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Beth asked: "3) I have read mixed opinions about sending pieces out to multiple venues. While of course the idea of ONE publication considering a piece of mine is wild -- the remote chance of TWO simultaneously wanting one seems darn well near impossible. While that is likely NEVER to happen, is there etiquette involved in telling Party A that Party B already has it? Or is multiple submissions frowned upon. I would sort of be of the persuasion first come first serve...b/c if you sit around waiting for responses one article at a time, you'll go nowhere fast."

Hooooooo boy. Now this one, we could take over into its own topic. And if it generates lots of responses, we might have to! For now.... here's my take.

Partly this depends on how much of a hurry you're in. When I submit poetry, I usually do it one batch at a time, because frankly there is NO money in poetry, period, whatsoever, unless you're William Carlos Williams or something (and even then, it's better if you're already dead). When I send out short fiction, I more or less do the same thing, because I'm not in much of a rush, and I tend to have a priority order on the mags I send to (from highest money/prestige to "oh well, just complimentary copies").

However--when I submit book-length queries and/or MS out, that's a real bear to wait and wait and wait indefinitely on, and face it, publishers are painstakingly slow. It just isn't practical. And there is that "nowhere fast" dilemma, no matter how you look at it. Just like in music publishing (it seems), the whole process seems to be terribly slow in updating from the Stone Age. While the rest of the business world has moved on to email and faxes and web-based everything, here we are MAILING things and waiting and waiting and waiting.... sometimes months... for replies to our work.

And so I tend to subscribe to the first-come first-served idea as well as that good old "a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush." (Ack! a cliche!)

Then it all boils down to etiquette, and that whole matter of possibly maybe burning a bridge with a sensitive or persnickety editor who doesn't like that you sent it out multiple places when their guidelines clearly state that they don't like it.

Best case, you wind up in a bidding war over your book MS. Wouldn't that be nice!

The thing you MUST do, when you send out simultaneous submissions of your articles [note: I'll do a little vocab lesson here in a second), is KEEP TRACK OF THEM!!

You must, must, MUST learn to use Excel or Word or some program to TRACK everything that you do. This way, when one of your articles DOES get accepted, you can *immediately* write to the others you sent it to, and withdraw your submission. That's where editors are most likely to get testy with you... when you fail to keep them informed your article is no longer available. With luck, you'll be able to do this with a good email or telephone contact and take care of it quickly and professionally.

I think I'll post a new thread on how to keep track of your submissions. Meanwhile, here's the vocab lesson.

A MULTIPLE submission is when you send MORE THAN ONE article to the same publisher in the same package.

A SIMULTANEOUS submission is when you send the SAME article to MANY publishers in the same timeframe.

Easily confused, but not the same thing. Most editors really don't want multiple submissions, unless they are very very short (in the case of poetry--they will tell you to send 2 to 4 poems or no more than 10 pages, or whatever). However--if you get a nice, personalized rejection letter, go ahead and send that editor something else fairly soon, so they remember your name. More on that in another topic too.

Linda