Loose Change

Submitting on the skeletal web

You've written your spectacular story or powerful poetry and are ready to submit it to the world.  You go to Duotrope or one of the other places that lists venues, and you find an e-zine that looks perfect.  Perhaps you go to their webpage and admire the look, imagining your work published there.  Everything seems perfect, so you submit, following their guidelines.

Wait!  You missed a crucial step.  Go back to that website, and follow the links, read the stories, look for a blog.  Make sure that something has been updated recently.  If it is a quarterly journal, see when the last issue was put out.  A certain amount of the time, you'll find dead links, nothing changed since early 2009 (or earlier), or other signs of a dead magazine.  Welcome to the skeletal web.  Like the Parthenon in Greece, these are magazines which may look good, but which are mere skeletons of their original purpose.  People walk away without ever making it clear on the website.  Perhaps they intend to return, but never make it.

If you miss that step, your submission may wind up sitting in a mailbox that is never read.  How long will you wait?

I have started to learn.  I saw Duotrope's page for Round  .  It looked good, seemed fine.  (I have reported this to Duotrope, so the status may change at any moment)  I went to the Round website  , which looks clever and well constructed.  Then, I tried to read stories from the latest issue (no date), and they were all broken.  I followed links to the periodic features, and while not dead, none had been updated since 2008.

Yet back on the Duotrope page, I noticed that there were two submissions, one for poetry that had been waiting 122 days, the other for fiction that had been waiting for 211 days.  I wonder how much longer they'll wait, or what dreams have been dashed that could have sailed to different shores.