That's interesting. I certainly trust your track record, but can you expand on this a little? The reason is I've seen in some magazine mastheads that they don't expect exclusives because of the pace of editors getting back to authors with a yay/nay.
Also, is it wrong to want to be read, even if the journals are smaller? I mean, I get to send the story to your top picks first, but not send at all to those with lesser circulations (ones you may not want to jump all over, but one which will still get a story you couldn't sell read)? Or maybe I'm kind of misinterpreting here.
Just curious what you'd have to say about these things, not objecting to your opinion, necessarily. Thanks.
My really big problem with simultaneous submissions is that they only work if you;re a good enough writer to sell pretty much everything you write as it stands.
Say you're a new writer, and you submit a story to five magazines. You're probably going to pick the top five. Now, say your story needs work, as just about all stories by new writers do.
You just blew four chances to receive feedback, rewrite the story, and submit it to the next magazine. You've already been rejected by the top five, all at once, because your story wasn't quite good enough.
So any rewrite will have to be for the sixth best magazine. If you go the simultaneous route again, and if the story still isn't quite right, you've blown four more chances.
A story of near professional quality will almost always receive some sort of feedback, and this is critical for fast, regular sales. A story that isn't close to professional level isn't going to sell anywhere, regardless of of the submission process you use.
I've found, through my own experience, that the best and fastest way to sell short stories is to target a specific magazine. Read it, and write the story accordingly. Or write the story first, then read the magazine, and make any little changes you can think of to make it fit that magazine.
Submit it. If it doesn't sell, it will still receive some sort of feedback, if it's any good at all. Use this feedback before submitting to the next magazine.
Writers use simultaneous submissions because they think it saves time. They say, "But it would take years to submit this to one magazine at a time." My experience is the opposite. It only takes years if you've written a story no one wants. If you write a story you've targeted, and if you write well, it's going to sell to one of those top five magazines because you've used the feedback between submissions to make needed changes.
The other side of the coin, the place where time does matter, is in how many stories you write. I've not sure how many short stories most writers have to write before selling one to a good magazine, but again from my experience, it's in the dozens, sometimes in the hundreds.
But I've found this number typically goes way down if the writer writes regularly, produces a good amount of fiction, but takes the time to target specific magazines, submits the stories one at a time, and worries more about the learning curve, rather than how long it takes to submit stories to one magazine at a time.
Really. If a writer submits to the top five magazines at once, and always gets a hit from one of them, he can submit simultaneous or not, though I still find I get better, and considerably more frequent, sales by hitting them one at a time, but if a writers is consistently rejected by the top five, or the top ten, or the top twenty magazines, simultaneous submissions will certainly allow him to burn through all the magazines out there much faster, but it won't produce sales, unless it's to the occasional bottom tier magazine.
That writer needs to slow down, focus on the learning curve, target magazines, make them fit the magazine, even if the quality is still a bit lower than the editor wants, use the feedback to rewrite, and do the same thing with the next magazine.
And if that writer is writing as many stories as he should be, it won't be long before he has stories sitting at several magazines without any simultaneous submissions.
I've always wanted my stories to be the best they can possibly be, and I want sales that reflect this. Going one at a time has made this happen, and has worked for writers in workshops I've dealt with. Sometimes going slow gives much faster results that trying to go too fast.
