Is there a quicker way to summit articles to article directories?

It's best to do it manually or pay a freelancer. Bots can get you banned and then you have lost all the hard work you put into it.

 

2 things:
1) Webmasters typically have no clue if an article was submitted using notepad and copy&paste or with a submission tool. The web server treats both as a POST, the script takes the POST data and displays it for the webmaster to review. Anyone who thinks there is some magical alarm that goes off when an article/link/post is submitted with software needs to do more learning.
2) You won't get penalized for submitting the same article to multiple sites. The duplicate content penalty affects webmasters who create duplicate pages on their site in an attempt to make their site appear to have lots of stuff about a subject. For example, if I create 5000 pages using the exact same widget article in an attempt to look like a site with tons of information about widgets, I will be penalized. On the other hand, there is a duplicate content filter which gets applied when lots of sites publish the same content. This is best exemplified by news websites that publish AP news stories. None of them modify the AP story; it gets published verbatim. When I search for that story, Google has to decide which of those thousands of news sites to display first. It does this by filtering those sites to find the best source for that story. Notice however taht this does not affect AP at all...they still get their story read. What that means for you is that you can submit your article, verbatim, to all the sites you want, and it is then up to those article directories to work to become the best source for your article. This is why publishing your own articles on your own site is ill-advised...why compete with hundreds of article directories?

So, my advice is to get yourself a nice submission program or pay someone else to submit it. I myself use digixmas.

 

If you have a lot of articles I would pay someone to submit them for me, it costs few bucks an hour very cheap.