Waiting Is Another Story

  

This past week I got an acceptance from Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, which of course made my day. (The knowledge that it'll probably be a long time until the story'll appear in print didn't dampen my mood a bit. Let loose the balloons--it's an acceptance.) I admit my insecurities: I need a pat on the head now and then, and it's always a warm feeling when an editor decides to publish something I created. 

But in the case of AHMM, I've often been asked it it's worth the wait. Sometimes it's a long one, from submission to response. 

How long? As most of us know by now, AHMM editor Linda Landrigan--one of the kindest and most professional editors I know--has said she reads every story herself. That must be a daunting task--I can't even imagine it--and for the writers who submit stories to her, it means a lengthy wait. Most of my submissions to the magazine over the past few years have taken from twelve to fourteen months to get a reply--this latest one took 410 days--and the thing is, not all of those responses were acceptances. Heaven knows, waiting an average of thirteen months only to receive a rejection can be pretty discouraging.

There's certainly no guarantee. As the old carnival guy used to say, as he chewed his cigar and showed you a raised eyebrow and three walnut shells (only one of which had a pea underneath), "You pays your money and you takes your chances." Are you willing to bet a year's time for the possibility of placing a story in a leading magazine?

I love AHMM, and I love writing stories for them, but my acceptance/rejection ratio hasn't been great there. Not for lack of trying; I started submitting stories to them (and to everyplace else) in 1994, when the wonderful Cathleen Jordan was the editor. The first one Cathleen accepted was in late 1995--I'll always remember it, a 1200-word bank-robbery story that appeared in the June '96 issue--and I've sold them 25 stories since then. Which sounds okay, at first--BUT there were a lot of rejections along the way. I don't know how many stories I've sent AHMM in thirty years to come up with those 26 acceptances, but I know it was a lot more than 26. Probably three or four times that many. I can thankfully say my success rate's better there now than it used to be--I was lucky enough to have six stories there in the past two years--but there were a lot of years when I had no stories published there.

So--again--is it worth it?

Consider the alternatives. There are at least half a dozen other mystery magazines out there right now that I think are respectable and worth our time as writers and readers. I submit stories to all of them pretty regularly, and I have been fortunate to have had stories published in all of them. And none of those magazines take as long to respond to submissions as AHMM does. Some are surprisingly fast. Should we mystery writers be sending the fruits of our writing efforts to those places, instead?

 

Some of my writer friends have chosen to do that. Several have said that a year or more (usually more) is just too long to tie up a good story that might've been submitted, accepted, and even published elsewhere in less time than it takes to receive a rejection from AHMM. Some of these are authors I admire a lot, and it's hard to say they're wrong.

As for me, I've decided to do both. I do submit stories to the other magazines--I think it'd be silly not to--but I also submit stories to Linda, and I plan to continue doing that. I realize the wait is long, and since I'm not as young as I used to be, I find myself more conscious of time, and of wasted time. I understand all that. And yes, my AHMM batting average isn't the best. But anytime I start thinking too hard about that, I think again about the thrill of getting an acceptance from them--and I send them another story. I can't resist it. I keep remembering the old saying that success isn't guaranteed if you try, but failure is guaranteed if you don't.

I hope their wait time decreases in the future. I'll welcome that, if it does. And I hope I'll get better at writing in the future, so I can be certain everything I send in gets accepted (ha!). But even if neither of those things happen, I plan to keep sending stories to all the mystery magazines, Hitchcock included. Why not?

What's your opinion, on this? Are you fed up with what some call unreasonable response times to submissions? Have you decided, however reluctantly, not to submit to AHMM anymore, because of that? (By the way, there are other magazines that also make you wait awhile.) Do you accept those long wait times as a necessary evil, sort of a cost of doing business? Do you compromise, and still submit to AHMM but not as often as you once did? Do you send them stories only as a last resort, stories that have been rejected several times elsewhere? (I'm not sure that's a good idea.) Either way, pro or con, please let me know in the comments. Am I--and Rob Lopresti, who's said he's also hanging in there--the only ones who've decided to hold the course?

Meanwhile, good luck with all your submissions, to any and all markets. I'll watch the sky for balloons.

Hey, nobody said this would be easy . . .