Saturday, September 7, 2019

Submissions and Slush Pile Update #5


STUPEFYING STORIES IS NOW CLOSED TO UNSOLICITED SUBMISSIONS


If you’ve sent us a submission recently, you should by now have received our “acknowledgment of submission received” reply, which includes your manuscript tracking number. If you haven’t received our reply, please query, as it most likely means we never received your submission. In the past we’ve had writers wait patiently for ridiculously long periods of time, hoping to receive our reply to a submission we never received. We’d like to avoid that this time around.

If you have sent us a submission and have received the acknol email with tracking number, relax. With a few exceptions, every story that’s come in to us in this reading period is being tracked and is somewhere in the reading → evaluation → acceptance|rejection pipeline. The exceptions are a batch of stories that came in early in the reading period that were held over for multiple re-reads and further discussion—in some cases, a lot of further discussion—that we eventually decided to reject with critiques. I remember writing these critiques in early July, but have found out that some were never sent. I’m not sure exactly why this happened, but expect to have the submissions files audit finished and everything sorted out by next weekend.

One final note: this time around, we decided to collect and track some metrics and statistics we’ve never tracked before. One particularly interesting one is that in this reading period, we received, read, and evaluated roughly 2.7 million words of fiction.

No wonder three of our slush readers got burned-out and quit.


4 comments:

ray p daley said...

I've just sent you a query, with tracking details. 119 days since sub. I won't assume it's a rejection, probably just Bruce waiting with my other feedback. Odds are it IS a rejection though.

Guessing you were busier than normal this time around as you've normally been fairly good at getting back to me in a timely manner. This is over double the time my "nearly" was though.

~brb said...

Ray,

Our submissions records show two stories received from you this year, 1905013, "I Hide Behind Cardboard Cliffs," received 5/1/19 and rejected 5/12/19, and 1905110, "Fillers," received 5/13/19 and rejected 9/9/19. Were there any others that might have slipped through the cracks?

-Bruce

ray p daley said...

I was just waiting on Fillers, thanks for the update. Definitly haven't seen an email on it yet though, were you holding it for my "Mushniks Guitar" feedback?

ray p daley said...

I didnt get the rejection for Fillers, if its possible for you to resend that please? Might be easier to drop me a tweet @RayDaleyWriter
I was also only really waiting on my feedback for Mushniks Guitar.