How To Tell If A Publication Has Scheduled Your Story To Be Published

Cracking the code when big pubs are too busy to keep you in the loop

Submit. And wait.

Currently, I have a piece submitted to a large publication that tells writers it could take up to a week for submissions to be reviewed and another 7–10 days before being published. The wait is killing me.

After learning a neat trick for checking which tags your story was curated into, I wondered if I could employ the same technique to see whether an article had been scheduled by a publication or not.

I tested my hypothesis on the aforementioned submission. Nothing. But it hasn’t been quite a week yet so it’s possible that no one has even read it. I haven’t lost hope just yet.

Shortly after, I received a private note from the editor of a different publication in regards to a recent submission. She was kindly letting me know that it would go live in a few hours. Bingo — let’s test this theory out again.

There it was! The highlighted “scheduledPublishAt” was the code I was looking for.

If this is all looks like gibberish to you, it’s really simple to find and search. From Chrome, open the draft in your stories and click View — Developer — View Source.

In Safari, you may need to visit the Preferences in order to turn on the Develop option via a checkbox under Advanced. Then it’s as easy as Develop — Show Page Source.

Once you have the page source open, click command-f to open a search box for the code and type “scheduled”. If you’re rewarded with a match, congratulations! The publication has your piece on the schedule to be published.

Nikhil Vemu took my hack a step further and figured out how to tell what time your draft is scheduled to publish!

If your search comes up empty, it’s not a guarantee that your story was a dud. Perhaps it hasn’t been reviewed yet or their scheduling process lags a bit. But it’s nice to have one more tool in the toolbox to peek behind the curtain of your submissions.

Martin van Soest even created a script that you can install if you don’t want to search the code each time.

Go forth and get scheduled!

(Update: The story I was originally waiting on was finally scheduled and published. The wait paid off for my first contribution to The Writing Cooperative. Huzzah!)