Submitting to sci-fi journals seems a lot more professional than I expected

For over four years, I've been consistently writing short stories and submitting them to literary journals, the kind that focus on literary fiction. Generally, when you submit to one of these journals, you can expect to wait at least three months for an answer. I've waited over a year several times. Because of this long wait, everyone sends out simultaneous submissions, meaning you are querying more than one journal about a story at the same time. It's just assumed this will be done. Very few journals anymore object to the practice. Prairie Schooner is one journal that comes to mind that specifically says they don't want simultaneous submissions. I know there are a few more, but for the most part, journals know they can't expect you to wait six months in between attempts to get published, so they are fine with simultaneous submissions. (And a lot of writers just ignore the few injunctions against simultaneous submissions that are out there, anyway.) For the most part, if you just let journals know as soon as it gets accepted somewhere else so they don't waste time on it, you're fine.

Also, it's become pretty common for these journals to start charging a nominal fee to submit a story. Three dollars seems to be the going standard. I don't really object to this practice. As the journals will tell you, it's comparable to what writers used to have to spend in the old days to mail manuscripts out. Now that everything is done electronically, meaning it's a lot easier to submit, the number of manuscripts every journal is getting is spiking. Meanwhile, it's not like each of these journals has thousands of subscribers paying to read the journals. The magazines have costs that are usually covered by a small, charitable endowment of some sort, one they can't afford to stretch thin.

If you get published in one of these journals, you typically don't get paid. Some journals will pay you along the lines of about twenty bucks, because the principle of paying writers something for their work is important to the editors, but in general, you're getting paid in exposure and a credit to put on your resume for when you submit work somewhere else.

So it was very strange for me to submit a story to sci-fi journals. For a long time, I've written stories that were on the fringe of literary fiction and something else. I'm a lot more plot-heavy than your average lit fic writer, but overall, I've always thought that my work leaned more toward lit fic than anything else, so I've focused on those journals. I wrote a story this month that was enough sci-fi I decided to try publishing it somewhere other than a literary fiction outlet. (By "enough sci-fi," I mean I can imagine it being made into an episode of Black Mirror.)

I used this list of places to submit speculative short fiction to start with. Early on in the list, I noticed a couple of things. First, there is a stated aversion to simultaneous submissions. Just as I was about to go on the rant all writers go on about how it's impractical to expect any writer to wait this long for a single response, I realized that these sci-fi journals did something I'd never seen before: they told you where you were in the queue to be read and gave you an estimated wait time. For one journal, it was sixteen days. For another, it was ten, unless they liked it enough to send it to the second round.

They also all mentioned something I've seldom seen talked about: money. They all offer to pay somewhere between five and eight cents a word. So, a couple hundred bucks for a story. All of these indicators--a team of readers anxiously plowing through the slush pile, a jealous interest in not wasting anyone's time, and actual discussion of money, leads me to believe that sci-fi is more like a business than lit fic. Meaning they actually have some expectation of making money. That's encouraging. I'm so used to thinking of writing as a dying industry that needs life support from wealthy patrons of the arts to keep it going, it's nice to know that somewhere, there are people who see it as a viable way to make a living.

I don't know if I'm going to keep writing sci-fi. My novel that I've nearly found an agent for a few times is fairly sci-fi, but that's the only other thing I've done so far that I could sell as something other than lit fic. I kind of have to write the stories that occur to me. I'm just enjoying the surprise that there is a model somewhere in the world for something other than an all-volunteer editing team publishing an all-volunteer team of writers.