Calls for Submissions

Invite authors to submit stories to a publication, then track who's interested — for anthology editors and publishers building an issue or collection.

What Calls for Submissions Are

A call for submissions is how you invite authors to submit work to a specific publication. You draft the call, send it to a list of recipients, and track their responses as they come in. It's the outbound counterpart to the Manuscripts tab: calls go out to authors, and the manuscripts they send back come in as your slush pile.

There are two sides to the feature:

• Publishers create and manage calls from the Calls tab on a publication.
• Authors who receive a call view it on their own page and respond with interest or a decline.

Feature Availability

Calls for Submissions is part of the Manuscripts feature, available to publisher workspaces. If you don't see the Calls tab on your publications, your workspace administrator may need to enable Manuscripts — for the whole workspace, or for a single publication under the publication's Edit → Settings tab. The same setting controls both the Manuscripts and Calls tabs.

Viewing Your Calls

Open a publication to reach its Publication Command Center, then click the Calls tab. You'll see a toolbar above a table of every call for that publication.

The table has these columns:

• Title — the call's title, e.g. "Open Call: Fairy Tale Retellings".
• Status — a colored badge: Draft, Open (green), Closed (blue), or Cancelled (red).
• Deadline — the submission deadline, e.g. "Mar 15, 2026". A passed deadline shows in red with a (past) label. Calls without a deadline show a dash.
• Responses — a summary of recipient responses in the form interested / declined / pending of total. For example, 3 / 1 / 5 of 9 means the call went to 9 recipients: 3 are interested, 1 declined, and 5 haven't responded yet.

Use the status filter dropdown at the top left to narrow the table to Draft, Open, Closed, or Cancelled calls.

Creating a Call

1. Click New Call at the top right of the Calls tab
2. Fill in the details:
   • Title (required): The name of your call, e.g. "Open Call: Fairy Tale Retellings"
   • Description (required): What you're looking for — requirements, themes, tone
   • Next Steps: Submission instructions shown to authors only after they express interest (see Tips)
   • Genre Preferences: Comma-separated genres you're seeking
   • Min Word Count and Max Word Count: The word count range for submissions
   • Payment: How contributors are paid, e.g. "Pro rate, 8c/word"
   • Deadline: The submission deadline
   • Reply-To Email: Where author replies to the notification email go (defaults to your account email if left blank)
3. Click Create Draft

Every call starts as a draft. As soon as you create one, the Send Call to Recipients window opens automatically so you can choose who to send it to — so the natural flow is create, then immediately pick recipients and send.

Sending a Call

Sending a call builds a recipient list and dispatches the call by email. Recipients who are linked Inkwren users also get an in-app notification with a link to the call.

You can add recipients two ways:

• Add from Contributors: Search your workspace's contributors by name or email. A contributor that's a pen name is labeled as a pen name of its primary author and can be found by searching the primary's name. Contributors linked to an Inkwren account show an Inkwren user badge. Contributors without an email address can't be added.
• Add by Email: Type any email address to send to someone who isn't in your contributor list.

Added recipients appear in the Recipients list, each with a remove (×) button. When the list is ready, click the Send button, which shows how many recipients the call will go to.

Sending a draft moves it to Open. You can send an Open call again — use Send to more recipients in the table's actions to add people without disturbing the responses you've already collected.

Tracking Responses

For any Open or Closed call, click View recipients in the table's actions to open the Recipients window. It lists everyone the call was sent to, with each recipient's:

• Display name (or email address)
• Email
• Status — Pending, Interested, or Declined
• The date they responded

This is the detail behind the interested / declined / pending summary in the table's Responses column.

Closing a Call

When you're done collecting responses, click Close call in the table's actions for an Open call. Closing stops the call from accepting new author responses, but the recipients and their responses stay viewable. There's no way to reopen a closed call.

Deleting a Call

Only draft calls can be deleted — use the row's delete action in the Calls table. Once a call has been sent, you can close it but not delete it.

How Authors Respond

When you send a call, each recipient gets an email (and, if they're an Inkwren user, an in-app notification) with a link to a read-only call page. There they see who the call is from, the title, which publication it's for, your description, and a details grid with the deadline, genres, word count range, and payment.

While the call is open and they haven't responded yet, authors see two buttons:

• I'm Interested — reveals your Next Steps instructions in a confirmation banner, telling them how to submit.
• Decline — records that they're not submitting.

Authors can change their response while the call is still open. Once you close or cancel the call, the response buttons disappear and the page shows that the call is no longer accepting responses.

Tips

• Create, then send right away: The send window opens automatically after you create a draft, so you can build your recipient list while the call is fresh.
• Keep submission details in Next Steps: Authors only see the Next Steps text after they express interest, so use the Description for the public pitch and Next Steps for where and how to actually submit.
• Send to more recipients without fear: Re-sending an Open call only adds new recipients — it never re-emails people who already received it or resets their responses.
• Invite pen names directly: Search a contributor's primary name to find their pen names, then invite a pen name on its own when that's the identity the author writes under.
• Set a deadline so authors know the window: The deadline appears on both your Calls table and the author's call page, and flags as past once it's elapsed.
• Pair Calls with Manuscripts: Calls send invitations out; the Manuscripts tab is where the submissions come back in.