Email from Serendipity

Serendipity magazine emailed to acknowledge the receipt of my submission. This, I think, indicates a market that is at least well-organized and polite. It's good to see. This is a fairly common practice but is by no means universal. It's also very easy to do, at least with emailed submissions - it's probably just an automated response. But it makes a big difference.

All too often you send off a submission to a magazine and aren't sure that they ever received it in the first place when you don't hear anything back after several months. Quite often, it seemes, the submission "never reached them" and you have to start again. I'm sure running a magazine is a hard, thankless task, but treating writers with such disdain like this is surely unacceptable.

Perhaps my favourite such experience was with a magazine called "Roadworks : Tales from the Hard Road". In April 1999 I submitted a short story called Small Differences of Detail to them and in June of that year they emailed back to say they had accepted it and would tell me when it was going to appear. All well and good. But the story didn't appear and didn't appear. Occasionally I sent off a polite enquiry but heard little or nothing back. The story would be appearing "soon" etc. Then, in October 2003, over four years later, the magazine folded just as, they said, my story was really, finally about to appear. They had held on to it for four years and then did this. Of course, it's sad when a magazine folds and I'm sure there were lots of good reason. Still, this is not acceptable behaviour and is certainly no way to treat authors. If they were still active I certainly would not submit to them again.