Things are taking a little longer than I’d hoped, in no small part because we got nearly 100 more submissions this year than last. So where I would’ve been almost done/down the home stretch, I’m just now cresting the hill. Of course, the problem is, I’ve already got way more stories that I really like than I have space for. Every really good story that impresses me is painful in its own way, because I know I’ll probably have to cut it or cut something else to make room for it. [This is why I could not care less about people who tell me “I’ll never submit to you because you said mean things about SFWA and BLM.”]
I’d say that the average quality for stories this year has been “very good” with most of the worst stuff being “it just didn’t grab me” or “it just wasn’t obviously going to knock a strong maybe off the bubble.” Sure, we’ve had a couple of stinkers and “obviously didn’t read the submission guidelines,” but they’re generally few and far between with the worst of them not even being included in our story spreadsheet [sorry guy who sent me a 6 paragraph story as email body text.]
If I didn’t send you a particularly detailed rejection letter, it’s because it’s incredibly exhausting to send out nearly 100 of these in one go, I don’t get off on writing rejection letters, and a lot of times the thing that knocked your story out isn’t something easily quantifiable [or I don’t have the energy to go into why a particularly oddly phrased paragraph or consistent non-standard punctuation or grammar usage made me give up in frustration half-way through while making light early editing notes].
Formatting errors or weird formatting is still not a 100% surefire rejection, but with the more stories we get, the more I have to consider “how much more time is it going to take me get this into layout than a story where I DON’T have to manually remove extra breaks between paragraphs?” or some such.
Anyway, now that the new Cirsova bank account is finally good to go and the July-August accounting has been tallied, offers are going to start trickling out over the next couple of weeks, so please bear with us and try to appreciate that 2 months is an incredibly quick turn-around time for submissions for most outlets.
- Read: 138
- Unread: 82
- Rejections/withdrawn: 90
- Read Stories Under Strong Consideration: 46
- Stories Officially Acquired: 3
Last year, we only had 130 stories, of which we purchased something like 34 or 35, for ~260,000 words of fiction.
Right now, we have something like 770,000 words of fiction officially “still under consideration,” with 337,000 in the “maybe” pile. So if I’ve already told you that we had to reject your story for space, there’s only a small chance I was just blowing smoke [especially small if we had to tell this to a past contributor…] Also those numbers mean that if we told you this, it’s not just some tiny thing around the margin where “if A withdraws” or “if B refuses our offer” that your story is magically on deck. I said that the average story was “very good,” so there’s a “very good” chance that there are easily a dozen or more “really great, but” stories ahead of your “very good” story. This is also in part why “I’ll give you my story for free/less than your stated rates” isn’t the magical key to jump your story to the head of the line.
Anyway, thank you again for bearing with us during another reading period, and we would especially like to thank everyone who has been magnanimous about their rejections.
In other news, the website is MOSTLY updated. Sidebar links now go to Amazon pages instead of Kickstarter pages, author pages have been updated with most recent titles, and the Contributors page has been updated to reflect contributors through the Summer 2023 issue. I still need to add Fall 2023 contributors and update the “Buy” page with more recent issues of the magazine.
At the risk of having a Jeb Bush “Please Clap” moment, please be sure to sign up for the Orphan of the Shadowy Moons kickstarter, which will be launching shortly after the Fall issue is out the door.
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