Letter to the Editors

When my friends and I started our literary journal, Off Season, we searched for a tool to manage submission reviews and were broadly disappointed. As the software engineer of the team, I started building an internal platform for receiving and reviewing submissions. As that project grew, it became more technically complex than the Off Season website itself. At the same time, I began to hear about other journals facing this same problem. So I decided to scion off the editorial review backend into its own app, Galley.

I believe there is an opportunity to build a fantastic and polished experience for literary journals. Modern tooling and software have made it possible for a project of this magnitude to be built by a single developer.

The mission of Galley is simple: be a polished platform for reviewing submissions for literary journals. That’s the focus, literary journals. Their needs are specific. Their budgets demand fair pricing. They don’t have time to waste on finicky systems or gluing together disparate platforms. I’ve seen and experienced some doozies as the husband of a writer.

With Galley, journal editors get a refined inbox modeled after Gmail and Linear. The tooling is elegant and powerful.

For a small zine or a curious editor, Galley is free. With a single editor plan, you can create a call for submissions, review work by yourself, and have a collected place for all the work you receive.

In our standard paid tier, three editors can work together with five reviewers. Editors can assign reviewers to give their feedback. Editors have final say on what gets accepted. Reviewers get notified and reminded to respond to the work.

This capability expands with the professional tier.

Need more? I’m working on a “department” tier with even more features. Non-editor admins, cycling reviewers and editors as the team cycles out every year, and custom domains for accepting submissions.

An editorial review platform is nothing without… submissions. Galley makes it easy to get folks submitting to your journal.

You can share your call for submissions with high-quality social media graphics. The call page offers a drop-zone for simple submission uploads. Every call gets a QR code you can put on signs for easy submission. With the professional tier, you get a custom email address where writers can email you submissions with their work attached. They get auto-uploaded into your submissions inbox, ready for review.

Galley is just getting started, if you have ideas about how it can improve, please offer feedback. I read every piece I receive.

Thomas