Six cheers for Sixfold

Like the majority of below-the-radar writers out there, I submit stories to a lot of journals. I realized a while ago--mostly as a result of working as an editor who made decisions on what to publish myself--that the odds of getting into even the most marginal journal are long, and the best bet to be able to share work with readers is to take the lead from what fish and reptiles do: drop a bunch of eggs in the hope that a few of them will survive.

Most of my stories meet the same fate as most eggs. They find a fast, quick death. The problem for me as a parent to these stories is that I really don't know what fate befell them beyond the fact they didn't make it to adulthood. Did they almost make it? Do I have the right overall strategy for raising my young? Am I way off?

Almost all rejection letters just say "no thanks." A few say the editors really liked the story, but it didn't quite make it. Lately, I've been really encouraged to be getting these kinds of rejections from some of the better journals, the ones that bring a lot of readers to the table. But most rejections I get are still quiet on what kind of rejection it was.

I've said before that I wish editors would be brave enough to give you a one to ten score. There wouldn't be any requirement to justify it, just a raw score. Ten is "we published you" and one is "I stopped reading somewhere on page one." I think a six or maybe a seven would indicate that the editor read all the way to the end with interest. That might be depressing, but at least it's some kind of response other than a form letter.

Enter Sixfold

I just learned about Sixfold. Its model is different. Rather than having an editorial board, they let the readers decide. Everyone who submits a story becomes a voter. They have a very complicated, three-round process you can read about here. Most of the complicated parts are transparent to the reader/voter. You just have to read six stories, rank them from one to six, and then do it again for two more rounds. At the end, they've got their top stories based on votes.

Sixfold is very enthusiastic about their process. Like, they're really, really big believers in it. I can see a few problems with it. One is that if I'm a voter but also looking to get my work published, aren't I motivated to vote down the best stories so I hurt the competition? Granted, my vote is just one of many a story will get, but what if a lot of voters are doing the same thing? Couldn't you end up with a good story getting dumped on preemptively? 500 voters who are also candidates is different from just having 500 voters.

Secondly, like any journal, a lot of stories aren't that good. Which means you're getting votes from people who don't write very good stories themselves. Granted, someone can be a bad writer and a good reader, but I'd trust a good writer more to have a meaningful vote. Whatever the plusses and minuses of having a board are, most editorial boards have writers who've at least published a little bit themselves. There's no real requirement to be a voter at Sixfold other than to enter the contest and follow the rules.

Third is what I'd like to call Weber's Rule of Workshops, which applies here as well. 90% of readers will only put 50% of the work into reading your work that they'd like to get themselves. Really, reading a story thoroughly ought to include reading twice. I didn't do that. But I did read every story all the way through once, which is more than I do when I'm an editor on a board. However, it's not like the magazine is checking to see how closely each reader read. It's an honor system. I did the best I could with the time I had available. I read closely, took notes, and tried hard to rank them. Usually, #1 and #6 were easy, but #2 through #5 were harder to define.

In spite of these problems, I still think Sixfold is a great idea. It's transparent--you get to see all the responses of all the readers. Readers who don't respond get their own stories eliminated. It ensures that our fate on the slush pile isn't just in the hands of one grad student somewhere. You might get some garbage feedback. My experience with workshops is that you almost always do get some thoughts you are better off ignoring from almost any group of readers. But even this ambivalent something seems better to me than the nothing I usually get.

I'm writing all this now, when the results of the vote I entered aren't back yet. I don't want anyone thinking I praised it too highly because they picked me or that I qualified their value too much because they ditched me in round one. Honestly, based on the stories I got to see when I voted and the stories that have won before, I can very much see my story going either way. Nothing between first and last would surprise me. But whatever the result, I think the approach is interesting, worth trying, and probably likely to come close to what a regular journal with a board could do in terms of quality.  I plan to report back at the end with whether there were any surprises, like stories I voted low that won.