Temporary closure
We (SH fiction department) decided a week or two back to not consider new fiction submissions during the month of December.
A lot of factors went into that decision that I won't detail here. We did worry a bit that doing this would in some way damage our reputation: either that people would see it as unprofessional, or that people would misunderstand and would think the magazine was shutting down. (Given that the first thing most people think when you say "online magazine" is "about to go out of business," it wouldn't take much to make people think we were closing our doors for good.)
But the former doesn't seem to be a problem; various of the print magazines close to some or all submissions at various times, and nobody so far has indicated that they thought this was an unprofessional thing for us to do.
The latter remains to be seen. One author whose opinions I respect told me, immediately after we made the announcement, that this was a bad idea, that rumors were bound to spread that SH was closing permanently. And that's certainly possible.
But I think several factors will combine to prevent it from being a big deal. First, we didn't just stop taking stories; we made a clear and detailed public announcement on the Rumor Mill and in the (little-used) SH newsgroup at sff.net, and we asked Ralan to note it in his market list, and we sent email to people that we've published in the past, and in all of those places we very carefully stated that we were closed only to fiction subs and only for the month of December, and that we would reopen on 1/1/2002. And we asked that anyone passing the info along be careful to state clearly that this is temporary, for December only.
It's still probably inevitable that word-of-mouth will result in someone getting the wrong idea. But if they do, they may come to our site to check on it, and will find that we keep publishing new material every week. And they may check our reader-comments page, where they'll see people continuing to comment on our material every week. And they may check our fiction guidelines, where we make very clear that we're closed only for December.
The really startling thing to me is that we've had only about three attempted submissions in the 72 hours since we made the announcement. I knew that a lot of our submissions came from readers of the Rumor Mill and of Ralan's market list, and I knew a few of the others came from people who actually read our guidelines (though many obviously don't), but I hadn't expected to go from 40 submissions a week to near-zero quite so abruptly. I'm impressed.
I'm sure there'll be a flood of submissions in early January, but we'll be braced for that, and anyway it seems likely that some people will send their stories elsewhere rather than waiting for us to reopen. (Note to any authors reading this: our standards will probably be particularly high in early January, if the expected flood happens; if you wait a little after we reopen, there may be less competition. I won't say how long you should wait, 'cause then everyone would wait the same amount, thereby spoiling the strategy.)
In addition to several other good reasons for doing this, I'm very happy at the idea of a break. We've been doing this nonstop for—well, our first submissions came at the end of June, 2000, so I pretty much haven't had a break from reading submissions in nearly a year and a half (and Susan and Chris have both been around for over a year now). I still enjoy it, but a little rest will do me good. And I'm hoping to take advantage of the break to get some long-delayed infrastructure work done: catching up on editing, setting up a firm advance-publication schedule, automating various database tasks to reduce the amount of manual work involved, etc. Don't know if I'll have time for any of that, but gonna try to get at least some of it done.