We love it when people just say it:
“Screw not judging. I will judge. Not the nine-monthers, who may have their own reasons, but the truly unprofessional behavior I still see all the time in response to submissions. Here’s what I say, as an outsider, an interloper in the publishing/literary world: taking a year to respond with a form email that is two sentences long is not professional. That’s right. Rejecting someone in your submissions software but never letting them know? Not professional. Sending Xeroxed and chopped up quarter slips of paper for rejections? Totally unprofessional. Pretending you take shit from the slush pile all the time when really 99.9 percent of what you publish is solicited? Not professional. Sending rejections that say things like, ‘This was really pretty bad,’ or ‘yeah, didn’t care for this at all?’ So incredibly not professional.”
Essential reading: this blog post by Amber Sparks on the lengthy and often plain insulting response times from some literary magazines. Yeah, there’ll be some who say “Hey, don’t worry about it. Just move on. Submit somewhere else. Don’t get so hung up on response times. There are more important things in life.” There are. There are many more important things in life, but we all need smaller things to think about than the fact we’re all slowly choking ourselves to death in a haze of crazy pollution. So we worry, agonize and get angry about response times instead. Anyway, are we the only ones to notice that the kind of people who make the “lighten up” speeches are usually those who have moved on from the submitting game?
Look, to us, it’s simple. Beyond everything, response times are about one simple thing: showing some respect for your fellow writers. That’s it.
(Before putting up this quote and encouraging you to read Amber’s post, we obviously took a look at our own response times. We’re not bad. Sometimes we could do better — everyone could always do better — but any delay in responding is usually to do with mundane stuff like having to work for a living, not because we’re busy enjoying our supreme editorial power by sitting on a huge pile of submissions, laughing our asses off as we sip the freshly squeezed blood of a penniless intern.)