Whenever we get asked where a submission is, we first check the computer files. If it’s not there, we try the “maybe” basket. We admit that our chief fault is dawdling with acceptances, not rejections. An obvious reject can turn around in days. A story that we want everyone to read can take longer, sometimes much longer. But this doesn’t mean you should think, “Oh it must be a good sign,” and be afraid to query lest you evoke our Editorial Wrath and get yourself rejected. It doesn’t work like that. A polite inquiry (especially one with a return postcard or an e-mail address) will evoke an apology, not wrath. We’ve found that about half of one percent of manuscripts do go astray in the mail (especially if the address is hard to read).
The other primary duty of the editorial team, of course, and the one the publisher most cares about, is producing the issue, ready for the printer, on time. Someone once described the process as assembling jigsaw puzzles against the clock, and so it is.
(S.P. Somtow once said the process, which he observed when we were still at Asimov’s, as the most frightening thing he had ever seen: “What’s the oldest three-page thing in the drawer?”)
Deadlines really matter, as a distributor will take fewer (if any) copies of a late magazine, which means decreased sales. But there are ways to get ahead of the game, the chief of which is to have as many stories already typeset and illustrated as possible.
In the Asimov’s days we could have almost our entire inventory standing in type, with illustrations and blurbs already done, so we could quickly assemble these complete units of story and art into an issue. This is how we could produce a thirteenth issue of Asimov’s and the initial issue of Asimov’s SF Adventure on very short notice. We carried over this technique to Amazing and then shook our heads sadly when people at the parent company (TSR, Inc., which published Dragon and other gaming items) used to complain about the Hell of “deadline week.” We had no deadline week. We did it all in an evening.
Nowadays, with computers, that’s a lot easier. Our basic procedure is to select the stories that go into an issue about two months ahead of time, and then send them out to be illustrated. (We are not, alas, able to have everything illustrated immediately anymore.) The artists’ deadline is designed to get the art to us about the same time the columnists get their columns in and we start assembling an issue. This is where the jigsaw puzzle aspect comes into play. Now we know exactly how long everything is, how many ads we have, and so forth. We know if we can have a long editorial or a short one. Hopefully everything we had illustrated will fit.
Sometimes they don’t. (“The Quilter” in this issue was squeezed out of #326.) Sometimes things have to be re-arranged to make a two-page art spread start on the left. We may have to drop an even-numbered story in favor of an odd-numbered story. Blank pages pop up or have to be inserted, as do partial blanks at the ends of stories. That’s where the poems go, which may lead some to the canard that magazine poetry is “just filler.” Not true. We buy poems because of their merit. But we lay them out as filler, which is quite a different matter. An important use of a one-full-page poem is to make all the rights and lefts flip over until the two-page art spread comes out right.
We share tasks variously. Everyone poofreads [sic] as an issue goes together. Darrell writes the contents-page blurbs. George, whose computer and design skills (not to mention his knowledge of type) are way ahead of anyone else here, does the typesetting, although as progress forces us into newer techniques and software, the final typesetting is done with the help of John Betancourt. (We admit to being old-fashioned. We use non-Windows software whenever possible. Until a couple issues, ago, we were among the few magazine editors who still pasted up photocopies of artwork and turned in camera-ready copy to a printer. If this sounds ridiculously primitive, look back at, say, Weird Tales® #318 or so and consider the results. But today, alas, printers charge extra for the photography stage.)
Between issues there all kinds of miscellaneous tasks to be done. For all we give ourselves various titles on the masthead, the truth of the matter is that a job is often done by whoever happens to be there to do it. Darrell often ends up writing artist assignments, shipping back issues, chasing down payments and stray art transparencies, and doing a good deal of the filing. This last is a task shared by Diane, who is listed as Art Director, but who also reads many of the stories.
Then there is the whole matter of rejection. Since George often has done the primary reading, the typical manuscript will have his notes on a yellow Post-it® sticker. Now at this point many editors would just attach an rejection form which says, “Sorry, this did not meet our needs,” and which tells the author nothing. It’s been our experience over the past quarter-century or so that most writers would prefer more than that. You can learn from rejections; one lady even sold to Writer’s Digest an article, “Will George Like It?” on what she learned from one of our rejection letters. And someone recently sent us a several-page-long letter thanking us for being the only editors who ever commented on the writer’s work.
Now we will admit that if the rejection letter is written by someone who hasn’t read the story, things can get lost in transmission. But we have found that with a little care, our system works. Darrell wrote many of George’s rejections in the Asimov’s days for George’s signature, and was in effect a corresponding secretary. George, Darrell, and Carol write most of them now. We try to find something encouraging to say, but at the same time we don’t stint the truth. It does no one any good to lie and say, “This is really great,” when it isn’t. That only leaves the author less able to understand what’s going on when the story is rejected again and again elsewhere. We would agree that tone is the issue in a good rejection. If the tone is reassuring (or at least not off-putting) you can say just about anything. It’s all a matter of balance, even as it is a matter of balance for the editor to say what needs to be said without yielding to the temptation to write everyone two-page, single-spaced letters and become, in effect, an unpaid writing coach to hundreds of writers. Editors like to do that, as there is nothing more satisfying than seeing someone’s talent blossom under such direction, but we can only afford so much time.
When H.P. Lovecraft was offered the job of editing Weird Tales® back in 1924, he turned it down, because the job would have required that he move to Chicago (where the magazine was then published) and he didn’t want to leave his beloved New England. We can’t help but wonder what kind of an editor he would have been. He had excellent taste, possibly too excellent, because a pulp magazine in those days had to appeal to a very broad audience to stay alive (and Weird Tales® led a precarious existence in the best of times). He might have been unwilling to run the trashy Otis Adelbert Kline serials and the Jules de Grandin stories of Seabury Quinn, which were just as important in keeping the magazine afloat as the highly artistic work of Clark Ashton Smith or Henry S. Whitehead. But certainly (as Lovecraft’s published letters indicate) he would have written the most amazing, detailed, and helpful rejections ever — for a while, at least, until he spent so much time doing so that he started missing deadlines.
So we try to live up to such ideals — but in the real world, where serving the readers with the best magazine we can produce is just as important as training new writers.
Some Interesting Books Received:
Declare by Tim Powers. William Morrow, 2001. Hardcover, 517 pp. $25.00. An entertaining mix of real, cold-war spies and djinn and things even more evil. Try it — we think you’ll like it.
The Great Escape by Ian Watson. Golden Gryphon Press, 2002. Hardcover, 283 pp. $23.95. Ian Watson has been one of our favorite writers for a long time. We’ve certainly done our bit in Weird Tales® to keep his name in front of the American public (a new story of his, “Alicia,” will be appearing in our pages soon), but at the same time we have a whole shelf of Watson titles which have been published in Britain only. So to many readers,