Yes, We Have Been Here Before, and I Have Come to A Decision

September 6, 2010

I need to bend your ear a little on a topic you’ve probably had your ear nearly shattered by: submission response times. Yes, I realize that we have explored this topic in many ways in many different places; this will not be an exploratory sort of post. It will be more of a declaratory sort of a post. I will, in fact, be making a declaration, and it is this: I no longer intend to submit to places that either say they take or clearly regularly take nine months or more to respond to a submission.

I understand these publications are swamped with submissions. I understand it is so very, very, very hard for them. I really do. And I do not hold it against anyone who wants to take that long with a piece, or longer, for that is their choice and it is their magazine, not mine. I don’t claim that it’s wrong or unfair and I am not whining or being a baby or whatever you might call it. I am not judging at all. Rather, I am simply making a statement about myself and my own writing path and development, and the fact that I will no longer wait over nine months to be almost certainly rejected by tiny slip of paper or a cursory form email.

I am thirty-two years old. Time is suddenly starting to seem like a finite quantity, in all sorts of unpleasant ways.  I am much more impatient now than I was five years ago. Add to that the face that my writing is changing (hopefully improving) all the time and that the pieces I thought were great a year ago are now cringe-worthy. I’ve had many, many literary magazines sit on my pieces for nine months, a year, sometimes more. Sometimes they never bother to respond at all. In fact, despite or maybe because of electronic submissions, this seems to be happening more and more often, and sometimes they don’t even respond to queries. And ultimately, the dubious worth of having one of my pieces appear in one of these magazines, to be read by the ten people that still read said magazines when they’re in print and not online, is not enough. It’s not worth enough in the balance. It’s not worth the headache and the waiting and the checking and the resisting the urge to edit and the hope after so very long that it must be one of the finalists and the shattering of that hope after receiving the form letter that says nope, you were never even close. It’s just not.

And you know what? Screw not judging. I will judge. Not the nine-monthers, who may have their own reasons, but the truly unprofessional behavior I still see all the time in response to submissions. Here’s what I say, as an outsider, an interloper in the publishing/literary world: taking a year to respond with a form email that is two sentences long is not professional. That’s right. Rejecting someone in your submissions software but never letting them know? Not professional. Sending Xeroxed and chopped up quarter slips of paper for rejections? Totally unprofessional. Pretending you take shit from the slush pile all the time when really 99.9 percent of what you publish is solicited? Not professional. Sending rejections that say things like, “This was really pretty bad,” or “yeah, didn’t care for this at all?” So incredibly not professional.

I don’t mind rejections. I really don’t. I have an awfully thick skin and thousands of rejections to prove it. I don’t mind people taking a very long time because they are carefully considering my piece, and then sending me feedback or an explanation or even just bothering to put my name in the rejection letter somewhere. That’s fine. That’s great, in fact. What I mind is the unprofessional behavior that some very big magazines engage in regularly. Get your shit together, guys. Passion is not enough. Being a great magazine is not enough. There are plenty of print mags (because really, the worst offenders are almost always print mags) out there that are great and do the professionalism thing really, really well. (Annalemma, New York Tyrant, MAR, Gigantic, Tin House, PANK, Hobart, Ninth Letter, Caketrain, Gargoyle, Grist…I could go on and on.) If you don’t have the resources, the time, the help, the energy, whatever, to treat your slush pile peeps with basic professionalism–the kind that many of them have exhibited in carefully following all of your minute and exacting instructions to the letter and paying sometimes for the privilege of sending you their very best–then you shouldn’t be running a magazine. Being an artist is not an excuse. I was in theatre for years. If a theatre manager ran their theatre the way some lit mags run their operations, that theatre manager would be fired in a hot second. Truly. If a tour manager ran their shit that way, word would spread and bands and venues would avoid them like the plague. Same thing with a gallery curator.  If you wanted to run a magazine but you have no sense of timing or organization or you’re too busy with your own artistic career to run it properly, then stop. Step down. Find someone else to do it. Or hire people to help you. Find volunteers to help you. Do whatever it takes, but be professional, always, please. Not because you have to, because god knows you’ll always find enough people to submit to you, desperate for glory and exposure. But because you want to, because you should, because being professional elevates all of us in the writing world and what we do. Because.