Acolyte is a submission management system designed for small presses. When Haven Spec Magazine first started, we did everything by hand. Submission files had to be individually downloaded and shared among the readers, reader notes had to be collated and tracked in spreadsheets, and email responses to submitters had to be manually created and sent. There was no easy way to streamline all of the bread-and-butter processes for handling the thousands of submissions we were getting. Too much time was getting spent on the tedious bits, and that was keeping us from doing the fun parts—reading all of your amazing submissions. And so, Acolyte was born. Version one was buggy as all get-out, but it helped us figure out what we actually needed in a submission system to make our process run as smooth as possible. What you're using now is Acolyte v2.1, written is Svelte and using Flowbite components to be fast and easy to use. Because that's ultimately the goal of this submission system—to automate and streamline the boring bits so that 100% of our attention can be focused on the fun stuff, reading your stories and poetry, putting together new issues, and celebrating the mighty literary achievements of our authors.

The process is simple: an editor sets up a call for submissions, which creates a public-facing form that authors can submit to. These forms are customizable and easy to activate, deactivate, and anonymize. Authors who submit to these calls get a confirmation email, and their submissions are logged in the database. The press's readers can then access them through a dashboard, claiming and processing stories and poems using a variety of tiered rejections and recommendations. There's tons more, and if you're curious about all of the things that Acolyte can do, check out our features page which has a full breakdown of Acolyte's functionality.

Eventually, the goal is to offer Acolyte for use by other presses, but we are still finalizing it, so we're not quite there yet. If you are involved in a small press and think you might be interested, you can reach out through our contact form. For other questions, we can of course also be reached through the contact form, but be sure to check out the Frequently Asked Questions below first to make sure we haven't already answered them.

Writing all of our correspondence by hand and using templates that we had to manually update meant reading the first sentence of our standard emails roughly ten bajillion times, and they all started with something like, "Thank you for your submission to Haven Spec Magazine." And after the first bajillion emails or so, I got to thinking about how strange the words submission and acceptance are. We use them when we fling our precious docx darlings into the void, maintaining the quiet hope that this time our words might break through the noise and get picked up by a press. As I write this in December 2025, I have a single short story out on submission, now approaching day 100 in the queue. I've gotten rejections after less than an hour, and I've had holds dead-lettered after a year, but still I submit and hope for publication. That's the standard process in our industry, and it's impossible to imagine an alternative. But the word submit also means to cede power and yield to another's judgment. To be accepted, then, offers a kind of validation in that judgment. As writers, we submit, are judged, and achieve acceptance or not.

And so, I got to feeling like a very friendly torturer in a medieval dungeon. Thank you for your submitting! Thank you for subjecting yourself to our vague and idiosyncratic judgment! Thank you for letting us read your stuff and also for letting affect your brain chemistry with good or bad news! And that feeling made me think of cultists in DnD, because it seems like in every campaign I'm always finding myself in strange dungeons fighting evil cultists. But Cultist has too much weird connotation to be a good name for a submission system. Proper cultists always have acolytes, though, and while a cultist is always evil in DnD, an acolyte might serve any god, even Balador, God of Werebears, or Alobal Lorfiril, the God of Party Animals. So, I settled on Acolyte as the name. An acolyte might ask for submissions, but they need not be in a dungeon torturing people. An acolyte can swear their loyalty to joy and optimism and hope, and they need not demand that people submit themselves to be judged on high. And above all else, an acolyte is not in charge. Their judgment is not sacrosanct. So, through Acolyte, we emphasize that just because we pass on a submission doesn't mean there is something inherently wrong with it. We too are finding our way (to stretch the metaphor past its breaking point) as worshippers at the feet of this strange god of publishing.