A Short Rant About Submission Guidelines

I followed a link to an open call from a new publishing company today. They set up writers guidelines telling prospective writers what they’d like to see submitted, but neglected to mention a pay rate. The comments thread on their submission guidelines involved two people asking about pay rates explicitly, and both times the editor/publisher ducked the question.

I closed the page at that point.

I won’t call out the actual publisher that did this, because they’re not alone in this particular habit. I’ve spent years looking at writers guidelines as a writer, with another five years working the Australian Writers Marketplace where checking guidelines was part of the job. The good ones tend to put the word counts accepted and pay rates in easy to find places. By and large, when figuring out whether to submit somewhere as a short fiction writer, those two things will influence your decision more than anything else.

The very good ones – which often translates as goddamn professionals that are a pleasure to work with — will put it right up the top before you look at anything else. There is nothing I hate so much as reading 1,000 words of an anthology’s guidelines, outlining all the things the editor looks for, only to discover the important details are half-hidden at the end. I can understand the logic of this, but some writers just aren’t going to submit for a handful of cents a word regardless of how cool the theme is.

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I had three classes worth of assignments to mark land on my desk on Tuesday. About 180,000 words. or two novels worth, of fiction. As of 4:00 PM today, I’ve finished the first class, which means i’m skipping the customary week of procrastination and processing this round surprisingly rapidly.

Unfortunately, this fit of organisation does little to curb my grumpiness about the whole process. Largely this is a function of the online submission interface, which means doing simple line edits is an incredibly complex process compared to just using a red pen.

On the plus side, I have finished enough that I can justify taking a night off to run our regular Superhero RPG this evening. The players are scheduled to face an evil psychic and his mind-controlled mob, but the PC in charge will be away due to the player being away.

Invariably, this means things will get worse for the team without me doing a damn thing to provoke it. The players in this particular game have a talent for that…