardcover or paperback from a real-life bookstore." While I understood the literary journal's desire to help struggling brick and mortar bookstores, their snub at people reading e-books or buying from online bookstores rubbed me wrong.
Today I noticed a fascinating addition to the Tin House submission game: On the Duotrope Digest list of fiction markets with no submission acceptances, Tin House ranked number 1 (and they ranked number 3 in poetry markets with no acceptances). Over the last 12 months Duotrope received reports of 511 submissions to Tin House either being rejected or withdrawn by their authors, all without a single acceptance. Of those rejections, almost 83% received a form reject.
Now Duotrope isn't the be all and end all in submission reporting. It is quite likely some authors made into Tin House through their slush pile. But the Duotrope numbers suggest the odds of this happening are laughingly low. So I guess it really doesn't matter whether or not you include a book receipt when you submit to Tin House--either way, you're merely taking the slow route to a form rejection.