Disabling Notifications for Unpublished Nodes?

Issue Summary

I'm working on a site that allows users to submit proposals for competitions. We've set this up so that users can save their entries and return to work on them later. Only when they are satisfied with their entry do they hit 'submit' and the entry is published.

We recently installed the Akismet module, and while it works as expected for filtering comment spam, it is sending out multiple notifications each time a user tweaks their entry as the node is still unpublished. Turning off all notifications would work but this isn't the best option as we still want to be notified of comments that need moderation.

Is there a simple solution that I'm overlooking?