Submission Strategy: Ranking Response Times

If you’ve been submitting short fiction for long, you’ve invariably develop strategies for getting your work out there as efficiently as possible. I have a number of strategies, and the one that follows I use for a brand new story I haven’t written for a specific market. In that case, I generally prioritize which publisher I send a story to based on how quickly I’m likely to hear back from them. This breaks down into four tiers or steps, as follows.

Tier One – Rapid Response

These are markets...