Yes, We Have Been Here Before, and I Have Come to A Decision
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.
the entire process of submitting stories to the sorts of publications you are talking about is degrading to the writer and to literature. i don’t submit to those places anymore and i don’t read their stuff either. to me the point of submitting work and having work published is to engage in some sort of dialogue, to share your work with a person you respect or a publication that thrills you. to have some half drunk 20 year old at some stale “important” print institution give me a slip of paper that says how much they value my submission is ridiculous. and what does it mean to have a story placed at one of these faceless valueless publications? as you say, nobody but the staff reads these publications and most often the staff of these places is only there because they want some tidy notch on their resume–not because anything is really at stake for them. why have your work devalued by people who don’t care about literature as much as you do? to me that has nothing to do with what being a writer should be about.
Yeah, I kind of feel the same way. I mean, there are some of those publications that I do think produce genuinely good publications–but to me it’s more worthwhile and interesting to develop real relationships–a conversation, like you say–with editors who are more intimately involved with their publications and have more of a stake in their content.
Sent from my iPhone
word. truly. I went from semi-depressed to a little jovial.
Glad my pissy little rant could do some good.
I actually started writing this because I have had a piece sitting at a magazine for something like thirteen months, and went and checked Duotrope and said magazine had like 20 percent non-responses–not withdrawals, which were like another 20 percent–but 20 percent of their submitters that they just never ever bothered to respond to! I mean, that is just inexcusable, and yet this literary magazine is regularly lauded and gets regular circulation in all the chain bookstores. I pulled my piece and decided not to waste my time with these places anymore. Not to somehow ‘punish’ them, because lord knows they won’t miss my writing. But just for my own mental health and sanity, and because I consider myself professional in the work that I do and deserve to be treated with the same professionalism.
Sent from my iPhone
Amen.
I quit submitting to these mags before the Internet cropped up to fill the gap. It kind of saved me.
Since Ploughshares and some of the others have electronic submit, I’ll still play the lottery. But the ones with electronic submit tend to be professional, so waiting, I try not to think about it. And yes, 90% solicited. So they should probably tell people that upfront. I think Tin House actually does.
But OMG have you dealt with agents? You send a query and they ASK you to send the MS, sometimes a paper copy. 90 days is the minimum, 6 months is common, just got two back recently that were over a year. Generally unresponsive or when they do comment they are rude or they give themselves away as not having the skills to really judge. A semi-famous agent sent me a reply that apologized for taking too long but she “just couldn’t let it go.”. For a rejection I felt pretty good, until I Googled and saw she was telling Everyone that, even writers with screen names like Elf Witch 47. If I lived in NY I might have murdered her that day.
Right on, Amber. I couldn’t agree with you more. This really made my day. I know my dreams of publishing in The Paris Review or The New Yorker are just ridiculous. So, I’m probably just wasting all of our time, especially since like you said, the majority of work they publish is solicited. I will say that The Missouri Review, a journal I really love, responds in a reasonable time, and I’ve gotten several personal hand written notes saying things like “Keep submitting”.
If you want to take the power back, then set up your submissions in tiers, and if you want to hedge those bets, send them so they all hit at the same time. Whoever takes your story first, well, they’re the lucky one. I wrote a column on simultaneous submissions that might be worth checking out too:
http://whatdoesnotkillme.com/2009/08/31/simultaneous/
@John – that seems a bit long to wait. Most ask for a query, then reject quickly. But going from query to partial to full, that can take some time, for sure. I know that when I first starting submitting to agents, I routinely had them ask for an “exclusive read” but usually got the manuscript back in about 30 days. Haven’t landed one yet, but I’ve found that they usually reject even faster. But obviously reading (or skimming) 80,000 words takes more time than a 3,000 word short story.
Good luck all.
Thanks, Richard. I’ll probably still submit to the Paris Review and the New Yorker, just because I pretty much write those off as soon as I send them and I know full well how ridiculous it is to submit there.
It’s the just-underneath-those mags that are usually the worst…and you’re right, the Missouri Review is actually really great. I’ve had good experiences with them, too. Your column has some good advice in it–thanks for the link!
Glad to help. We’re all in this together. Do you care to name the publications that have frustrated you? I’d wouldn’t mind eliminating them from my list. Can I just assume they’re on the Duotrope slowest list? Or do you mind naming names? Shoot me a private note to wickerkat@aol.com if you’d rather not dish in public.
Hey, Richard- I’d rather not name names in public, but yeah, I’ll shoot you an email.
I love how you move from not-judging to full-bore rant, Amber. It’s fun to follow your train down those tracks.
I’ve found it’s the same — or worse — with pitching (some) independent publishers. Of course, I realize that it takes time to read three chapters or a complete manuscript, esp. when the submission load must be insane, but I’ve followed up with an email note or three many months up to a year after first submitting to which I’ve received no reply, and this is even after I’ve enjoyed face-to-face conversation with said publisher or we’ve communicated via email on other matters in the past. Funny, too, because I wonder how much better a job at packaging, marketing, distributing and selling books some of these wee presses can do v. DIY.
My take? Until there’s real money involved, there will never be universal professionalism in lit-arts subculture.
Thanks! I realize I am probably clinically incapable of not-judging, really. But I try.
I think this is SO dead-on: “My take? Until there’s real money involved, there will never be universal professionalism in lit-arts subculture.” It’s funny, because I was just talking to a musician friend about how so often, the same bands or musicians that are dead professional and such good performers onstage, are often sloppy at weddings and other events–that it really takes money, even among friends, to boost a performance to that higher point. Same probably often holds true in lit, too.
i agree . . .but then I had a story taken by a really good journal after—thanks to duotrope for allowing me to know this—562 days.
Can you tell us the name of this fine publications?
happy to tell you via e-mail, not publicly. (i haven’t yet seen the galleys for this story.) my website has contacts.
I’m effing loving this post. I agree with jesusangelgarcia–your progression from not-judging to full-blown rant is great.
I have even less patience than you right now (six months is my limit) and I’m only twenty-three years old! I really believe that six months is reasonable, unless we’re talking about a full-length ms. IMO, anything less than full-length and more than six months is getting unprofessional. Whether or not the writer and/or editor are getting paid, professionalism should be applied to all submissions/correspondence by all parties involved. There’s no excuse for anything less because you aren’t being forced to do this. Don’t do it if you can’t hang.
Thanks, Dawn. I’m glad to know it’s not just me being an old fart.
Great piece.
“Rejecting someone in your submissions software but never letting them know?”
I always had a hunch some mags did this. Can you tell me which ones and how you know this? Privately, of course. Thanks.
Yep, sadly more than a couple times. I don’t know how this happens because with Submishmash, for example, you automatically send the person an email when you reject or submit. I don’t know why all systems wouldn’t be the same. I’ll shoot you an email with the ones I’ve had this experience with.
Oh, and I know because I went to check on my status of my submission, and hey, presto: rejected. But I never was told.
I prolly should’ve left my email
dmoreau at g m a i l
I agree with your post, Amber, but somehow I still can’t break from submitting to mags that take a long-ass time to respond. I think part of me is morbidly curious to see just how long it will take. Still, there are many pretty well-known pubs that do respond fast–Ninth Letter, NOON, Tin House–so it’s not as if it’s impossible for a mag with a massive queue to respond in a timely manner.
Anyhow, here’s a relevant link you may enjoy, if you haven’t read it already:
http://www.jasonsanford.com/jason/2010/05/six-years-rejection.html
Thanks for the link–six years is crazy. I can’t believe they wouldn’t have just curled up in embarrassment and not sent that.
I do a few of the long-timers that I know are just pipe dreams anyway–kind of like playing the lottery. And yeah, I forgot NOON–they’re really good about getting back to you, and pretty fast.
I couldn’t agree more with this whole post, and I think a full-scale rant about it was needed and, to be honest, long overdue. My only consolation about these magazines that take So. Unbelievably. Long. to respond to submissions – or those who aren’t even bothered with responding – is that in this day and age, and in an era of such instant technology, such dinosaurs have surely got to become extinct soon, haven’t they? Haven’t they? Please? Unless, of course, we keep feeding them morsels that somehow convince them they’re still needed …
Brilliant post, though. Thank you for (admittedly probably only temporarily, since I am a misanthrope) restoring my faith in the human race.
Vaughn, I agree so completely. I just can’t believe that these magazines are at all relevant or will remain so, unless they change. How could they? Especially (and I didn’t even get into this) those magazines that won’t let you subscribe or buy online, and you have to print out a damn form and pay for a stamp and mail it. That’s just asking for people not to buy your mag. And a few of my faves do this, too–I just want to help them by showing them how to set up a Paypal account. And I’m old, relatively! I don’t know old you are, but i can’t imagine anyone under 25 putting up with any of this dinosaury nonsense.
Glad to help renew your faith in man, albeit temporarily–from one misanthrope to another.
AND…there are still places that ask you to print out a copy and mail it in. AND I do it. Mostly because I still want to publish there. I was just going to say that I’m surprised that The Missouri Review, such a hip place, always getting stories in the BASS, isn’t online yet, as far as submissions, and WHAM, they are! Wow, guess I haven’t sent in anything in to them in awhile.
It is interesting though, the times that I have printed, stapled (or paper-clipped, per regulations) a story, written out the address, signed the cover letter, stuck a stamp on there and thought to myself…hell, this must eliminate a lot of submission bombers. This must remove the riff-raff. And I think, great, less submissions.
Then I think, crap. OR, it’s just whittling it down to those writers that are REALLY serious about getting in, so even if they’ve reduced the overall submissions by 30%, the ones they DO get, they must be really good.
Crap.
Either way, it’s still tough out there. The one thing I liked about mailing in to TMR was getting the occasional “Keep submitting” note. I live for those.