# "No Simultaneous Submissions" is Ridiculous



## EternalGreen (Sep 11, 2020)

I don't know if a publication which demands monopolistic rights over manuscripts they don't even pay for deserves to be fed stories.

I can't possibly understand why they would make this demand, beside from shutting out competitors and not risking minor inconvenience for themselves.

It just seems plain rude to disrespect people's time so obviously. It's like they take a slush pile of publishable stories for granted. They don't even pay much for the _endless_ content they're grown to just expect from us.

Everyone wants you to submit to them, but why should you?


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## luckyscars (Sep 11, 2020)

Don't submit to them. Problem solved?


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## Olly Buckle (Sep 11, 2020)

People have spurious copyright concerns.

You could start your own publication, self publishing gone large.


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## Tiamat (Sep 11, 2020)

I feel like we've had this conversation relatively recently in a different thread. That said, I'm actually changing my stance. Courtesy of our very own Kyle R, I feel like I have a better understanding of some reasons why one may wish to submit to certain zines who don't accept simultaneous submissions. The main reason being: money. Also there's literally no reason for them not to take their slush piles for granted. There are way more of us than there are of decent-paying markets. Now, if you're not in this game for the money and the satisfaction of seeing your name in print is enough of a reward for you, then... what lucky said.


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## BornForBurning (Sep 11, 2020)

> It's like they take a slush pile of publishable stories for granted.


Yes, they do. And if said endless pile were to evaporate overnight, standards would change. However, the current standards are largely due to the fact that there _is _an endless pile of slush for editors to sort through, and they have adapted accordingly. For example, it's very annoying (and time consuming) to have to scramble last-minute to find the seventh story for your monthly short fiction periodical just because Maria Shotgunsubmitter couldn't be bothered to explain that she'd been accepted two weeks earlier someplace else. Far better, than, to just cut Maria out of your system in the first place. Harsh as it sounds, for a professionally-paying quarterly or monthly zine, there's _always _going to be another good story. Even a fairly unknown professional zine like Mysterion gets over 300 submissions each period, of which they pick seven. It's also a way of cutting out a sizable chunk of bad writing--shotgun submitters _tend to_ (not always, of course, and it's definitely a fairly tentative rule) be of lower quality than those that submit to a single journal. 

The long and short of it is, excluding SS allows overworked editors to streamline their existing systems, and that's not something I really begrudge them. Besides, I've got time, and lots of stories. It's not like I'm sitting here waiting on one story to get published.


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## Darren White (Sep 11, 2020)

In the poetry world this is very common, and I do understand the reason why. PiP and I run Flashes. We do accept simultaneous submissions, but I can assure you it is incredibly annoying when you are enthusiastic about a story/poem, you wish to publish it... And then you get an email that it has been accepted elsewhere and thank you very much for your time and trouble. That is the reason behind it.


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## Lee Messer (Sep 12, 2020)

I'm not fond of finding my work elsewhere after many submissions. It's not plagiarism, but the concepts are just too unique to just sprout up if not based on current events. I see little bits of my work sometimes and it pisses me off. No one else could've thought of what I came up with unless they were psychic or something.


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## Darren White (Sep 12, 2020)

That's a different issue, Lee


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## Bayview (Sep 12, 2020)

I think my attitude toward this very much depends on response times. IF they're asking for two weeks of exclusivity, I think that's totally reasonable. If they're asking for two months, it's much less acceptable to me. If it's an unlimited period of time? Nope. Doesn't work for me.


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## EternalGreen (Sep 13, 2020)

Lee Messer said:


> I'm not fond of finding my work elsewhere after many submissions. It's not plagiarism, but the concepts are just too unique to just sprout up if not based on current events. I see little bits of my work sometimes and it pisses me off. No one else could've thought of what I came up with unless they were psychic or something.



_Are they_? Don't be that person who sees other people doing similar things and thinks they inspired them. 

If you actually do influence other writers - which, once in a blue moon, you _might_ - be pleased, not bitter.


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## Phil Istine (Sep 13, 2020)

Bayview said:


> I think my attitude toward this very much depends on response times. IF they're asking for two weeks of exclusivity, I think that's totally reasonable. If they're asking for two months, it's much less acceptable to me. If it's an unlimited period of time? Nope. Doesn't work for me.



I've said similar myself - if they are willing to be _very_ prompt in their acceptance or rejection, then saying 'no simultaneous submissions' might not be too unreasonable, but they can't expect people to hang on at the publisher's whim when there might be money to earn elsewhere.


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## Olly Buckle (Sep 13, 2020)

Lee Messer said:


> I'm not fond of finding my work elsewhere after many submissions. It's not plagiarism, but the concepts are just too unique to just sprout up if not based on current events. I see little bits of my work sometimes and it pisses me off. No one else could've thought of what I came up with unless they were psychic or something.



I'm with Eternal Green on this, when you think that people have simultaneously come up with discoveries from the telephone to evolution and the polio vaccine, and that is just a few of them, it is not really remarkable at all that others are duplicating your ideas from time to time.


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## Darren White (Sep 13, 2020)

That's a different topic


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## luckyscars (Sep 13, 2020)

Bayview said:


> I think my attitude toward this very much depends on response times. IF they're asking for two weeks of exclusivity, I think that's totally reasonable. If they're asking for two months, it's much less acceptable to me. If it's an unlimited period of time? Nope. Doesn't work for me.



Do you find they usually provide the response time, though? I tend to see things like 'if you haven't heard from us in six months, it's a no' and that's generally the closest thing to a timeline that's offered. 

I may just have not paid attention, but I feel like it's always intentionally vague, which seems like it would make it hard to apply this kind of strategy.

A good workaround might be to submit, allow them a couple weeks or whatever is tolerable, and if they don't respond in a reasonable time then contact them to withdraw the submission. If you're feeling sassy, you could _maybe _send them a follow up first before withdrawing, but I have never done that.


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## EternalGreen (Sep 14, 2020)

I've been tempted to just simultaneously submit anyway. There's a very small chance they'd ever even find out. Although they might try to blacklist me if they did.

Unlike publishers, writers actually have to follow rules. 

I wonder what would happen if enough of us held certain bad publishers to a higher standard. 

If they think we're so disposable, they can write their own stories/poetry.


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## Bayview (Sep 14, 2020)

If I were going to start listing traits of "bad" publishers, I don't think a ban on simultaneous subs would make the top ten.


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## Tiamat (Sep 14, 2020)

EternalGreen said:


> I've been tempted to just simultaneously submit anyway. There's a very small chance they'd ever even find out. Although they might try to blacklist me if they did.


Strongly recommend not to do this, because as you say, they would DEFINITELY blacklist you if they found out. Plus, I don't think many people realize just how small the publishing world is. I'm not just talking literary agents in NYC. Imagine pissing off an editor that has connections to a dozen of decent-paying short fiction markets. 

On another note, I accidentally subbed a story back in June to a market I didn't realize at first didn't accept sim subs. I did happen to catch it before I subbed that same piece anywhere else, so there's that. But I noticed that the 90 days they quote on their website had passed recently so I sent my first-ever status query letter. Most markets tell you to query after X days but I've never bothered before because usually the story is outstanding several other places as well. This time though, because I can't do anything else with it until I hear from them, I sent an email last night that said, "WHERE MAH STORY AT?!" Well, in a manner of speaking. They replied today. Surprising no one, it was a rejection. :lol:


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## EternalGreen (Sep 14, 2020)

If you use Moksha you can _yoink_ your story back if they don't respond in time.

I'm not saying I won't consider submitting to no-simultaneous publishers (we're not on strike currently to the best of my knowledge) but I still don't like it.


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## luckyscars (Sep 14, 2020)

Bayview said:


> If I were going to start listing traits of "bad" publishers, I don't think a ban on simultaneous subs would make the top ten.



Sounds juicy! Do tell?


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## Bayview (Sep 14, 2020)

luckyscars said:


> Sounds juicy! Do tell?



Oh, mostly financial, I'd say. Publishers who go out of business and are never heard from again, leaving authors without rights-reversion letters that would allow them to republish their work elsewhere. Publishers who DON'T go out of business but just stop paying their authors (I'm currently dealing with one of those). Publishers who don't report sales accurately and therefore don't pay authors as much as they should.

In general, I think authors are smart people and should be trusted to read and evaluate contracts and publisher requirements. If the contract isn't to your liking or the publisher requires things you don't want to give, you don't work that publisher. No big deal, nobody wrong or bad or whatever... just not a good match. I think the "bad" publishers are the ones who break contracts and cheat authors. No simultaneous submissions? That's their business.


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## EternalGreen (Sep 14, 2020)

An open rhetorical question:

_Would a business owner who employed waiters and waitresses for about a week at a time, accepted only 2% of job applications received (often after a period of weeks) and "didn't accept" simultaneous job applications, and would go so far as to blacklist unemployed workers who went against his wishes (and who were caught applying to multiple jobs at once) so that they might never work again be ethical?_

(This is the kind of rhetoric I come up with when I should be reading and writing. :grin: I am not renowned for my focus.)

I repeat: I believe that line should not be drawn based on who does or does not submit to given publishers (as one writer has no power to affect change) but whether or not they fully condone the practice.


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## Bayview (Sep 15, 2020)

EternalGreen said:


> An open rhetorical question:
> 
> _Would a business owner who employed waiters and waitresses for about a week at a time, accepted only 2% of job applications received (often after a period of weeks) and "didn't accept" simultaneous job applications, and would go so far as to blacklist unemployed workers who went against his wishes (and who were caught applying to multiple jobs at once) so that they might never work again be ethical?_



Sure. Why not? The only part that's dodgy is the blacklisting, and I don't really think there's an industry-wide blacklist to deal with, just the possibility of burning bridges with that particular publisher/restaurant (and maybe the editor/hiring manager).

Why not reverse your hypothetical? For some reason, a server really wants to work for a restaurant, and knows that a LOT of other servers really want to work there. In order to deal with this demand, the restaurant hires people only short term, is highly selective in their hiring, and requires that any applicants commit to being available for the time they're selected to work. After all, the restaurant puts a lot of effort into screening people and finding teams that will work well together, and it's really frustrating for them to put all that time in only to find that the server is no longer available. If the restaurant selects a server and the server turns out to be unavailable, why would the restaurant ever bother offering that server a slot again?

Honestly, this comes down to choice. If you don't want to follow a certain publisher's terms, you can choose to not engage with that publisher. I don't think there's an ethical element at all. We don't have a _right_ to be published and _certainly_ don't have a right to be published in the places of our choice according to the terms of our choice.

The world of publishing is a buyers' market. It sucks when you're the seller, but it is what it is. There are way more people wanting to be published than there are publishers wanting to buy their work. So the publishers have power over the process. If it feels wrong to you, there's always self-publishing...


[ETA re the restaurant analogy - most authors who are serious about being published have a lot of projects on the go at any given time, especially in the short story/poetry world. The analogy seems to be based around the idea of an author who has only one piece of writing to worry about. Possibly the solution to this situation is to write more? If you have twenty or thirty pieces out to various publishers, it's likely less onerous to know that a single piece isn't submitted to more than one place at once.]


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## luckyscars (Sep 18, 2020)

EternalGreen said:


> _Would a business owner who employed waiters and waitresses for about a week at a time, accepted only 2% of job applications received (often after a period of weeks) and "didn't accept" simultaneous job applications, and would go so far as to blacklist unemployed workers who went against his wishes (and who were caught applying to multiple jobs at once) so that they might never work again be ethical?_





Bayview said:


> Honestly, this comes down to choice. If you don't want to follow a certain publisher's terms, you can choose to not engage with that publisher. I don't think there's an ethical element at all. We don't have a _right_ to be published and _certainly_ don't have a right to be published in the places of our choice according to the terms of our choice.



But even then, let's say it wasn't ethical (I happen to think it isn't particularly -- in the sense that if I was a publisher I would not feel like it was the right thing to do)...............so what?

Is there _any _large industry that is ethical? I can't think of one. We can believe there are some individuals and maybe some companies that pride themselves of scrupulous ethical practices but (1) They don't represent their industry as a whole (2) They often aren't extremely successful as ethics tend to have some sort of cost and (3) It's really hard to fruitfully engage with an industry successfully without sometimes dealing with people whose ethical standards don't exactly match our own. People can ethically raise chickens all they want, they probably still need to do business with Walmart and so on if they want to sell a lot of chickens!

With that in mind, I generally agree with Bayview that this isn't really something most writers can afford to be choosy about. We can complain, sure, but it does seem fairly pointless. Some of the people I have allowed to publish stories have seemed like total dickwads. Most of them have paid me next to nothing (in some cases, literally nothing) while evidently making sales. That isn't strictly speaking 'ethical' either, right? 

I try to think of everything in terms of cost-versus-benefit, including moral questions. In a cost-benefit scenario we have to weigh up our priorities and figure out what is negotiable versus what isn't. Some things aren't negotiable. I wouldn't submit to a white power magazine, for instance. I wouldn't do business with a homophobe or racist. But those are extreme and, generally, rather irrelevant examples and beyond those...it stops being an absolute question quite rapidly. The 'unethical' becomes a question of scale and tolerance.

I would absolutely submit to a place which required No Simultaneous Submissions _if _I believed it was worth it. If it wasn't -- if the NSS publication was not paying much, had few readers, etc. then I probably would not, partly because I don't care for their approach but mostly because their approach inconveniences me with little potential to be overcome with a prospective benefit.


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## luckyscars (Sep 18, 2020)

Side note: This isn't directed at anybody in particular but sort of a gripe I always get when this sort of subject comes up... 

I do think it's rather fucking ironic to hear writers complain about the elitism and ethical practices of traditional publishers while apparently seeing no problem with self-publishing and selling their books on Amazon, one of the most unethical corporations around.

 It almost sounds like people don't actually care that much about ethics and more about whether the lack of virtue in a given business model hurts them or somebody else.

Like, make up your mind.


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## Bayview (Sep 18, 2020)

This is maybe a big branch-off for this thread, but...

What ethical rules do you guys think are being broken by publishers who don't allow simultaneous submissions or don't pay authors well? If they are deceptive about their practices, I agree it's unethical. If they were raking in huge profits by taking advantage of desperate writers, I'd agree it was unethical, but most publications I know of are barely staying afloat. I agree that Amazon is in a different world.

So... what is it, specifically, that you object to, and are you able to expand it into a general ethical principle?


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## luckyscars (Sep 18, 2020)

Bayview said:


> This is maybe a big branch-off for this thread, but...
> 
> What ethical rules do you guys think are being broken by publishers who don't allow simultaneous submissions or don't pay authors well? If they are deceptive about their practices, I agree it's unethical. If they were raking in huge profits by taking advantage of desperate writers, I'd agree it was unethical, but most publications I know of are barely staying afloat. I agree that Amazon is in a different world.
> 
> So... what is it, specifically, that you object to, and are you able to expand it into a general ethical principle?



Not OP, but sure I think I can.

The principle is similar to the 'dog in the manger' and concerns informed decisions. We know that the vast majority of submissions to any magazine don't actually get published, that the statistical chances of any single submission being published are pretty small. 

We also know that, at least in short stories (I have never encountered the No Simultaneous Submissions rule in novels), submissions work in cycles, sometimes really brief ones of only a month or so. This is especially true for anthologies where you have a single open period (which is often filled before the official 'deadline') and if you miss it, too bad. Even the ongoing subs markets often only have reading periods at certain times of the year. So a lot of the time publishing success comes down to writing a lot of material and then chancing upon an appropriate submission call at the right time. 

If Anthology X demands No Simultaneous Submissions and Writer A submits to them in early July and the publishing house holds onto the piece with exclusivity through the end of September only to then say no, they may have -- probably did -- cause the writer to miss out on unique opportunities with Anthology Y, Z, etc. that opened and closed within the exclusivity period, never to come again. These are opportunities that Anthology X surely knew could potentially be out there, since they are in the business. If they don't know, that seems like willful ignorance. Certain genres have pretty small pools of publishers (there aren't a ton of markets for splatterpunk, say) so you essentially have to locate and submit to every single opportunity nearly 100% of the time to have a hope of publishing frequently.

Given how many anthologies then like to claim some kind of 'helping new writers' philosophy, and given excessive delays are normally avoidable (I think its reasonable to expect no short story submission should take three months to consider, and yet many do -- I still occasionally get rejections for stories I submitted in 2019!), I would call no simultaneous submissions something that certainly has the potential to be highly unethical, even if it may not be every time. ​Again, I'm basing that mainly on what I would personally not think is right if I was a publisher. Others may disagree, of course.

There's a lot of variables in the above, of course. In the grand scheme of things I am not saying this is a mortal sin or something, only that it's pretty disreputable, especially if the publication presents itself as an advocate for its writers and then takes a long time. I agree that a week or two of exclusivity is probably fine and unlikely to hurt anything...but a month is pushing it. More than a month starts to be truly excessive (and now damaging to the writer) and multiple months is definitely unethical, yeah. 

It's important to say that the ethical problem could probably be avoided if the publisher is upfront about the reading time. If the information on turnaround times is consistently and clearly provided and the writer decides the risk outweighs the benefit, that's on the writer and we probably would not need to have this conversation. The fact is, a lot of places aren't that forthcoming about things like timelines, which is why we end up having to pay duotrope subscriptions and stuff.


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## EternalGreen (Sep 18, 2020)

Amazon is the literal devil.

I would never publish with them.


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## luckyscars (Sep 18, 2020)

EternalGreen said:


> Amazon is the literal devil.
> 
> I would never publish with them.



I understand but, unfortunately, it's quite difficult to avoid. Who is doing what they do as effectively and more ethically? 

This is the problem, isn't it? How are you going to publish without engaging with Amazon (or somebody else who is some degree of unscrupulous) at least passively? It's like the whole "I hate the pharmaceutical industry" thing. Yeah, okay, I do to...but what's the option? Dying? 

The world is, broadly, an unethical place fashioned into a giant ATM for sociopaths. You can do business with bastards (albeit reluctantly, albeit with the intent of resisting) or you can go off-the-grid and those are essentially the only two options. I assume you fill your car with gasoline. I assume you probably pay taxes that fund drone strikes on Afghan weddings. I assume even if you don't use Amazon ever you probably do use other things that are 'as bad' if not as prominently so.

 You don't bear moral culpability for those things, _because you have no choice, _but you do bear the responsibility of acknowledging that you are not actively avoiding them, either.


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## EternalGreen (Sep 18, 2020)

I don't _need _to self-publish a novel rather than (possibly) working harder and jumping through hoops to go traditional, for example.

I do _what I can_ to avoid evil leviathans.


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## Bayview (Sep 18, 2020)

EternalGreen said:


> I don't _need _to self-publish a novel rather than (possibly) working harder and jumping through hoops to go traditional, for example.
> 
> I do _what I can_ to avoid evil leviathans.



But if you get a traditional publisher, surely they'll want to put your book up for sale on Amazon?


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## Golden_Age (Oct 14, 2020)

Bayview said:


> I think my attitude toward this very much depends on response times. IF they're asking for two weeks of exclusivity, I think that's totally reasonable. If they're asking for two months, it's much less acceptable to me. If it's an unlimited period of time? Nope. Doesn't work for me.



I'd agree with this. A short window of exclusivity is fine, but anything more than that and you could be waiting a year for "permission" to submit to a handful of agents.


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