A Distressing Trend for Writers of Short Fiction
*Author’s Note*: I pulled this image from a website in which some HR managers were answering a question about candidates for work/school where this has become standard practice. I find it both ironic and somewhat prophetic that the rhetorical image used to portray and normalize this behavior is drawn from a movie glorifying the Mob/Organized Crime where fear, threats/intimidation, and outright violence and murder are also considered “acceptable” business tactics–food for thought, don’t you think? So, my response to those on that website who think that candidates (read writers, for my purposes) are whiners on this subject–yeah, job candidates/school candidates/writers, etc., are also all humans, not cogs in some giant “wheel” and I don’t care how much of buyer’s market it is out there–it is still unacceptable not to update candidates/writers on their statuses. Courtesy is “Good Business” as well!
In the world of writing short fiction, there’s a distressing new trend that’s emerging that I assume will become standard practice for many markets in a few years. While I don’t want to be another “angry voice” on the internet, I do feel that it is important to call attention to practices that are not fair to the writer. Charging writers fees to submit is something that gained prominence in the early to mid 2000s. While it remained controversial for that time, it has become normalized and there are many, many markets who would like to make their money both off the writers who submit work to them, hoping for publication and from the readers they hope to sell the work to in the future.
Submit All You Want, We Still Don’t Want to Talk To You
So, to be brief, I’ve noticed that now many markets want to actively submit works from writers, but now they no longer want to respond to you. More and more, I’m seeing markets that say that editors will not respond to every manuscript they receive. On Duotrope, the listing notes that you should wait “a reasonable amount of time . . .” to wait for a response before assuming that the submission has been declined.
“A reasonable amount of time?” BWHAHAHAHAHHAHHAHAHA!
I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be dismissive or sarcastic, but . . .
BWAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHHAHAHHAHAHHAHA!
Okay, sorry, no more laughing fits. A “reasonable time” to me is one month or 30 days. Fully 75% – 80% of my submissions have been been longer than this with a couple at the 9 month mark. What I might consider reasonable is (obviously) going to be different from someone else–and since I can’t say yes, publish this and cut me a check, only they can, then I (as a writer) need them to actually make a decision and let me know the result.
A Slow But Steady Trend Away From the Editor/Writer Relationship
One of the reasons why I’m a little more cutting in this blog post than I might normally be is that I see it as yet another way that certain markets are trying to distance themselves away from the very writers they (say) they need. In the 1950s and 60s, fiction writers used to get feedback from editors about their stories. Tolkien, for example, “shopped” Lord of the Rings around to different publishers because he was distressed at the initial feedback that he reportedly received from an editorial reader (not the publisher himself, btw, who was the only one empowered to buy the work) if I remember the story from the Tolkien biography correctly.
In the 1970s and especially in the 1980s, the big thing became the “rejection slip” where rejections were preprinted on little slips of paper with a “canned” rejection notice on them–maybe there was a handwritten note on the back of them, but more often than not, it was just the slip.
Writers retaliated by going to Simultaneous Submissions (SS), which was also a reaction against very long wait times to hear back from markets (just to get a “rejection slip”). The thinking was that SS helped writers maximize their time and energy by sending out stories to a bulk of markets, hoping on finding just the one or two that were interested.
Then came Reading Fees, which I’ve noted in a previous blog, are not helpful to writers. Reading fees were once the province of “contests,” but they’ve become more mainstream in the intervening years and now you can see them in certain magazines as requirements before submitting work.
Why This is Bad For Writers
One of the reasons why “open submissions” (i.e., “the Slush Pile”) exists is because it is expensive to keep people on staff and on payroll to create content. For most markets, it is way cheaper to buy content as needed rather than to pay salary and benefits to someone to always be available to produce content. That’s why you have “submissions.” With things like Rejection Slips, Reading Fees, Agented Submissions, and the like, markets seem to be intent on removing any vestiges of human contact between editors and writers, and trying to turn writers (who are pesky human beings) into commodities that produce work and nothing else. Many of these markets keep trying to create their own version of the “phone tree” system in which they never have to interact with the writers they are actively solicit work. The easiest way to not have to deal with writers is to close submissions and have an on-staff writer–but let’s see, a year’s salary plus benefits vs $50 per story and you only buy 10 of those a quarter. 10*50 = 500 (1 quarter). $500*4 = $2000 per year. Good luck trying to hire someone who will work for that a year.
And yet, those same markets now want to turn around and ask you to submit work to them, but don’t want to take the time to let you know whether you were accepted or rejected. “Assume if you’ve not heard from us in two weeks/1 month/3 months/1 year” that your work is rejected.
Really? I, as a writer, can take the time to read your guidelines, make sure it matches everything as closely as you the editor/market requests, but you don’t have the time to reply to my submission. I’m to assume that I didn’t get in because you’re too busy to actually tell me?
Not to be “Mr. Angry Guy” on the internet, but I’m going to just say: if you’re going to solicit my work by allowing open submissions, then please do me the courtesy (and yes, it is a courtesy–an interaction between two humans) of telling me whether or not it is accepted.
If you’re too busy to do that, then I respectfully submit that you are too busy to be in business in the first place. Or maybe consider hiring that $15,000 a year on-staff writer that you seem to need rather than paying the $2,000 to us freelancers who are way too “needy” and “bothersome” just because we’d like to know definitely whether or not our stories have been accepted or not.
Sidney
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Currently Working On (7/2020):
“Project Wall” (Science Fiction Story)
Drafting: First Draft
Unhallowed (Weird Western Story)
Drafting: 2nd Draft (Working Draft)
Childe Roland Graphic Novel
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I, Mage (Urban Fantasy Story)
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