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May Roundup: We Gave the Browse a Summer Glow-Up

A roundup of all of our new and shiny features, updates, and milestones

Welcome to our monthly changelog—a roundup of the new features we’ve released, updates we’ve made, and milestones we’ve reached. Honestly, it’s so good to see you.

May certainly kept us busy. We did a bit of housekeeping, hit some new numbers, and added lots of new filters to our Browse. You know. Just workin’ on our summer bods. You can jump right in and explore or let us tell you a bit about it below.

Recent releases

A screenshot of our Browse page, including our new filters. "Format" and "Subgenre" are highlighted, and a black tutorial bubble underneath reads "Tailored to your genre. Format covers length plus word/piece limits, and Subgenre narrows things further."

Mmm, filters.

We’ve added lots of new updates to the Browse, including filters for:

  • Formats and Genre: Now, you’ll be able to get even nittier and even grittier with suggestions tailored to your genre. Pick “Poetry,” and you’ll be able to narrow mags down by form. Choose “Fiction,” and, well. You get the idea.
  • Vibes: We finally wrote descriptions for our Vibes filters. So if, for example, you were wondering what exactly our “Top tier. Not Paris Review, but pretty close” label is all about, now you know. (They accept <3%, respond within 6 months.)
  • Quick Filters: You can now automatically filter for mags that are open, charge no fees, and/or pay, and get your shortlist with haste.

To see more, head over to the Browse and navigate to the “Show tour” button in the upper right corner for a proper preview.

There’s a lot more in the works, so keep your eyes peeled for even more updates and releases! But not literally. Please do not literally peel your eyes, ew.

Milestones to brag about

We’re up to 87,244 users and counting, a 4% increase from last month. For context, we started the year with 75,000 users, and we’re hoping to reach 100,000 (!) users by the end of the summer. So be sure to spread the word to your friends, and also your enemies. That goes for you too, affiliates.

We hit over 355,581 tracked submissions, a whopping 56,000 more submissions than in January. Now we’re writers, not arithmeticians, but we’ve done the math: That’s about four submissions per writer. Y’all are on a roll. (You are using the tracker, right?)

As of today, we’re at a total of 6,802 opportunities in our database—that includes magazines, journals, contests, etc. You can take a peek at some of the magazines we’ve recently added to our database here.

What writers are using the most

Wondering what folks were into this May? Last month's most popular keyword searches were mostly mags. When folks weren't filtering by genre, they looked for specific mags. Keep aiming high.

  1. One Story
  2. Agni
  3. Split Lip
  4. Swamp Pink
  5. New Letters
  6. The Offing
  7. The Sun
  8. The Adroit Journal
  9. Brevity
  10. Apex Magazine

That's all from us for now. Thank you, as always, for being a part of Chill Subs.

Rachael Vaughan Clemmons headshot

rachael vaughan clemmons

rachael is the Senior Editor of Chill Subs. Sometimes writing, always procrastinating.

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