Thursday 21 August 2008

A dilemma

I don't know what to make of an email that I received this morning.
Remember that I told you last week that I chased up on a story that had been with an editor since December? In my experience this magazine either reject a story within 10 days or accept it after 6-7 months. As they had had this particular story for almost 9 months I just queried the state of play. Bearing in mind the length of ime it had been with them I have to say that I was hopeful of a sale. However this morning, a week after my query I received an email saying no thanks so to speak. It was the standard curt email rejection that I have had several times before but like I say it has always been within 10 days before.
So my dilemma is, should it have been rejected before Christmas but the message either wasn't sent or didn't arrive or have I hacked off the editor by querying the story?
I do hope it's not the latter because she is sitting on two more of my stories.

6 comments:

Pat Posner said...

I so emphasise with that feeling - when you get a rejection soon after querying. But I'ms sure you haven't hacked off the editor; you left it a looong time before querying. Good luck with the other 2 she's got and the ones at other mags, too.

Thank you so much for your lovely comment on my blog about Charlie-dog and Tessa Buttons - it's great to meeet people who understand. I'm so, so glad I took the plunge and entered the Land of Blog.

Tessa B sends licks
Pat

Anonymous said...

This is one of the aspects of the publishing business that I really hate. Why on earth should we be pussy-footing around these people? What's wrong with having a simple time expectation set, even if it's a long time? This is just not reasonable behaviour on their part (nor ours, for that matter). In any other business, it would be normal to have an estimate of how long something will take, regardless of what the outcome will be.

When my turn comes, I'm going to ask them what their normal time for responses are. Perhaps I'll piss them off, but I don't see why they can't say "we don't know. but it won't take more than ?? months to decide". Maybe I'll ask various agents/editors/publishers this question before I submit anything to them.

As you can see, I'm not a big fan of this part of the procedure.

Deborah Carr (Debs) said...

It's impossible to know what they're thinking.

Hopefully you'll have more luck with the other two stories that they still have.

Colette McCormick said...

In an ideal world editors would work to a time frame like the rest of us but sadly it doesn't happen very often.

Amanda said...

Hi Gonna be

I'm relatively new to submitting to women's mags, but I think you were fully justified in querying a submission that had been out there for 9 months. I'm sure you haven't hacked the agent off by asking. Good luck with your other pieces.

Colette McCormick said...

I hope I haven't but it was just a bit odd. It was as if they were looking at it for the first time. When I've queried things before I've had a personal reply.