Subj : English skills
To   : Spectre
From : Arelor
Date : Wed Oct 19 2022 15:21:43

  Re: English skills
  By: Spectre to Arelor on Thu Oct 20 2022 04:48 am

 > You'd expect that they'd have guidlines for word/page counts going in. I'd
 > also expect that some will sit on the back burner waiting for a time when the
 > page count fits goldilocks free page numbers in the "current" edition. So it
 > may take some time before anything appears to happen.
 > 

Most pulp publishers have general guidelines that don't apply to a given month. My
experience is that guidelines are a bad foundation to work on because they are
decorative at most.

See, Fantasy and Science Fiction Magazine accepts, teoretically, flash fiction pieces,
but I have never seen them publish flash fiction. What the publication wants and what
they tell you they want is not necessarily the same. You really need to do research
into which sort of thing the magazine is actually publishing, not what they say they
are publishing.

Then there is the issue that a given magazine might publish a fixed number of stories
for ech given length (say, 2 flash pieces and 5 short stories). If you send a flash
piece and the editor has already selected 2, yours is gonna end up in /dev/null. There
is not such a thing as saving a good story this month for future use in this industry.

Finally, there is the fact that many magazines don't seem to be sourcing their stories
from their official slush pile. Baen's Universe Annex has not published material from
their official slush platform for what must be an eternity.

My point is that the odds are so low that the mathematical profit expectancy of a
given story is abyssmal, so it is just natural for quality to degrade. This dawned on
me once I found an author, owner of some really hard hitting IP with thousands of
fans, cutting corners really hard in his novel production process because making a
profit was so unlikely.


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