Welcome to this week’s installment of The Never-ending FAQ, a constantly evolving adjunct to our Submission Guidelines. If you have a question you’d like to ask about Stupefying Stories or Rampant Loon Press, feel free to post it as a comment here or to email it to our submissions address. I can’t guarantee we’ll post a public answer, but can promise that every question we receive will be read and considered.
Today’s question comes from Luan, who asks:
“Does Stupefying Stories have a waiting period after publication? Some mags out there state that if you have had a story accepted or published by them, you must wait some number of months or reading periods before you can submit to them again, to make space for new unpublished authors. [...] One mag says to wait two years after being published before submitting again. Do you guys have something similar?”
Huh. They really do that? I mean, I’ve heard rumors of magazines that had policies like that, but have never understood why anyone would want it. If I like an author’s story enough to buy and publish it, that means I want to see more stories from that author, not fewer.
That’s how we wound up publishing Privateers of Mars, after all. Matthew Castleman sent us one great story about Jacob Rhys and his crew of space-faring scoundrels, and we liked it so much we asked if he had any more like it, and pretty soon he’d sent us enough stories to make an entire book.
So we made an entire book, and the fans love it.
But this idea of telling successful authors to wait before submitting again: I just don’t get it. To me, it smacks of misguided egalitarianism. My goal is to put out the best magazine I can publish. To do so I need the best stories I can find, from the best writers willing to write for what I can afford to pay. If someone sends me a story that’s so good I want to buy and publish it—you’d better believe I want to see more stories from them, and sooner rather than later.
Why would I want to handicap myself by deliberately not looking at more stories from a writer who has already proven they’re good?
I don’t know. Maybe it’s because of some defect in my character, or some terrible mistake in how I was raised. I can’t seem to remember any track coach ever telling me, “Bruce, you’re running too fast. Slow down and let the other kids catch up.” Nor can I remember any teacher or professor ever telling me, “Bruce, you’re too smart. Why don’t you slack off and let the other students feel better about themselves?” This idea of not striving to get the best stories I can get…
I really don’t know. But somehow I just can’t imagine John W. Campbell telling Isaac Asimov, “Y’know, Ike, I really like all these robot stories you’ve been writing lately, and the fans really love them. But why don’t you slow down and give other writers a chance?”
So to answer your question: no, we have no such policy. If you send us a story and we accept it, please send us another story. Soon.
Sidebar: We do ask that writers send us one story at a time, in order to help us better manage our first-reading queue. We have had writers send us all their unsold stories in one huge dump and tell us, “Just pick out the ones you like.” Don’t do this. When this happens, the answer invariably is, “We don’t like any of them.” Submit your stories en masse and they will be rejected en masse.
§
In the follow-up conversation, Luan made the observation:
“I can understand where it comes from. Some feel that new writers aren’t given a chance, and so the waiting period after being published is born.”
I keep trying to get this message across to writers but they don’t seem to believe it. New writers really do get the same chance everyone else does: when your story shows up in the slush pile. We really do read everything that comes in—or at least, we try to. Sometimes we receive things that are so bad it’s a struggle to make it past the first page.
But at this point in the process, the only things that matter are the quality of the story itself and whether it’s right for us at this time. We buy stories, not authors’ names, biographies, or lists of previous publication credits.
To cite Isaac Asimov again, back in the 1980s he said that even he couldn’t sell a story just on his name alone. It still had to be not merely a good story, but a better story than all the other stories the editor who saw it was looking at that month.
Once again, thanks for asking. Any more questions?
Kind regards,
Bruce Bethke
Editor, Stupefying Stories
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3 comments:
Bruce, this is too helpful, why don’t you post fewer of these so that other people can… 😉
Even more annoying are those that require anonymous submissions 😆
> anonymous submissions
We did try that, very briefly. For a time we "anonymized" submissions before we passed them on to our first readers, to give authors the most unbiased first read we possibly could. When we hit an incoming rate of 300 new submissions monthly, we had to stop doing that, as the admin work involved consumed too much time.
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