Yes. Can I have some of your fairy dust?

I agree. 50 days is too long.

Up until July, Clarkesworld used personalized rejection letters. This created a bottleneck. When I stepped in as editor last month, we made the switch to form letters. I’m also in the process of signing up some more slush readers. Combined, these changes should greatly improve our response time.

>Strange horizons the response time is one month to 70 days.

Our minimum response time used to be about 11 days. These days we’re further behind on our slush reading, so it takes longer.

Our average response time is about 45 days right now, but that’s a fluke; the average (not minimum) held pretty steady at around 30 days for the previous couple years.

>Yes, the slush is big–but you read a paragraph or two, it sucks, you fire off a rejection email.

I can’t speak for any other magazines, but at Strange Horizons it doesn’t work that way, for three main reasons:

1. A massive increase in submission volume over the past couple years has left us struggling to keep up; at the moment, unfortunately, we’re about four weeks behind on reading. We’re working on various approaches to fixing that, but catching up after falling behind is pretty difficult (given that new stories arrive every day).

2. Because one of our magazine’s goals is to support newer writers, we almost always read more than a paragraph or two. Our approaches vary, but we generally take an average of 5-15 minutes to read or skim a given story these days, plus a couple minutes to write a summary and comment (for our internal records) for each story.

3. We have three editors, so we want to give other editors a chance to “rescue” a story before we reject it.

Of course, in addition to reading slush, we’re also doing things like editing forthcoming stories, answering queries, entering and tracking stories in our database, writing rejections (see below), reading stories that the other two editors marked as maybes, discussing which stories to buy, and so on.

Oh, yes, and dealing with the rest of our lives, ’cause we’re all three volunteers who do this in our spare time. I mention this not to complain, but to explain why we can’t spend 8 hours a day on this. I spend roughly 20 hours a week on assorted magazine tasks; that includes roughly 6-8 hours a week reading and commenting on new slush, and another 3-4 hours a week reading and commenting on stories that my co-editors have read and want us to consider.

Whenever we have time to do so, we go through and reject stories that are waiting to be rejected. Sending a form rejection takes only a few seconds; writing personal comments can take anywhere from a few seconds to half an hour. So sometimes if we’re short on time or energy, we put off writing personal comments, which can increase response time.

So … it would be possible for us to streamline this process in various ways, and I would love us to get our average response time back down under 30 days. But for the time being, given the volume of submissions we’re seeing, it’s gonna take a while for that to happen.

And given the number of editors we have and the volume of submissions, and various other quirks and idiosyncrasies, it’s pretty unlikely that we’ll ever have a minimum response time of less than a week.

Superguy is still around (as are the complete and searchable archives), just experiencing a lot less activity these days. Though if anyone wanted to change that, new writers are always welcome.

“Denise Jones” reminds me of Superguy at its best.

It just works.

Bloody marvellous. I love living in the future.

I’ve got a Favourite Client who generally pays me within minutes over the Intertubes, too. They’re great – worth their weight in organs for sure.

It’s actually an interesting counterpoint to your article on supporting oneself as a writer (or other manner of freelance creative) that when you get a Really Good Payer, then for the love of gh0d hang onto them with both hands and do not let go! Over the years, I’ve had tonnes of clients who fall into the categories of:

1) The Hand-To-Mouth (You get paid when the end client pays us. Funny how nobody ever says that before the gig starts).

2) The Changeoholic (We’ll pay the invoice just as soon as you re-do absolutely sodding everything that we’ve already signed off on).

3) The Post-Invoice Whiner (Yes, we know everything’s great with the work, we just don’t like giving away money).

And my personal favourite:

4) Finance Department Bums (You have to sit through another 90 day cycle until the Finance Department issues cheques again. No, that’s just how it works).

Guh.

So when anyone who generates their own revenue finds a client who’s a Prompt Payer, that really helps with the omnipresent spectre of Cashflow, who’s second only to the Demon Murphy for any freelance thing-maker. Love the Prompt Payer. Cherish the Prompt Payer. Nuture the Prompt Payer.

Wow, I went on a bit there. Sorry.

Quis custodiet custodies?