Abyss & Apex Magazine

I hope this is the correct forum for this and that it isn't a "not again!" type question. I couldn't find anything that addressed this.

I was looking at the submission requirements for Abyss and Apex and I'm a little confused as to what to do. For flash fiction and short stories, they list all the submission details toward the top of the page; it then goes through all the poetry details. And it's very detailed. But then, at the very bottom, it gives the email for queries for fiction, and the email for queries for poetry with the addition of "if you have questions". (They do list specific reading periods btw.)

So now I'm not sure if they want queries for the short fiction/flash fiction or if that's meant just for questions. I'm thinking it's just for questions, since the flash fiction itself would be shorter than a formal query.

I would just send them an email asking, but I thought, since I'll be looking at a lot of possible places to submit, I should ask here to see if there's a "standard" or if I need to check with each if this isn't specified.

Thanks

shaldna said:

I'm a alittle confused. You just said they listed all the info and then an email address for sub? Right. So what's the problem. Maybe I'm just not reading that correctly.

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I was confused (based on the addendum for poetry queries) if they meant query as in "if you have questions" or query as in "I have a story would you be interested". But I think Polenth answered my question ;-)

Polenth said:

They don't want a novel-style query. Send the complete text of your story/poem, with a brief cover letter in the email. The cover letter includes story title, length, genre and credits (if you have any - otherwise, don't mention it) plus anything else they ask for (A&A asked for a bio last time I looked). Don't include a description or summary of the story.

That's standard for most short story markets.

In the short story world, the term query often gets used for sending followups to check the status of submissions. You'll only do this if your submission has taken longer than expected. It's rare to be asked for a novel-style query. Where it happens, the market will make it very clear they want one (e.g., "if you have a story above our word count limit, but you think we'll love it, please query first").

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Thanks - that clears it up for me.