The Editor’s Journey, Part 9: The “Real” World

 This was not a post I planned when I originally came up with the idea for this series, but in the last few weeks it’s become an important issue for me.  I’ve put up a couple of vague status updates that probably aren’t particularly satisfying for anyone, so this is something a little more substantial without going into much personal detail.  Everyone has time periods in their life when there are a lot of external forces pulling at them.  I’m going through one right now.

For the initial round of reading on Distant Worlds, I’d hoped to maintain a two-week response rate and managed, in spite of mediocre time management, to get every story back within about four weeks with an overall average response time of 16 days.  Knowing that I’d have more to do during the reading period for Distant Realms, I set myself a goal of an average four-week response time and I’m running about six at the moment.  I had hoped to get that down, but it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen.

Why?  The real world has been a bit more stressful than I’d been ready for in the last little while, involving a variety of personal, family, and work issues that just all came together at once.  That’s life. 

It would be nice to sit with the computer/notebook/camera/sketchpad/whatever and just create all of the time.  Very few of us can manage that.  Many of us have families and most of us need day jobs to help support those families, or at least ourselves.  If we do have families, they deserve some of our time.  If we have kids, well, they’re only kids for short while.

A six-week average response time isn’t bad when I look around to see what averages look like.  But it’s not what I originally wanted and it’s not going to get better unless I can somehow learn to not sleep.  That doesn’t seem too likely.

The real world isn’t an excuse not to get things done.  The real world is the one we all, like it or not, live in, part-time editors included.  Unless you’re lucky enough to be able to do what you love to do full time, you’re probably doing it in your spare time.  And when your spare time shrinks… you get the idea.

From my end, everyone who’s queried has been polite and understanding about life and time, and no one has sent me any hate mail yet.  In fact, the worst I’ve gotten is a litle poke about using the phrase “passive voice” when what I meant was “past continuous”, and that was good-natured.  Things are moving, just more slowly than I’d originally hoped for and the time bottleneck right now is me.  If you’re waiting for a response from me, thank you for being patient.  It is coming, and both of these anthologies are going to be great. 

The Editor’s Journey, Part 7: Tough Decisions

It’s been a while since I’ve done a post in this series, about a month in fact, and I thought, since I’m taking the next step in the process, that it’s time for another one.

We’re still a little way from the final push to publication.  Edits, layouts, cover art, proofs… yes, I’m simplifying and lumping things together, the point being that there’s still a lot to do.  But as the editor, the next step for me is create the Table of Contents: final acceptances and final rejections.  This means that I have to make decisions.  Tough decisions.

There are ten stories on my shortlist.  That means, according to the definition I set out in part 5 of this series, I’ve got ten stories that I really like.  Sounds great, but the specs given to me by my boss give me a word limit that will only accommodate five.  So from those ten I’ve got to pick the five that absolutely must go into Distant Worlds.

I’m not saying that some of the decisions I’ve already made haven’t been difficult.  I’ve found something to enjoy about every single story that’s come in.  A couple of them were very difficult to reject; a couple of really good stories I had a hard time reading as Science Fiction instead of Fantasy or Horror; and a couple of stories I’d really like to see blown out into full grown novels, two to three times the length they’re currently at.

I’ve got ten stories I really like, ten stories that drew me in, ten stories that at times made me forget I was reading for an anthology.  Five of those stories will have to look for other homes and novellas have been a hard sell for a long time.

But when it comes down to it, the editor’s job, the job I signed on to do, demands that you put together the best anthology you possibly can, that you make the tough decisions so your readers, when they finally put the book down, want to pick it up and read it again.

The Editor’s Journey, Part 6: Last Minute Panic

I know.  This is not a post on some other sub-genre of SF.  I still haven’t finished writing it yet, but it’s about Space Opera if anyone’s curious.

Just before I started writing this post, I updated the Progress page to reflect the current state of the Submission Queue and I tacked a little message on the end saying that the deadline is coming up fast.  I thought about that for a couple of minutes, and thought about it some more while I took the garbage out.  The deadline is coming up fast.  Just a touch over five days.

This is real.  In five days I’ll have all the submissions I’m going to have.  Sometime after that, I’m going to have to pick the final line up from my shortlist.  That’s hardly the end of the process, but this has suddenly become a lot more concrete.  I’m going to put together an anthology of really good SF novellas.  I might even say great.  No, I will say great.

Panic might be stretching things a little, but the pressure is on and there’s a lot of work ahead.  I can see the top of that first hill on the roller coaster, the one that’s drops you a couple of hundred feet into the corkscrew.  The anticipation is building in the pit of my stomach, but it’s going to be a hell of a ride.

The Editor’s Journey, Part 5: The Shortlist

So, if

Right Story + Right Editor + Right Time = Acceptance

And if changing any one of those three Rights to a Wrong makes the equation equal Rejection, where, exactly, does the Shortlist come in?  Not exactly in the middle – it’s far closer to an acceptance than a rejection, even though it might still result in a rejection.  But it isn’t quite an acceptance, either.

My definition of a Short List:

Shortlist: submissions received I really like.

Yup, that’s it.  There may be problems with the story or things I’d do differently, but on a fundamental level, if I put a story on the shortlist, I do it because I really enjoyed reading it, probably to the point where I had a hard time making notes as I went because the story kept sucking me in.  (As I side note, I make notes as I’m reading every submission.  It slows my reading speed down a lot, but makes things easier for me when I’m finished.)

Sounds like it should be an acceptance, doesn’t it?  So why use a shortlist?

Pros:

1. You get a better crack at the full field of what might be available to fit your theme.  “Until Filled” can work very well, but does run the risk of you getting only what people happen to have handy.  Accept the first X stories you like just enough to fill the volume, and you don’t know what you might have missed, especially if you’ve only got room for a few to begin with.  If you set your deadline so people have a reasonable chance at hitting it from a standing start, you’re likely to see a bigger breadth of talent.

Cons:

1. With that hard deadline, you always run the risk of not having enough material to fill the anthology.  How big a risk it is can depend on a lot of things, but it’s definitely non-zero.
2. If you’ve shortlisted more stories than you have room for, you wind up with a harder decision making process when the submission period is over.

Okay, so it’s not much of a pro/con list, but I’ve boiled it down to what I think is really important.  And you know what else?  Con number two is actually a Pro.

Taking Distant Worlds for an example, I’ve got room for four or maybe five novellas in the total length I’ve been given.  What if I shortlist ten? (Or more ,and that could certainly happen as there’s still more than a month for submissions to come in.)  Yes, that unfortunately means I’ll wind up disappointing five (or possibly six) authors whose hopes I’ve gotten up, but I think I’m also going to give those authors a good boost, effectively telling them their stories have a good chance at finding a home somewhere, even if it isn’t Distant Worlds.

As a writer, I’ve had a couple of “we really liked it, but it didn’t make the final cut” rejections.  Disappointing, sure, but the important part is that they liked the story.  If one person/group does, I’m sure I can eventually find someone else who does, maybe even someone who will publish it.

From the editor’s point of view, I’m going start with ten (or however many) really good novellas and have to choose the best four or five to go into the book.  That will force me to put together the best anthology I possibly could have, and that’s what the people who are going to read it want.

I won’t shortlist a story to fill numbers or to make the author feel good or because I’d feel bad writing a rejection.  None of those are good reasons.  There’s only one good reason to shortlist a story for the anthology or magazine you’re working on: it’s a really good story that you really like.  If the Shortlist makes my job as an editor tougher, I’ll live with that.  To my mind, or at least the way my mind works, it’s going to help me make the final product better.

I’m not sure what the next post in this series will be.  My plan for it is to step through final acceptances, edits and working with authors, proofs, publishing, and promotions (and probably more), but most of those are further in the future.  I have some other thoughts for posts outside The Editor’s Journey, but they’re still a little vague.  If anyone has an idea they’d like to see a post about, leave me a comment here or send an e-mail to distanteditor at gmail dot com.  I’m happy for this to be a conversation, too.

The Editor’s Journey, Part 4: Writing Rejections

Rejections are hard.  Anyone who tells you otherwise hasn’t written enough of them or has written too many without really caring.  As a writer, it’s important to develop a thick skin because rejection happens and early on it happens a lot.  As an editor, I think you need to beware of the assumption that everyone has that thick skin.  Not everyone does because it takes time to build it up and even once you’ve got it, someone can always find a way to slip a shiv in somewhere.  For example, a few months back, with a skin that would throw back spears, I received a rejection that said basically, “While the story was well written, when we reached the end of it, we wondered what the point was.”  Ouch.  Stung for a little while, but the next rejection I got for the story was closer to, “I liked it but it doesn’t fit with what I’m buying right now.”  Fair enough.  Maybe I’ll figure out the right place to send it someday.  I like the story, so I’ll keep sending it out until it finds a home.

The point of the matter is this:

Right Story + Right Editor + Right Time = Acceptance

Change any one of those three Rights to a Wrong and the equation equals Rejection instead.

So unless you’re an A-list author (and how many of those are there, really?), you can probably expect more rejections than acceptances.  The corollary would be that, as an editor, you’re going to send out a lot more rejections than acceptances.  Trust me.

So what goes into a rejection?  As a writer (Notice how I keep falling back on that statement?  As an editor, I’m still always trying to think about things from the writer’s point of view.), I’ve received four different kinds of rejections.

1. Form Rejections
2. Detailed Rejections
3. Positive Rejections
4. Good Rejections

There is a fifth kind.  I’ve been lucky enough not to get one yet, but have talked to people who have: the Rude Rejection.  And that might be putting it mildly.  The editor so dislikes the story that s/he feels the need to point out every single perceived flaw at length in an unpleasant rant.  There might have been a place for such unrestrained ego in the days before the Internet when communication took a lot longer, but even if there was a place for it in the publishing world, that place is gone.  Writers talk to each other and e-mail is a whole lot faster and easier than in snail mail.  Jerks don’t last long anymore.

So, the four primary kinds of rejections.

1. Form Rejections:  Polite, but not exactly informative.  Doesn’t tell you anything about why they didn’t like it.

Thanks for submitting “Wings of Fury” to Whizz Bang Adventure Stories, but we’re going to pass on it.  Best of luck in the future.

Signed,

The Editor.

2. Detailed Rejections:  A step or two above Form Rejections, the editor has taken a moment to tell you something about why s/he didn’t buy the story.  Your main POV was a cardboard character, the story ran to short or too long, you used far too many dialogue tags, etc.  Something to indicate why it was rejected.  Keep in mind what you get is one editor’s opinion.  If you get several of these saying the same thing, then take a look at the story, but until that point, you just need to send it out for a new opinion.

Thanks for the opportunity to read “The Groundhogs of War” but we’re going to pass on the story.  The majority of the story line seemed to hinge on the groundhogs’ ability to learn to operate complicated alien combat vehicles in an unknown language in only a few minutes which didn’t seem believable to us in spite of their intelligence implants.  We wish you luck in finding a home for the story.

Sincerely,

Editorial Collective

Whizz Bang Adventure Stories

3. Positive Rejections:  Also a step or two above Form Rejections, but in a different direction.  The editor has taken a moment to tell you something they did like about the story, but not why they didn’t buy it.

Thank you for submitting “Tim the Space Marine” to Whizz Bang Adventure Stories.  While certainly a fast-paced exciting tale, filled with crazy aliens and space battles, it just isn’t for us.

We hope you can find a home for it elsewhere.

Sincerely,

Alien Editorial Overlords

Whizz Bang Adventure Stories

4. Good Rejections: these combine Detailed and Positive Rejections, telling the author what you liked about the story and why it isn’t right for you/this anthology/at the moment.  This is the kind of rejection I try to write every single time.  It’s not always easy and it takes a lot longer than banging off a couple of quick details or copy and pasting a form response, but it’s a commitment I’ve made to myself.

Thank you for the opportunity to read “Howard Conquers the Land of Woon”.  Howard is an interesting and well presented character – it’s not often an accountant gets the opportunity to be an action hero – and the world is rich and well developed.  The main difficulty I had with the story was the switch from the civil war of the first two thirds of the story to fighting off the Watussi invasion in the last section.  I found the shift jarring, but it might work better with some kind of resolution to the internal conflict first.

While I’m going to pass on the story, I do wish you the best of luck in placing it elsewhere.

Sincerely,

Humble Editor Creature

Whizz Bang Adventure Stories

I know what kind of rejection I like getting as a writer (as much as I can like getting a rejection).  I also know what kind I get the least often.  It’s the same kind.

So, why am I writing “Good Rejections” instead of any of the others?  Why take the time and effort to tell people whose stories I’m not going to buy both what I liked and what didn’t work for me?  There are a couple of reasons, I suppose.  One, it’s ultimately more satisfying both to the author and to me.  The author is (hopefully) happy that I’ve given the story real consideration and explained my reasoning, and I can rest easy with myself that I’ve done the same.  Two, I can certainly find something to like in any story and shouldn’t the author have the opportunity to know what it is?

But the biggest reason is that the editor’s job isn’t just to pick stories, but to help writers craft the best stories they can.  Why waste time and details on a story I didn’t buy?  Because maybe I’ll like the next one you send me better.  Or the one after that.  And maybe next month or next year or some time in the nebulous future, I’ll come across the story I rejected in a different form and enjoy reading it with the tiny conceit that something I said helped you make it better, even if that’s not true.

Next up, the Shortlist Letter.

The Editor’s Journey, Part 3: Responding to Submissions and Queries

If the Guidelines are your cover letter, the response to query or submission is your first impression in a job interview.  How and whether you respond to a submission might depend on your available time, but I’d suggest that a couple of minutes spent on a semi-automatic response that lets the writer know you’ve got their story and you’re going to read it.  Here’s mine:

Thank you for your submission to “Distant Worlds”.  This message is to confirm that your story has been received and to let you know I’m reading stories in the order they arrive.  Final decisions on acceptances will be made when the submission period is over.  Initial rejections will be a little quicker, I’m afraid.

Sincerely,

Lance Schonberg

Editor, Distant Worlds 

Simple and to the point:  I’ve got your story and it’s in the list to be read.  And I’m reminding you that I won’t be making final decisions on acceptances until I’ve read everything.  It’s wordier than some acknowledgements I’ve received as a writer, and slimmer than others.  I’ve seen auto-responses ranging from a simple “Got it!” to a full page detailing exactly the path through the submission process any given story might follow.  The response itself is the most important thing – How else will anyone know you’re actually checking your inbox? – but my still is to put a little information in it, too. 

Queries can be a little trickier because each one will require an individual response, but I’d summarize the requirements into two words: be professional. 

That’s it.  Really.  You could put it a lot of different ways, but if you want to be perceived as professional, start by acting that way.  Don’t send any virtual sighs or eye rolls (probably avoid emoticons and smileys altogether, really) or tell people they need to read the guidelines which answer their question.  Answer the question, whatever it happens to be. 

Example: someone asks to send (or actually sends) you a story that exceeds your maximum word count by 5k. 

What not to say: “Read the guidelines, you dope.” 

Better tactic: “Thank you for sending me <story title>, but I’m afraid the length restriction of X to Y words set by my publisher isn’t flexible enough to allow me to look at including a story at Y + 5,000.  I wish you the best of luck finding a home for it, and certainly leave the offer open to resubmit if you feel willing and interested in doing a revision that brings it into my word range.” 

Ultimately, it isn’t fair to either of you to look at that story.  As the editor, you’ll spend time on something you don’t have a hope of including and you’ll get the writer’s hopes up of a potential story placement that just can’t happen, never mind tying up a story that could be out looking for a real home. 

Look at every query with fresh eyes and think about the response you’d like to get.  Be nice, be polite, be professional.  And be honest.  If someone wants to send you a story that obviously doesn’t fit your theme (if you have one), let them know that, but leave the door open for them so that if they can find a way, they’ll still want to send you the story.  Or another story. 

Yes, this is asking for a bigger time commitment.  Yes, form responses and quick one liners would be easier, but how pleasant are they to receive?  Yes, the age of e-mail has taught us that the first thing to spill out of your fingers is good enough for e-mail, but think about this:  pissed off writers won’t submit to you again.  Really pissed off writers will tell their writer friends not to submit to you.  We’re in the early phases of a Golden Age of Short Fiction.  Do you want to be part of it or not? 

Maybe none of what I’m putting in these posts sounds new to you.  I doubt any of it is new.  I’ve been reading editors’ commentary about likes, dislikes, wants, and not-wants for years, and I’m one of those people who reads the editorial or the forward in an anthology.  I could easily be rehashing old ground, picking out the bits I like and putting my own spin on them.  As of right now, I’m a first time anthology editor.  Your mileage may vary, but this series of posts is covering my approach to things.

Next up in The Editor’s Journey:  Writing Rejections.  And I’ll try to make it less than two weeks from now.

The Editor’s Journey, Part 2: Guidelines

The Editor’s Journey, Part 2: Guidelines

There’s probably a fair amount online about how to write an effective set As a freelance writer, I’ve spent a considerable amount of time reading guidelines.  Some sets are well written, some aren’t.  Some are very clear and straightforward in their expectations, some are vague and meandering.  I know which I prefer.

The Guidelines for your anthology are like a cover letter.  If they’re done well, I’ll bet you get more submissions than if they’re not.  Since I want more submissions, and (more to the point) more good submissions, it isn’t an experiment I’m willing to set up, so I decided to do the best job I could on them up front.  So I went back and looked at guidelines for markets I’ve submitted to recently, and read a couple of dozen over again, picking out the common items and concepts to go with my initial thoughts.

Here, in my opinion, is the minimum of what guidelines should contain:

1. General Intro.  Your welcome/mission statement.  The “pleased to announce” that really should include the title of the anthology.  Somewhere in here should be an invitation to submit.
2. Theme.  This can be very broad or very specific or somewhere in between, but it should be here.  Is it an inclusive Fantasy collection or specifically Sword and Sorcery?  Space Opera that has to include aliens?  Traditional Horror, but please no vampires?  If you don’t tell your potential writers something about what you are looking for, you can guarantee you won’t get what you want.  I’m told you’ll still get some things that miss completely, but if you act to minimize these, you’ll save yourself some frustration.
3. Length And Other Restrictions.  The length restriction is probably the most important – short, long, flash, a specific range, or if you really don’t care – but it’s important to note if you’re looking from a specific sector of society.  If you’re only open to writer’s who live in or are from a specific country or who are over 60 or who identify themselves as Left-Handed West Coat Immigrant Bagpipe Technicians, you really owe it to the people reading your guidelines to let them know in advance so if they don’t fit your profile, they don’t waste their time (and yours) submitting.
4. Timelines.  When do submissions open or are they open immediately?  Is there a deadline or are you accepting submissions “until filled”?  Both very important questions that may determine how many submissions you get and how quickly they come in.  Personally, I prefer a hard deadline
5. How To Submit.  Do you want e-mail or snail mail submissions or both?  List the appropriate address(es), file formats (if applicable), and subject line parameters to clear the hurdle of your spam filter if you’re taking e-mail submissions.  If you’re not taking e-mail submissions, think about it; it’s a virtual world out there and writers hate paying for postage.
6. Payment.  Are you paying for stories?  How much?  By the word or flat rate?  Do the authors of stories selected for the anthology get one or more contributor’s copies?  Inquiring minds want to know.
7. Story format.  Are you looking for standard manuscript format or deviating significantly from it?  Purely online/electronic magazines and anthologies sometimes have big differences or throw standard format out the window, but it’s usually a good bet to go with something approaching the industry standard.  Aside from providing people what they more or less expect, after a few stories, having everything formatted similarly will give you a feel for how long something will take to read.  Mr. William Shunn has possibly the best and most complete (and certainly most often referenced) example and explanation of just what Standard Format consists of.  Be prepared for a variety of interpretations as the stories come in.

There’s one other thing that may or may not be essential according to your particular anthology.

8. Caveats and Suggestions.  This is where you put things like a reference to Strange Horizons’ list of overused plots, and anything special or odd about your submission process.  Things you want potential submitters to know about fall under this category.

You can obviously go on and on with things you want and don’t want, like and don’t like, but there probably comes a point when you’ve written too much.  Too many restrictions might restrict the number of people willing to send you a story.

Tweak the Guidelines and rewrite them until you like how they read.  They’re a cover letter, a story.  Make them informative and easy to read.  Then post them and open the floodgates.

In Part 3 in this series, I’m going to talk about responding to queries and submissions.

The Editor’s Journey, Part 1: The Pitch

I’ve wanted to put together an anthology, or even periodic magazine, for a long time, years.  The time just never seemed right or I had too much on the go to think about starting something from scratch.  I have thought of putting together a pitch for one on more than occasion, but I always seem to read what a hard sell anthologies are at just the wrong moment.

But when opportunity knocks, grab that sucker by the collar and yank it inside where it can’t get away.  I grabbed at this one with only a vague idea of how much work it would be but thinking it would be a lot of fun and a good experience, too.

I hang out on the forums for the Library of the Living Dead Press (and its younger sister, Library of Horror Press), lurking significantly and occasionally posting.  I missed the beginning of a conversation of how Dr. Pus (the Publisher, Living Dead = Zombies) was thinking he might like to move into Science Fiction and Fantasy and did everyone think it was a good idea?

Things move quickly at LotLD sometimes, and within a couple of days, the Library of Science Fiction & Fantasy Press came to pass.  Doc said he was far more interested in getting novels running first, but would consider an anthology of novella length stories.

Excitement.  I consider the novella to be a much maligned and neglected length in any genre and would love to see more of them available for reading.  I’ve written a few which, if I ever find the time to go back and polish into final drafts, I’ll have a damned hard time selling, but it’s a good length for a more complicated story.  I offered to read for such a collection with the expectation was Doc would get someone who’d done a previous anthology for him to cover it.  Never hurts to let them know you’re interested even if you’re not in serious consideration.

Imagine my surprise when he offered me the job.

More excitement, followed immediately by the chilling realization that I had no theme, no unifying vision.  Except, after a few seconds thought, I knew I did, but it meant pitching a slightly larger idea.  A little electronic conversation with Doc, and the concept of Distant Worlds and Distant Realms started on the path to life.  Offered the task of editing one anthology, I weaseled talked my way into two.  And then the real work began.  At least I thought it did.  I know better now, a couple of weeks later.

Part 2 in this series, coming sometime in the next few days, will be about Guidelines.