At long last, an honest and understanding literary journal which has a grip on reality and really does display an interest in writers and sees their side of the publishing wall:
"And, yes, we do consider simultaneous submissions. After all, we’ve heard that the average story is submitted twenty (or more) times and rejected twenty (or more) times before being published. At that rate, without simultaneously submitting, it would take at least five years to place a story. That just seems mean. We’re really nice people."
(Submission Guidlines, Orchid: A Literary Review)
I hope I haven’t just inundated them with submissions via this post, but they certainly deserve recognition for fearlessly making the above statement. With the three to four-month average notification time, it’s useless to assume that writers will (or should have to) wait on acceptance or rejection slips to send a story out only what, four times a year? Most writers, it seems, just don’t adhere to the rules unless they have enough stories in the hopper to circulate different ones to different mags and keep a spreadsheet on who has what. I’ve done this, but have backed off because I’m concentrating only on what at this point in my writing believe to be really, really good. That right there is restricting enough.
There are other journals too that have come to terms with the simultaneous b.s., and I applaud them all. It does in fact make good sense for the journals themselves to adopt this outlook as well: do they want to have an equal shot at that superstory or do they want to be tenth, twentieth or so in line for it? Eventually, they’ll run out of the big names and unless they start assisting new writers in getting work published, they’ll run out of content as well. More and more lit journals are starting up to combat the elitist attitude of some of the old timers, and they’re willing to take their chances, to do the reading, to put in the time and effort to more than equal their established counterparts for offering excellent content and grow their readership.
Maybe the move is on. Maybe the outlook is brighter for both authors and readers.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology