Day 3

Filed under: Strange Horizons
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Today: 24 submissions--more than either of the past two days, and tied for second-highest-volume day ever.

For those keeping score at home, that's a total of 69 submissions in these first three days of the year. Tied for tenth-highest-volume week, and the week is less than half over. If things continue at this rate, we'll have 170 submissions by the end of the week. But let's hope the volume abates. (Our previous highest-volume week came a couple of years ago, with 101 submissions in a week. But the fact that January 1 was a Sunday this year, so the first week of the year is a full seven-day week, will almost certainly result in more subs than that this week.)

I'm finding that I have less patience than usual for authors who don't follow directions. But it would waste more time to make them jump through the reformat-and-resubmit hoops than to pretend they got it right, so unless the problems are egregious or the author has ignored multiple past requests to format correctly, I just grumble and cope. On the bright side: if it weren't for this, I would have to find something else to grumble about, so this saves me the trouble.

One Response to “Day 3”

  1. Jetse

    January 3: 18 submissions for Interzone. A sharp drop-off. Total 71 so far: more than in May, but less than in August. This seems to say that January may end up somewhere between 333 and 373: let’s say 350.

    I’d estimate that Strange Horizons — based on the numbers so far — is heading for a similar number (say 300 to 350) for January. Of course, I might be proven wrong, but my experience so far is that the volume is high on the first few days, then drops off and settles somewhat — to about 8 a day in May, and about 10 a day in August — to slightly pick up at the end (but not as high as the first days).

    There are differences: Strange Horizons is open almost year-round to email submissions, while Interzone only has three email reading periods. On the other hand, Interzone is open year-round for postal submissions, and from Andy I understand that he receives more than 200 postal submissions a month (although that’s for Interzone and Black Static combined).

    As to authors that don’t follow directions: mine are very simple (RTF-attachment and single-spaced), and even then some can’t (don’t) follow them. But even then a quick reformatting is faster than extra email traffic.

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