Subs

5 Comments

We've now officially received a Whole Lot Of Submissions this week.

Our previous highest-volume weeks were a three-way tie at 65 subs apiece. (Average is more like 45 per week.) In five days of this week so far, we've received 79, with presumably another 15 to 30 arriving in the next couple days.

I suppose one shouldn't complain about an embarrassment of riches. But seven of the last eight days are now on our top-20 highest-volume-days list. Or to put it another way, we're currently averaging over 17 stories a day in 2004, as compared with about 6 and a half a day in 2003. If things keep up at this rate, we'll end up with over 500 subs this month, as opposed to our usual 200ish. I see a lot of reading in our future.

On an entirely unrelated topic, I've just become horribly disillusioned: the speaking voices of the Beatles in Yellow Submarine are played by other people entirely. (And yes, I wrote this paragraph before noticing that the entry title applied to it.)

5 Responses to “Subs”

  1. David Moles

    I guess a lot of people really wanted that extra penny.

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  2. Karen

    The Beatles ended up liking Yellow Submarine (the movie) lots, but when it was first proposed they thought it was going to be a travesty of all they held dear, and didn’t want to lend their voices to it. So while this may compromise the structural integrity of the movie, it does sort of affirm the personal integrity of the Beatles.

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  3. Jon

    Well, with the SFWA rate requirement hike, that does trim down the number of possible markets for any writers wanting to qualify.

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  4. Anonymous

    Do the economics of SH allow you to hire more readers as you get more submissions? Or is that not an issue at this scale, yet?

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  5. Jed

    Thanks re Beatles, Karen! Didn’t know that.

    Jon: Does it actually reduce the number of markets? …Hmm: I had thought that SH was the only market affected by the change, but now I see that there are others whose minimum rate seems to be under 5c/word: Artemis, possibly Interzone, Realms, possibly Third Alternative, possibly Weird Tales. Anyone know whether those magazines are changing their rates?

    Anon: Our staff are all volunteers, so hiring readers isn’t an economic issue; we could certainly bring in volunteer readers if necessary. But we SH fiction editors have never really liked the idea of having someone else do our first-pass reading, for a variety of reasons. And it’s very likely that the current high volume is due in large part to our having just reopened after a month-long closure to subs, so I assume that volume will drop over the next couple weeks. If we’re still getting this many subs by the end of January, we’ll have to talk about what to do about it.

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