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[alg]

Submission

A look at submission guidelines -- what they mean, how to read them, how to find them, and much encouraging to follow them.

Comments

[alg.livejournal.com]

Giving a deadline only makes editors annoyed. You don't get to give deadlines. We give you a deadline. We say, "Our turnaround time is usually six months," or whatever it is that we say. Then, if you haven't heard from us in six months and you want to know where your unsolicited submission is, you can say, "Your turnaround time on your website is listed as six months. Are you up to date? Do you have a revised date?"

When authors sending me unsolicited submissions give me a deadline, they get a form rejection the day I open the work.

Maybe it works differently in periodicals? I don't know.

[joannemerriam.livejournal.com]

Periodical editors have given me a whole range of opinions on this, from "that's a great letter, send it" to what you've said above. I remain confuzzled about what the right thing to do is - but I do think, if the magazine's posted guidelines say three months, and after six months I send a letter asking about my ms's status, and there's no reply, and then the one year mark goes by, then I need to be able to withdraw the material. I thought giving them an extra 60 days was nicer than pulling it immediately, on the off chance they were considering it.

This has happened to me four times (out of literally thousands of submissions, so it's not like it's common) and two of those times, the editor emailed me and asked me to resubmit. The other times I got no reply at all (one of those magazines turned out to have gone out of business; never did find out what happened with the other one, maybe I pissed them off).

I guess the difference between unsolicited novel submissions and unsolicited periodical submissions is that you can, presumably, submit your partial elsewhere while you're waiting for a request for the full (can't you? I've never submitted a novel), whereas I can't submit my poem/short story elsewhere until I hear back from them.

[zhaneel69.livejournal.com]

So you're saying you sent the 60 day deadline AFTER you've let it sit for the specified deadline?

That's a lot better than what I thought you meant by just saying 60 days for all unsolicted material.

And I can see that it would get a lot more positive responses.

Zhaneel

[joannemerriam.livejournal.com]

Oh, jeez, no, I don't specify a deadline in my cover letter.

In all cases the journal in question was at least nine months past their specified response time, and hadn't responded to a previous query about my ms status.

[huntergal.livejournal.com]

Hi, Lady!

Well, I finally succumbed to your suggestion to get a username (instead of continuing to quip off-blog...heh.) Since I also write for periodicals (several major ones), I'd say your advice holds there too. The turn-around can be just as long as books, because mags have "seasons" and the lead time can be from six-nine months. Send in a cool Christmas suggestion to a major monthly in October, and you're just about *guaranteed* not to hear back until the following August. Just last June I finally got an acceptance on a query I sent 21 months before. Yes, that's TWENTY-ONE---nearly two years. It's why I've always advised to send out a query and let it go. Just walk away and work on the next thing. My ideas file bulges. I have no shortage of ideas and having one sitting out there with the right editor for months and months doesn't harm me in the least. Heck, I'm STILL sitting on a poor lonely fan-fic novel that no one will ever buy because the series closed. Sigh...

Nice to be here, BTW. I've been spreading the word on your great insights! :)