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Sim Subs, Redux

I had a number of responses to the simultaneous submissions entry. A couple of them mentioned that it's acceptable to put an "expiration date" on a submitted manuscript. That is, in your cover letter you can state that after X weeks, the story is automatically withdrawn from consideration.

I admit that this method is a bit more efficient than having to manually send the editor a withdrawal letter. It probably has psychological benefits, too -- it sets a hard limit, and thus prevents you from dragging things out too long. "Well, I know what I decided back in February, but maybe just a couple more weeks..."

As for the root of the problem: Tim Cooper sent me an excellent letter, which provided me with the only cogent arguments I've seen so far for disallowing simultaneous submissions.

First, he points out that editors send out acceptances and rejections for a magazine at roughly the same time:

Suppose I have stories in my slush that I like, from Writer A, Writer B, and Writer C. I only have the ability to buy one of the stories. So, after much agonizing, I accept Writer A's story and reject Writer B's and Writer C's. The next day, maybe I choose to buy a very short piece from Writer D because it works well with Writer A's story. The day after that, Writer A writes back to me and says "Oh, wait, I already sold it to Editor X." At this point, I can't recover the stories form Writer B and C, which could very well be better than anything I'll get in before the issue comes up. And I now have a short piece I've committed to buy that doesn't fit with anything in the issue at all...

Which is fair enough: perhaps given a busy magazine's schedule, it isn't practical to hold off on rejecting Writers B and C until you have confirmation from Writer A. (I don't see how book publishers could use this excuse, though.)

Tim also mentions that the no-simultaneous-submissions rule serves as a barrier that limits inappropriate submissions.

If someone can send a story to every market in the field at once, quite a few of them are going to do it, regardless of how appropriate the story is for that particular market. If sending Stan Schmidt a high fantasy story isn't going to cost the writer anything, a lot of them are going to say "why not?"

And then there are authors who send cover letters that say things like "I have finished over 250 stories" -- with no sales. As Tim puts it, "I know that if simsubs were ok across the genre, the moment I opened for submissions I would have gotten every one of those 250+ stories. I'm going to get all of them eventually, anyway, it seems, but at least they're coming at a speed I can handle."

I sympathize with this. Barriers are necessary. After all, isn't that why so many publishers still require paper submissions?

However, I suppose that again this explanation makes more sense for a magazine editor than a book editor. First, unless our author writes with demonic speed, he or she will not have an outrageous number of unsold novels. Second, while a book editor's slush pile might be large if you count pages, my guess is that it is relatively small if you count manuscripts. This means that the burden of rooting out the inappropriate submissions should be lower for book editors. Finally, novels are expensive and time-consuming to print out and ship -- so again, fewer submissions.

Finally, Tim makes a very valid point (jeez, why didn't I just print his whole letter verbatim?) about the responsibilities of authors. If authors could be trusted to track their submissions and inform editors when a simultaneous submission is accepted somewhere else, the rule would be unnecessary. I couldn't agree more.

The flip side is that publishers should at least be honest about why they do this. The non-explanation in the SFWA FAQ just doesn't cut it.

Posted by Evan Goer on Jan. 15, 2002 at 11:22 AM