Here are more we missed
Michael Antman’s excellent piece earlier this week, Poetry, Patience, and Rage, hit very close to home. Some of his experiences were mine; in fact, some were shared experiences between us. Michael refers to haiku he published in the late 70’s. They were part of a collaboration between us when he was working at the Chicago Board of Trade and I was working as a PR assistant for a machine tool company. Together we wrote more than 100 haiku and, ultimately, compiled 50 each, along with an introduction, under the title Here Are More We Missed.
The theme of Michael’s piece is, in part, the frustrations a young writer experiences trying to get published. Mine were equally disappointing. He published 20 poems out of a 100 submissions, an awesome ratio. Mine is more like 2%.
You do this long enough and the little rationalizations one makes — such as feeling great because the editor wrote a few lukewarm words at the bottom of the standard rejection slip — can become quite pathetic. But, it’s not a game for the thin-skinned. A college professor of mine used to go on a bender every time he received a rejection, which, since he was prolific as a writer, made for a lot of hangovers.
The only rejection I ever got angry about was the editor who put you through three revisions and still rejected the poem or story, or, even worse, the editor who took it upon himself to pen-edit the poem or story and sent it back without even a rejection note. Rude and arrogant.
Admittedly, even the smallest literary magazine can receive thousands of submissions annually, and they have to have some kind of streamlined process for dealing with such volume, but a delay of 6 to 9 months (which is standard), resulting in a photocopied rejection slip, is simply barbarous. Compound that with the fact that it’s an enormous no-no to submit the same piece to more than one magazine at a time, even with Michael’s success ratio of 20%, it can take a single poem three to four and a half years to get published.
The only bright note in all of this is the growing popularity of online submission. Magazines like Virginia Quarterly Review, The Believer, even the New Yorker, have all embraced email submission, bless ’em, so at least I don’t have to pay for postage (both there and back, of course). Now, if only they could TNT me in 30 days.
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At VQR we get back to people, on average, in 18 days. (In fact, I notice that only 14 days elapsed from the time of your last submission to us and our response.) When work isn’t right for us, we think it’s essential that we return it to authors as quickly as possible so that they can get it in the hands of an editor who it is right for. The catch, as always, is that work that really catches our attention takes time. The more that a given submission seems to suit us, the longer it takes for us to decide, because it’s that much more difficult. So that 6-9 month delay still exists, although for only a small percentage of our submissions. With ~10,800 submissions annually, that’s not too shabby. :)
VQR is, in my limited experience, one of the most professional and well-run literary magazines out there. The editor I corresponded with about a year ago sent me a detailed personal reply to a submission and subsequent query. Obviously, given the number of submissions they receive, they can’t do the same with every manuscript, but — having largely ceased the whole time-consuming process of unsolicitied submissions to journals — I consider them one of the only remaining ones to which I would still send an unsolicitied manuscript. I wish other publications would emulate their approach.
I agree with Michael about VQR and I stand corrected, Waldo, you do get back quickly. It’s much appreciated. So, now that I have your attention, I have this new poem….
:) Sadly, I have no pull on that front—I’m just the web guy. :) Thanks for your kind comments, guys. Though I apologize in advance to whomever comes along, reads this discussion, and is irked because we’ve been sitting on her poem for five months. It’s only because we like it! (But that’s still a really long time. We’re working on getting that down because, really, anything over three months is inexcusable.)
Anything over three months is incompetence. People can chalk it up to rudeness and arrogance if they want but in reality it’s simple ignorance and stupidity. -blue
I’m sorry to return to this so late—perhaps nobody will ever see this comment :)—but it’s worth responding to your comment, Beau Blue. I think that, generally speaking, you’re right. But there are some important exceptions. A small percentage of the work that we get is very good, and we want to publish it, but we don’t have a clear spot for it in any upcoming issues. We don’t want to accept it if we’re not going to publish it. And since we’re a quarterly, there are basically only four shots each year to publish something. So sometimes we’ve got to sit on work for a few months to see if we’ll be able to slot it into an upcoming issue. (If VQR were, say, a monthly, that wait time would be reduced substantially.)
That accounts for vanishingly few submissions, though. Maybe a few dozen each year. Other than those ones, though, I agree: there’s just no good excuse for sitting on a submission for more than three months. It’s not rudeness, arrogance, ignorance, or stupidity, though—it’s often just a function of getting a stunning number of submissions, combined with relying on a couple of dozen readers, combined with the perils of indecision. But, yes, the fact remains that three months is an awfully long time.