This chapter addresses various issues that authors will have to deal with before manuscripts are submitted. It discusses how students initially thought about pre-submission work, how students and researchers experienced in the real world through three cases, and three major concepts related to what the pre-submission phase means, how to pass the initial editorial screen, and how an online journal management system works. It ends with three practical suggestions, including preparing a mature and well-developed manuscript so that it can pass the desk rejection and enter the peer review process, emailing the journal editor the pre-submission inquiry and checking the fit, and asking good colleagues or even senior faculty members to have a pre-submission review.

After deciding the target submission date, the second planning strategy is to choose the target journal. It could be through the process of finding the two best fits, the author–journal best fit and the journal–author best fit. After presenting students’ intuitive thoughts and four real cases (Chi, Laurel, Justin, and Liz), the chapter discusses multiple core concepts, that is, impact factors, professional rewards, readership benefits, turnaround time, and desk rejection. Based on the discussion of students’ intuitive thoughts, four real-life cases, and four core concepts, several strategies can be used to choose our target journal wisely: finding the first best fit, that is, the fit between the needs of authors and the features of journals. Consider our professional needs, and then search and choose a target journal; finding the second best fit, that is, the fit between features of journals and the needs of readers; developing a shortlist of target journals as early as possible, and reading the latest three issues of these journals and finding at least three-to-five articles.