You’ll notice there’s no new short story for the month of December here at Futurismic. The reason is quite simple: time has outraced our inventory. We just haven’t been able to find appropriate, high-quality stories faster than we’ve been publishing them.
This is not for lack of trying by our contributors, and I am continuing to work through the submissions as quickly as I can. A lot of good material has come in, but we’re looking for great, and this month we didn’t quite find the story we were looking for.
Another issue is that a considerable amount of what’s been submitted hasn’t been a perfect fit with our guidelines, which I strongly encourage potential writers to review thoroughly to get an idea of what we’re looking for. I’m aware there’s a school of thought out there that suggests: when it doubt, send it and let the editor decide. I’m not entirely on board with that approach, though; here at Futurismic we really are looking for a particular type of story, so writers who spend even just a little time researching what we’ve published in the past and what excites us at the blog can save themselves some wasted effort, and us a lot of time, by targeting us appropriately. For my part, I plan to contribute more to the blog in the coming months in an attempt to improve the general idea of what Futurismic is about as a fiction market.
Of course, many of our potential contributors are reading the guidelines and targeting us appropriately. We really do appreciate that! And thanks to all the writers who’ve been submitting to and supporting Futurismic over the past five years. I look forward to working with many more of you down the road.
At any rate, since we clearly haven’t made our deadline this month, we thought it would be best to take a month off to recharge and hopefully restock our inventory, so that we can get off to a running start in 2010.
And yes, we’re definitely still open to submissions!
I’m stunned (no kidding). I was under the impression that the number of would-be authors was so overwhelming that every paying SF magazine was nearly buried in story submissions all the time. Can you give us an idea how many you typically receive in a month? I’ve been assuming that you receive somewhere between 100-500 or so. If so, and even if only 1% are any good, that would be enough to have a new one posted fairly often. And hey, if your fiction submissions are running at less than 100 per month, I may consider sending you one myself. 🙂
I’ve never really done the stats, Robert (hmm, could be a blog post in that) — but I’d say probably on the lower end of your range…probably between 100-200 a month. And many of them are very good, but sometimes they’re just not Futurismic stories. That’s usually the main issue. As for submitting, bring it on!