Zine it all before

We've all been there ... waiting for the response from a zine to a tale you've submitted, sometimes you get a reply, sometimes you don't. SANDRA SEAMANS gives Pulp Pusher a personal view of the murky submission process form the writer's side of the fence.

By Sandra Seamans

I confess. I'm a short story writer and I love ezines. I spend hours scrolling through the listings at Ralan.com looking for new zines to submit to. A click of the mouse and guidelines magically appear on my screen. My heart pounds as I read through the editor's requirements. Yes, my story's a match for this market. Yes, it's formatted properly. Damn, they want to hold my story for six months before they make a decision and, oh yeah, they only respond to accepted stories. Next market please.

We've all read the "horror" stories about writers that editors compile for Writer's Digest.

Writers don't read the guidelines.

Writers don't read our publication.

Writers send totally inappropriate stories and tell us they're the next big thing, then argue if we reject their stories.

And...well, you get the idea. I'll admit that starting out, I made many of these mistakes, though I never went so far as to tell an editor how wonderful I was or to complain when they rejected my story - at least not on paper. My mind, well that's another matter.

I sometimes think that editors, unless they're writers too, forget that there's a flip side to the submission coin. There are things editors could do for the writers that would make their own job easier.

With the increased use of the internet to submit stories, zines could and should have an auto-reply in place. Zines such as Spinetingler, ThugLit, and Grim Graffiti use them and it's such a relief to know that your story arrived and isn't floating lost and alone somewhere out there in cyber space. Another feature of the auto-reply is to let the writer know how soon they can expect to hear back from the editor. That's two bases covered by one simple reply that doesn't require any time from the editor except to set up the original reply. And the writer isn't frantically emailing the editor an hour after their story was sent to see if they received it.

Response times and simultaneous submissions. Most zines want first crack at a story and that's their right as a publication, but if you don't want the writer sending their story to a competitor, have a resonable response time. One to three months is a reasonable time for any publication to respond to a story. If an editor needs to hold on to the story longer, they should specify in the guidelines how long it will be under consideration so the writers can decide if they want to wait that long for a decision.

And then there's the dreaded rejection letter. I've noticed many markets are choosing not to send rejection letters, claiming they don't want to hurt the writer's feelings by rejecting their story. If a writer's feelings get hurt because their story is rejected - they need to find another line of work or take up needlepoint as a hobby. Rejections are part of the process. Even an auto-reply form letter is better than never hearing anything at all.

I believe what editors are missing by not sending out rejection letters is the opportunity to tell a writer what they're doing wrong for their particular publication. Once they know, most writers will change their writing to be a better fit, or will submit elsewhere instead of sending the same type of story over and over until they (fingers crossed) get accepted.

Just for an example, I'll use my experience with ThugLit. What I love is that they send out an auto-reply when they receive the story. They also give you an exact date by which you'll know if your story has been accepted.

But they don't send out rejections. My problem with this - I don't know why my stories don't make the cut, so I keep submitting, trying different stories, until Big Daddy Thug is probably sick to death of seeing my name pop up in his email. Just a simple line to say the writing is shit, or they had too many great ones to choose from, or it's just not "Thug" enough would tell me what to change or to just give up on that market.

Since I chose to use ThugLit as an example, I asked Todd Robinson, Big Daddy Thug himself, to give us the view from the editor's chair and he was kind enough to reply.

"We don't exist as an editing service. We're not there to workshop writers through their pieces," said Todd.

 

"It's hard enough working through the number of submissions every

month and editing the stories we ARE using without telling every writer

what was specifically wrong with their piece.

"Despite my own overall lack of success as a scribe, I still consider

myself a writer first and an editor second. I'm sympathetic to a

writer's need for feedback, but that's just not an editor's

responsibility to every story that is submitted.

That's what writing groups are for.

"I've received dozens of form rejections, all telling me that my piece "wasn't right" for the publication. We'd rather not send out blanket excuses. Our philosophy has always been that we reject no one, but can only accept very few. It's not reasonable to think that we should take the time (or that we have the time) to break down every one of our submissions."

Which brings us back to the bare bones of publishing an ezine. As writers we tend to forget the amount of time and effort involved in putting out each new issue. Some writers are so anxious to see their stories in print that they create extra work for editors by sending out inquiries about their stories, failing to get back to an editor with revisions in a timely manner, or withdrawing a story that's set for publication because the zine wasn't fast enough with their need for instant gratification.

Most zines are a labor of love, started for a variety of reasons. Some are started as a place for a group of writers to showcase their talents, others because they want to give back to a community that's helped them along the way, and still others because they can't find the kind of stories they enjoy reading. All good reasons but when the dream becomes too costly or too time consuming, especially if that tiny little project takes off beyond what the publisher imagined when he first said, "I think I'll start a zine", things can unravel.

The more a zine is talked about and touted as a great place to be published, the more eager writers become to contribute their work, most without pay, in order to have it read, and perhaps selected for an anthology or an award. Between the work and the egos, both sides start sniping at each other instead of working together to keep the zine going and the work in the public eye. The zine folds and the writers lose a market.

Like it or not, we're all in this business together. Writer's need to support the zines - the better the writers who contribute, the longer the zine will be in business and possibly able to become a self-supporting, paying market. Editors need to be more open to the concerns of their writers, giving them honest time frames for acceptance and publication, and time permitting, a little feedback. We need each other. Zines can't exist without writers and writers can't publish without markets to showcase their work. Writers and editors both need to learn how to respect each other's concerns.

SANDRA SEAMANS has worked both sides of the publishing desk. As a writer she's had over a hundred short stories published in print magazines and online ezines. She wrote a humor column and slice of life essays that appeared in local newspapers and regional magazines. Her flash story "Home Entertainment", which was published in the ezine, "A Cruel World", was short listed for a Derringer Award from the Short Mystery Fiction Society in 2007. On the other side of the desk, she was co-editor with the late KR Mullin who published the quarterly chapbooks, "A Flasher's Dozen" and "The Lone Flasher".