Lessons from the Editor’s Desk
As a new editor and slush reader, I am still learning a lot of things. I’ve heard the stories from other editors and agents, but never truly grasped what they mean or all the stuff they deal with until I got on the other side of the desk.
Take Penumbra eMag, the digital specfic magazine I now work for. Each issue I do my share of the slush reading. Penumbra doesn’t have a lot of submission guideline restrictions. We ask that the manuscript be readable. We ask that it be in .doc or .rtf format, not .docx, .wps, or any other format. We ask that the story be 3500 words or less. We ask that the story abide by our monthly theme and that the authors state that monthly theme in the email subject. Aside from that, we’re pretty flexible.
I won’t reject a story if the monthly theme is listed in the body of the email (though that makes it more difficult for me to know which emails I need to read in which order). I will reject a story if no theme at all is listed. And no, I don’t read the story to find out what theme I can apply it too. We get a lot of submissions, I have a day job and my own writing career, so anytime an author makes it easy for me to reject them, I will. Especially when they admit in their email that they’ve violated the guidelines.
Which happens more often then I ever expected.
When I open a submission, the first thing I check is the query-listed wordcount. If an author claims 3499 or 3500 words, I check is the true wordcount in my trusty copy of MS Word 2000. Penumbra has a limited budget, and therefore a limited maximum number of words we can buy per issue. We want to get as many stories and poems in as possible, so we tend to be very strict about the wordcount. So when someone tells me they know they’re over the wordcount but will cut the story later during edits, or when they deliberately send in a piece that is over the wordcount by more than one or two words, I reject it. Editors operate under the assumption that authors know how to read, and therefore have had the opportunity to review the guidelines. It’s not the editor’s job to remind authors to check guidelines. It is the editor’s job to thin down the slushpile by rejecting stories that don’t fit, and guideline-ignoring stories are always the first to go.
After recently rejecting one such story, by an author who claimed his wordcount was only 3500 despite the fact that he knew it wasn’t, I received an email from the author offering to cut his story further and resend it. Apparently he’d already trimmed off 1000 words before sending the story in at 3569 words, assuming that 69 words wouldn’t matter. But here I’m thinking “that’s an extra poem. That’s an extra piece of flash fiction that I would have to reject because someone else wanted to take up that extra space.” Plus, Penumbra pays by actual wordcount, not rounded wordcount, so this author is asking us to pay him more for his story than we pay anyone else.
When I rejected him again, telling him he should have cut the story down to our wordcount limit before he sent it the first time, I got an interesting response. “Okay, you win.”
Win? Win what?
Slush reading is not a contest. There is no winning here. There is no prize for rejecting stories. Editors do not meet at a cantina in the middle of the night and pull out their stack of rejections for comparison (“Mine stack’s bigger than yours”). We do not hold secretive award ceremonies for the editor who beat down the most authors.
In this same email, the author goes on to lambast me for not being a “rubbery market” like “many markets are,” because if I was truly being fair I’d allow him his extra words and ignore the fact that he ignored our submission guidelines. I’m also in the wrong, apparently, because our submission guidelines don’t say that stories will be rejected unread if they don’t abide by the guidelines. The he slams out with the passive aggressive by apologizing for taking my time.
The first thing I learned as an author was that if I wanted to go above wordcount, I needed to query the editor to verify. If the editor said no, I’d either not submit or trim my story to the wordcount. The second thing I learned was most editors and agents will reject unread any manuscript that doesn’t follow their guidelines. That’s the way the industry works. The submission guidelines, contrary to their name, are not a suggestion. They are a house rule and, as I’ve since learned, a test of an author’s intelligence and ability to follow instructions.
As an author myself, I get that it sometimes feels like editors are out to get authors. But it’s not true. Editors truly want to be bowled over by fantastic fiction, if authors will let them be. But I am learning that more often than not, we authors tend to shoot ourselves in the foot and then refuse to take responsibility for it by blaming the people who rejected us. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts. We send in a submission “knowing” that the editor won’t like it, then get angry and surprised when our worst fears are acknowledged.
But if we know that the editors won’t like our work, why are we still submitting it in a condition that isn’t publishable or that deliberately ignores the guidelines?
It’s not a contest. There is no prize. As an editor, I don’t get paid by the number of stories I reject. I get paid on the success of the magazine. I want Penumbra eMag to be brilliant. I want hardworking authors (new or veteran) who know how to follow a few simple instructions and then can leave me stunned by the beauty of their fiction. I want to cram as many people in the magazine as I can. I want Penumbra submissions to sky-rocket because when they do, we can start accepting more authors, more stories, and maybe even up the per story word limit.
I hate rejecting other authors because I find myself on the other end of every email I write. So don’t make it easy for me, please. Follow the guidelines. Write brilliant stories. Make me fight myself over which stories I want. And don’t give me a reason to push your story to the bottom of the heap.
