I stopped by campus today to pick up contact information for accepted Hungry Eye authors. Up until this point, all of the submissions have been anonymous - save those each of us either submitted or recognize from workshop. Now I can put names with all of the pieces.
I started going through, writing down the titles of pieces we want, the author's name, and the author's e-mail. For about four authors, I had to write small when I wrote the titles because these folk had four or more pieces we wanted. These are the people who consistently write great quality work. Kudos to them.
The only problem now is that we're going to have to un-accept some of their pieces because having six poems from one author and only one from another makes for an off-balanced anthology. This problem is compounded by the fact that we need to expand the magazine since we initially accepted so few pieces. Now we're faced with the paradoxical task of expanding the magazine as a whole, while simultaneously limiting the representation of certain authors. How do you like that?
As for these particular authors, I wish them the best and hopefully those pieces we will, out of necessity, be cutting are pieces the authors can turn around and submit to another publication. So, it's really the best kind of rejection one can get, isn't it?
2 comments:
When I left the H.E. editor position I e-mailed a list for David (who made no promises to pass it on) but I wrote that the submissions, if we were going to limit them, needed to not be anonymous. That way you can watch for 'balance' ahead of time. (And because one of the pieces that I wanted got lost in the numbered shuffle. If I'd known the author I could have said, "Hey, put Jack's in" but I didn't, and then we couldn't find the damn piece.)
Other publications don't do it without names/contact info, and I'm not sure if H.E. should either.
As far as balance goes, since you already have pieces picked, is it really fair to the magazine to limit really good work? After all, at this point you (by you I mean H.E. staff) did choose anonymously, you didn't limit the number of submissions (I realize this was so that you could get as many submissions as possible), so the odds always were that the whole thing could go to a select few. I'd say as long as there aren't seven short stories by one author...but I put in as many as three by the same person(s).
Keeping the author's pieces physically together in the magazine helps to see 1.If it's weighted in the first place and 2. If inserting the smaller numbered authors throughout the big numbered authors makes the balance that you need anyway. (In other words don't stack it so it reads like:
A,A,A,B,B,B,B,C,C,C,D,D,D,E,F,G. Because that seems weighted. Intersperse E,F,G between the segments of the more numerous works--works better to stack like that in regards to short stories and poetry too.)
My, I seem to have gone on. Okay, that's enough. I'll shut my trap now.
I understand your dilemma, Ali. I get kind of [written with English accent] the same thing with AL. Since the same people tend to submit over and over, my pool to choose from is often small. But I also get the occasional person whose work I would publish every single time they submit because they are so good.
You don't want it to look like a few friends got together and decided to put on a magazine, but then again you also want to go with your best. Always. If you look at Poetry magazine, they almost always have a couple poets with four or five poems in a row. Then there are the single poem people.
Good luck. It's not an easy thing to be editor. As I'm learning more and more with each passing day.
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