Publishing: October 2009 Archives

I've never been one for the shotgun submission approach. It used to be a waste of time (mine and the editor's) and money; these days it's mostly just a waste of time. Stamps, after all, cost money, and to do the equivalent of an e-mail attachment blitz meant the outlay of cash and supplies. With the ever-increasing number of online venues for fiction of all sorts and print publications that accept online submissions, it's a trivial matter to send out two dozen tales in the course of an evening. I tend to doubt that the folks who do that on a regular basis actually read through the publications they're flinging their words at.

I once sent an epic free verse poem full of cybernetics and pornography to Science Fiction Eye. I got some great comments back, along with what I took to be some implied advice: "While I'm pleased that you think of the Eye as a place for something as energetically weird¹ as your poem, we don't actually publish fiction or poetry." Whoops. The Eye was a non-fiction publication, which I would have known if I'd read a copy or two instead of just picking it out of the 1996 Writer's Market because it had "SF" next to its listing. Still, I considered that a nice and valuable note. The editor liked it enough to actually read it, respond, and not call me an idiot for sending it in. Small victories!

One of the virtues of the shotgun approach is that, if you blast off enough submissions and are at least somewhat coherent, you'll eventually get something into print or pixels, somewhere. Intermittent stimuli make for stronger addictions, so I suppose the occasional jolt of recognition could be enough to keep that process going. As for myself, I take a greater measure of satisfaction in targeting a specific publication that I like and seeing if I can match something I've written with its editorial sensibility. Some publications are just out of bounds: I enjoy The Georgia Review immensely, but I don't write things for a particular sensibility. So unless something strange and disturbing happens to its editorial staff, it's unlikely that my work will find a home there.

There are also certain publications that I like which are also Big Deals. When every author's bio in a given issue mentions five or six credits in other publications that I've actually heard of, that's enough to make my provincial heart go all pitterpattery. It's an especially fine sensation if I think I've got a piece or two that might actually fit in with the editor's grand plan for literary domination. I've got a couple of those venues in my sights right now: one's a new-to-me magazine that I'd love to be in, and the other's a magazine edited by someone who's got a piece in the first magazine that resonated with me.

But before I submit, I'm waiting for two copies of the second publication to arrive, because I haven't actually read it yet, and what someone produces as an author isn't necessarily the same as what he chooses to publish as an editor. One copy is the first issue with that author serving as editor, and the second copy is the latest issue, which ought to provide a neatly bookended overview. I'd love to be able to do more extensive delving, but I need sleep and my life is full of burgeoning chaos, so I do what I can and hope it's enough to keep me from any obvious foolishness, like sending a story about buggery and death in the brothels of Morocco to a magazine that specializes in publishing romances involving 19th-century botanists.

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¹"Awesome," thought I. "I am Energetically Weird!"