Chill Subs Is Reimagining Literary Community, One Submission at a Time

Chill Subs is a lot of things: an intriguing name, a hip alternative to Submittable, and, most of all, a long-awaited disruptor in the literary publishing space. In the guise of a common-sense submission tool for the literary writer (overworked, aspiring, successful, confused, you name it, everyone’s welcome!) the company is quietly upending the way writers find a home for their writing. The core website is a searchable database of everything from indie presses accepting manuscripts to the “wtf even is it” lit mag that you might spend hours googling to find. A vibe filter lets you decide whether you’re searching for the Paris Reviews of the world, the “very fancy very impressive very not fast” response times, or the single-volunteer-living-in-a-friend’s-rental-car magazines, the “we’re just chilling here” publications. In itself, this tool makes choosing the right outlet for your work easy and intuitive, but the Chill Subs innovation is to go a step farther and turn the anxiety of trying to get published into a fun, social experience. Suddenly, it seems like submitting can be something to chat about, build a community around, and enjoy.

Since its early days, that is, a two-and-a-half years ago when cofounders Karina Kupp and Benjamin Davis began collaborating from different sides of the planet (Kupp was living in Poland and Davis in South Korea), their creation has mushroomed out in a head spinning number of directions. They have a Substack-built online writing academy, The Forever Workshop, a unique, micro-publishing magazine that lives on Threads called THREAD; there’s a partnership with Write or Die magazine, an automatic submission formatter, and even a service that will decide where and how to submit your stories for you, the Submitter’s Club. The truth is, Chill Subs has too much going on for it to be summed up, much less catalogued, in a few neat paragraphs. What I can say concisely is that, at its heart, the project has a sense of fun, an eagerness to innovate, and a decidedly fed-up attitude toward the old ways of doing things in publishing. The doomed feeling that submitting makes no sense? That it’s too hard to break into the literary scene? Too isolating? Chill Subs is a salve for all that.

Over a long, digressive Zoom call, I had the pleasure of talking with Karina and Ben about Chill Subs past, its future, and how their disruptive ideas were born (hint, they got sick of thousand item spreadsheets, SEO’d articles, and mucking around in the publishing trenches by themselves).

Willem Marx: For the uninitiated, can you tell me what Chill Subs is?

Karina Kupp: It’s a lot of things. At its core, Chill Subs is a searchable database of submission opportunities. We have over 3000 magazines, we have contests, we have indie presses, and we have a bunch of tools for writers to help with the submission process. That said, we’re also a community—people can come host their work and, in the future, connect with other writers on the platform.

Benjamin Davis: We’re trying to build a home for writers on the internet. A lot of writers have been relegated to dark corners of Twitter or Instagram where it’s hard to find each other. Literary platforms have been built to serve journalists and content-style writers. We want to be a place for the creative writer, a home where they can find places to publish, find each other, get discovered, and present their work in a meaningful way. We started out thinking about submissions and as we’ve grown—we have about 36,000 writers now—we’ve become much more focused on being a community that helps writers, that helps with problems in the industry, that helps editors connect with writers and vice versa. We’re about to release “profiles,” which is a huge part of what we’re eventually going to build. This can be a tough question to answer because there’s what Chill Subs is now, and then there’s what we’re building. We’re not anywhere near done. It’ll probably be another six months before Chill Subs starts to resemble its final form. That’s when we plan to bring in the connective tissue of the submission manager.

WM: It already feels like a home for writers. Honestly, it reminds me of a social media, one that’s welcoming and targeted at a specific group. Writers, writing in general.

KK: We were just talking about that…we created our own social media a while ago. It was when Elon bought Twitter and people were bombarding us with tweets like, “Please create another place for us to go.” We were really opposed to that because we didn’t want to create another place for people to scream at each other. But they wore us down eventually, I coded something in a week, and we created this social media called [ugh], because that was how we felt. It was basically a joke, but people were using it so much. There were so many posts every day. People were actually communicating. That’s when we realized that there is a need for something like this. We’ve seen so many websites with a social element that feels so dead—it’s just one post by one user over and over again. [ugh] was really alive. We had to take it down because of some technical issues, but we’re planning to rework it for sometime next year.

BD: It was just the two of us then and Karina built [ugh] in a week. She built it in a week! So, it was also about learning why not everybody builds a social media. We have no investors. We use no advertising. We just try to be funded by our community members—we want to create a space that doesn’t fall victim to the same issues of other social medias. Because of that, we can’t launch something and then hire a bunch of people to do crowd control and make sure it doesn’t get out of hand. We’re trying to really think through how to have a positive impact. One way we’re going to do that is by developing a badges system where you can award journals badges that come with a positive connotation: you had a friendly editor. Eventually, we want to build a feed that will connect everyone. It will be chronological, only filled with the people that you follow. There won’t be algorithms or anything like that, which is a little bit of our philosophy because we’ve seen what happens in writing rooms where it’s like, “You follow me!” “I follow you!” “You share this!” “I share that!” We really want it to be constructive. Because of that, we’re thinking of it as a feed rather than a social media.

KK: Do you remember when you went on Twitter and your feed just ended? It said, “You’re done for the day. That’s it.” I miss that feeling so much. Since we already have a lot of info, events, our submission tracker, profiles where people add their publications, it would be so easy to have this feed that says, “Hey, your friend was published here, go check it out.” Or, “They were reject, go cry with them.” It could be this social experience.

WM: Even without the feed, there’s something interactive about Chill Subs. I think it’s the way your personalities are integrated into the site. In everything that’s written, in the interface, the aesthetic, you’re both front and center—it’s like you’re already posting.

KK: Our designer, Nikita Klimov, is actually working on a whole “character” thing for us, so we are going to be even more present. The whole team will be across the site sharing notes and advice.

BD: Karina and I tend to be a little crasser than the rest, sometimes we find our “fucks” erased. We’ll give Nikita copy for a design and, suspiciously, the sentence that had “fuck” in it will disappear. Which is to say, we’ve had to find a good balance. In the beginning we could be a lot rougher and snarkier. Now that there’re a lot more people on the website, we’ve had e-mails about it.

KK: My favorite was, “Buttholes? Seriously?”

BD: I had a newsletter, called “14 Top-Tier Magazines That Want To Watch You Crawl Out of a Rhino’s Butthole.” It was about that Jim Carrey movie, when he climbs out of the rhino’s butthole. Whenever I think emerging writer, I think of that scene. It’s a funny reference point in my head. Of course, lots of people liked it, but then you get those emails where it’s like “you’re immature.”

KK: Ben and I are really protective about that voice—so many people joined because the landing page says: “Making your writing life not so freaking exhausting,” and “Get published without losing your shit.” If that’s part of what attracted people, we’re not going to change it.

WM: From the outside, Chill Subs seems to grow very organically. It just keeps expanding. Does that reflect an overall plan? Or is it a natural outcome of how you work?

BD: We are learning to be a little more planned because things grew very weirdly. For the first nine or ten months, it was just Karina and I emailing, getting on calls, and having random ideas we thought were funny. Rejection Bingo was one. Basically, we were like two children with too big of an audience and too much Google. To save time building a blog, we launched a startup diary and brought in Write or Die Magazine. To utilize our data and gain a membership, because building things on the website takes too long, we made a Substack. And we had no money, right? Karina and I had no jobs. This month last year, that was the first month we were able to pay our core team $500. So that was a year-and-a-half of us living somewhere in Eastern Europe in one-bedroom apartments and working. It’s like we’ve been in a dark room and have run into absolutely every fragile fucking object we could find. Now, we are getting better at moving in a good way. Now, we have a plan. But we have grown…organically is such a nice way to put it.

KK: Two months before we were able to pay ourselves salaries, we went on a company retreat. We’d just earned a little bit of money for the first time, and we decided to spend it all on a week together in an old house on a Turkish island.

BD: It was made of cardboard and it was right next to a mosque. The call to prayer was like someone standing inside your room screaming at you every fucking day. And Karina brought her cat. The cat couldn’t go outside, there was no air conditioning, and the windows didn’t have screens, so we had all the shutters down all the time because of the cat. It’s August in Istanbul. You can’t open the windows, we’re having a prayer shouted at us five times a day, and that was the first time we all met.

KK: We launched our premium membership during that retreat. In the midst of that madness, we sat in the living room and had a three-day long planning session about how to generate salaries in three months. And we actually did it. It was all worth it.

BD: And the cat survived.

KK: Yep.

WM: At that point it was, do anything. If you have the idea, it happens. Turkish retreat, premium memberships, salaries…

KK: No filter.

BD: I think we’re very idealistic and fair-minded people. We want to make money but at the same time, we’ve always had an endless scholarship for anybody who can’t afford our Substack newsletter or our website. We hate hardcore SEO dump content. We hate hard paywalls. Any tricky stuff like that. We have an audience, but we want to build things within the bounds of our ethical framework. Because the internet is so gross. Everywhere you go there are ads inside banner ads.

KK: It could have been so easy—we have over 300,000 monthly views of the website now. Just slap some Google AdWords on that and sit and enjoy it. But it would be so ugly.

BD: That’s important for everyone on our core team. The basic information that a writer needs to get involved in the community—it’s just there. We had all these frustrations coming into Chill Subs, and we want to make sure that no one else comes into the industry and feels the way we did. Lost and confused and intimidated.

WM: What were you doing before Chill Subs? Submitting, banging your head against that wall?

KK: We had very interesting corporate lives. I was a fulltime software engineer from 2018 to 2021. Then I quit my job, went freelance for about half a year, and moved from Belarus to Poland. An old client found me and I worked for him for six more months which was already during Chill Subs. By May 2022, I thought, “this is something really special, I don’t want to waste time freelancing,” so I quit again. I had enough saving for almost a year in Eastern Europe. Then in late April 2023, we ran out of money, and I took freelance clients for six months until we could pay.

I only became curious about submitting at the end of 2021. I’d been writing, but I never submitted. Then, in the fall of 2021, I was researching the whole thing, what are the magazines? How does being published work? I found all the SEO articles, “The Top Ten Magazines!” They copy pasted everything. I found Duotrope and bought a subscription for a month. Wasn’t impressed. In the end, I made my own giant spreadsheet where I collected magazines that I liked, but it was still confusing. I have all of this info, but how do I figure out where to submit? In what order? Which magazines do I like? Which magazines do I fit? Spreadsheets feel clinical. I wanted to browse the magazines and get a feel for each one. What are they like? That’s why one of the first filters was a vibe filter, so you can filter by “very impressive, very not fast,” “send us your fucking worst,” “just chilling here,” and so on. I wanted to have something that wasn’t just data, there had to be feels as well. Ben, talk about your whole Korean situation.

BD: I’ll keep it to the basics. I’ve been submitting on and off for probably fifteen years. After college, I left the States and have been moving for the past thirteen years. I did a stint of three years in Russia—that’s where I started working for a lot of tech startups and got into PR and marketing. That’s how I entered the online space professionally, which is a soul sucking field. Right before the pandemic, I took a job teaching literature and writing textbooks for this international school in Korea. So, I spent a few years there too. I actually got stuck there during the pandemic and got back into my creative writing. I had been writing on Medium a lot, I wrote essays, did freelance writing, and I had moved away from fiction and poetry. With the combination of the pandemic and having a relaxed job, I was writing again and saving money. I had my own spreadsheet too. Then I discovered Chill Subs, there was an interview with Karina in Becky Tuch’s newsletter. Again, I was alone in Korea with my books and my stories. A lot of fucking time on my hands and a lot of experience doing online content. So I go, “Hey, here’s a 3500-word email of all of the reasons I think what you’re doing is awesome and here are all these ideas I have.” We went back and forth like that and when my contract was up in July, I decided to launch into it.

You want to talk about cobbled together? Our designer, Nikita, is one of my best friends from my days in Russia. Shelby Stretton, who’s my partner, quit her career of seven years and learned social media marketing from square one. They are co-owners now. Those early days were really, really messy.

WM: One of your recent newsletters jumped out at me. You were asking people to resubscribe because you had announced that one arm of Chill Subs was becoming free, and it was misinterpreted as “everything is free.” Humor aside, I was struck by the fact that you are actively taking down paywalls when it seems like everyone else is doing the opposite.

BD: A lot of those decisions are based on feels. Originally, we had the Startup Diary paywall as a means of funding everything else, but once we didn’t need that anymore, it wasn’t worth it…

KK: We’re too much like people people, and not like business people. We just want to make friends and have fun and be able to buy chicken. We also don’t want to be business people. We want to focus on our creative lives. Our ideal situation is to get Chill Subs to the final form, get assistants, offload the horrible workloads, and focus on the creativity. People start companies wanting to be in the business—we don’t want to be in the business.

BD: Gosh, I never want to do business again. You should see us trying to speak with lawyers and accountants. Watch the faces of our accountants. Like, “What the fuck are these people talking about?” You can tell when they get us on a call and they ask, “So what’s this over here?” “Oh, that’s the education arm. The Forever Workshop.” “Oh, that’s when we tried to sell merch for two months and it totally shit the bed…”

KK: “And this is Karina, she’s from Belarus but she’ll go to prison if she goes back, so she’s in Georgia, and she needs her documents. So please, set up a form for her.” They’re just like, “please, make it nice.”

WM: There’s the chaos of creating the company, but you’re also deeply involved in the submission process. You talk with magazines, publishers, editors. You’re there. Is running Chill Subs the perfect job for a writer?

BD: Working for Chill Subs over these years, I feel less like a writer and more like the member of a community. I’ve realized that so much of the problem has been barriers that separate people. I’ve been amazed meeting editors from big magazines and seeing that they’re just nice, cool people who’re trying to create something great.

So, the focus became all the ways we can open up the literary world. Not, “this benefits me as a writer” but, this is a whole community of people where there is no good communication method. As a writer, that’s the biggest value I’ve taken from all of this. The importance of editors and also the miscommunication with editors. Somebody needs to get everyone in a room together and just say, “Hey, we’re all people here trying to create something and each of us have a part.” I think of editors and writers as siblings. We fight but we’re siblings—we’re together forever and we need each other.

WM: Almost three years in, are you able to step back, look at everything you’ve made, and relax?

KK: This year has been simultaneously less stressful and more stressful. We have money so we’re able to relax a little bit and not work 15-hour days and worry about rent. But then at the same time, with the size of the company, we have to go through new levels of quests. When it was just Ben, we had random ideas and put them out in a week. Now, with the whole team and the whole audience watching we want to do things right. So, we’ve been working on two massive releases almost this entire year. This very different style of work has been interesting, but we can’t wait to and go back to the fun, small updates.

BD: Now, we know it’s going somewhere. For the first two years it was still—this could all explode and we will have done everything for nothing. We would have just spent two years of our lives on a nice little memory. Now it’s on its way somewhere.

KK: It’s stressful, but calmer stressful. We know it’s going to be all right.

The post Chill Subs Is Reimagining Literary Community, One Submission at a Time appeared first on Electric Literature.