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Fiction-submission volume-cap status update
By Jed Hartman
18 January 2010, 10:21 AM
As many of you know, the SH fiction department instituted a cap on number of submissions per day this year.
From our perspective, it's been quite successful. In past years, when we've reopened to submissions after a temporary closure, we've sometimes received upwards of forty submissions in a day; on one memorable day, we received 73 submissions. Since our normal volume is more like fifteen a day, getting that many subs in one day could feel a little overwhelming. We certainly don't want to discourage any individual writer from submitting (and we hope nobody will take our discussions of high volume as a request not to submit); but we wanted a way to smooth out the high-volume periods, and to give us a chance of reading and responding to the incoming submissions in a reasonable amount of time.
So we set up the automated daily submission cap system. The system counts submissions as they come in; when we reach the daily limit, it replaces the submission-form web page (which is the only route by which we allow subs) with a page saying, essentially, "Sorry; we've reached our daily submission limit. Please come back tomorrow, or next week, and try again."
The daily limit is much higher than our normal average volume, so the cap system is unlikely to come into play except during periods of extremely high volume, such as just after a closure. However, in the future, we may have brief periods of setting a lower cap, if circumstances warrant.
There were some concerns among our writer friends that instituting a limit would result in a flood of submissions each night at midnight Eastern US time (when the form reopens), and that nobody would be able to submit unless they arrived at the submission form within five minutes of midnight.
And if that had happened, we would have turned off the limit; we agree that that would not be a good outcome.
But in fact, except for a couple of brief periods when a bug caused the form to shut down before we reached the limit, the form has been open for at least fourteen hours a day almost every day this year. (Which also alleviates another concern: it means there's been a good window for submission on any given day from any time zone in the world.)
And in the second full week of the year (January 10 through 16), the form was open for at least 21 hours a day for the first three days of the week. Ever since January 13, we haven't reached the daily limit, so the form hasn't closed at all.
We're still getting nearly double our usual volume of submissions, and that'll likely continue for another week or two. But at least the limit prevented any single days of five or six times normal volume.
So from our point of view, the limit has worked well. But we'd be interested in hearing your thoughts about it. Did you find it frustrating? Did you have to come back and try again more than once? Did seeing the "closed for the rest of the day" notice cause you to give up and go submit elsewhere? Let us know what you think.
Comments
I have not seen the cap or encountered a "please try again" message (yet) but this does make a lot of sense.
Personally, if I wished to submit and found the form closed for the day, I don't see it as an inconvenience to wait an extra day and try again. (Perhaps if I had limited internet use and there were other circumstances, but that's hardly SH's problem or fault--so while it might be annoying in one sense, I'd just chalk it up to minor set backs and wait and try again later.)
By the way, I'm excited to see this blog! Thanks for putting it up.
It'd be nice if there were next/previous entry links.
...and I probably should have put that comment on the previous entry. :P
Merc: Thanks for the comments!
David: Thanks for the suggestion--I was thinking that too. I'll try and add links sometime soon.
I haven't encountered the cap, but it doesn't seem like an unreasonable way to manage things, and it doesn't bother me as a sometimes frequent (and at other times infrequent) submitter.
With my most recent submission on January 1st, I received a response after only 17 days, which was terrific. If that's a consequence of daily caps, then that's outstanding.
Honestly, since you've asked for input, if I did encounter a "please try later" message, then I would move on to the next market on my list, and catch you later with the next story. That is just my personal rule, and I never deviate from it, because I believe in no excuses when it comes to keeping my work in the hands of editors. But this is no different than what I do when markets are on hiatus. If, for example, it's 10pm and I have a story to submit to the first market on my list but that market doesn't reopen until midnight, I send my story somewhere else.
But an easy web form, reasonable response times, and, most importantly, high editorial standards and sophisticated readership, make ST one of the best places to submit genre fiction.
I've now added next/previous links. Let me know if you run into any trouble with them.
Mike: Thanks for the comments!
The fast response times so far are mostly due to (a) it being the start of the year so we're not behind yet, and (b) our First Readers taking on half the stories, so we're not overwhelmed. Sadly, as the year goes on, our response times will probably go up again.
Re moving on when a market is closed: Good to know. I imagine that's true of a fair number of writers, and it's fine with us as long as the writers are okay with it. We'd be sad if it turned out there were a lot of writers out there who were, say, swearing to never submit to us again because they encountered a "come back later" notice, but so far it doesn't seem like that's happening.
Thanks for the praise! Much appreciated.
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