Status Update: 10/23/2018 ~ Stupefying Stories Magazine

Tuesday, October 23, 2018

Status Update: 10/23/2018

By ~brb October 23, 2018 No comments

With the 2018 reading period all wrapped up, we’re deep in the throes of book production. If you submitted a story to us in 2018 and have NOT received either an acceptance or a rejection from us by now, please query, as it means something has gone off-track.

If you’ve received an acceptance from us and have replied to it, the next step is that we will send you a contract. We use Adobe Sign to do e-contracts with e-signatures, so if you have an acceptance from us, please watch for email from Adobe. Admittedly, the email message Adobe sends out is kind of generic and spammy-looking, so we’ll be sending redundant messages from submissions@rampantloonmedia.com to let you know that we’ve sent your contract, and if you haven’t received it, to check your junk mail or spam filters to see if it’s stuck there by mistake.

Once you receive the contract, you must click on it in two places, once on the signature line to add your e-signature, and then again down at the bottom of the second page to send the contract back to us. If you don’t click in both places, your contract gets sent to Adobe Document Cloud Hell, where it will remain trapped forever—or until Katherine gets tired of waiting for it to come back and goes into the Adobe administrative interface to delete it.

Actually, it’s a lot like a print spooler. Once a contract gets stuck halfway through the process, the easiest thing for us to do is to delete it and start over.

Assuming you do sign, though—and remember, we won’t publish a story without a signed contract—we will then countersign and file it, at which time Adobe will send a PDF file of the signed contract to you. Save that email! Adobe will also send us a copy of the signed contract, and we’re darned near religious about backing up our files and then saving backups of our backups, but its always possible that a digital catastrophe might occur, so don’t count on us to save a copy of the contract for you.

If you have further questions about contracts, the best email address to use is contracts@rampantloonmedia.com. Just about everything that comes in here hits the submissions@ email account first, so it’s easy for queries to get lost in the noise.

Finally (almost), once we have your story under contract and scheduled to be published, your story will go to copy editing, for the clean-up edit. The resulting copy-edited file will be sent to you, for your final approval, from editing@rampantloonmedia.com. (I know, this may seem like a lot of email addresses, but it really does help us organize and manage our workflow.) This is your last chance to make minor changes to your story—no heavy rewriting, please—and to send us your updated author’s bio and (optional) photo.

Once you get back to us on the copy-edit, either with your changes and/or corrections or just to tell us that it’s perfect as-is—and yes, we do get it perfect the first time, from time to time—the real fun starts, as we begin to build the book. There are a lot of behind-the-scenes considerations that go into creating a book or magazine: for example, does cover illustration candidate #2 get the spirit of the cover story?