This week: Lessons Learned as a Publisher Edited by: Max Griffin 🏳️🌈  
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| This newsletter is “for authors,” but sometimes it’s useful to have an editor’s or publisher’s point of view. This month marks the one-year anniversary of my personal experience as both editor and publisher of Tales From the Crosstimbers. |
The purpose of this particular newsletter is to convey some of my experiences as publisher, and the lessons that might be useful to you, as authors.
Background
About a year ago, I started a small, mostly online, quarterly magazine to publish speculative fiction.
Admittedly, this is a tiny publishing endeavor. While it’s a paying market, the payments are not “professional-level.” It does generate a small amount of revenue, but that’s nowhere nearly sufficient to pay for the associated expenses of creating and maintaining the website, to say nothing of the payments to authors.
Still, I’ve tried to make this in all ways possible a professionally-run operation. That involves, for starters, the website, which is by far the most expensive single part of this endeavor. In addition, I formed a limited liability corporation under the laws of Oklahoma, Crosstimbers Publications, LLC, and obtained the necessary IRS documents for filing corporate taxes and sending royalty payments to authors. Last February, I sent out 1099s to the authors and, in April, I filed taxes on the LLC. (We lost several hundred of dollars.) These activities—creating and maintaining the website, the legal and fiscal paperwork—are all time-consuming and often interfere with my personal creative agenda. Still, interacting with authors makes it worthwhile.
Two author friends have agreed to assist. One, who runs a small press of her own, has provided invaluable advice on editing, graphics, operations, and contracts. The other is an indefatigable acquisitions editor who diligently reads every submission. The latter is especially helpful, since we’ve gotten nearly 1,000 submissions in the last year. For each issue, she selects the twenty or so top submissions, and we winnow that down to the ten that will appear.
The observant reader will note her first cut is less than 10% of the submissions for any particular issue, and that our final acceptance rate is about 4%. This does not mean that we are “highly selective.” It just means that even a minor publication like ours gets way more quality submissions than we can publish, and that many otherwise deserving stories don’t make it into our issue. Sometimes the decisions have nothing to do with the quality of the story. For example, we try to limit the print edition to around 100 pages, which constrains how many longer stories we can accept. Other times, we’re choosing between two excellent but similar stories.
Things Authors Should Know
The first thing authors need to know is that a rejection letter does not mean that you’ve written a bad story, or that your writing is deficient. More than half of the submissions we get are certainly suitable for publication. For any number of reasons, they might not make into a particular issue.
The second thing authors neeed to know is that reading all of those submissions is an enormous task. There is no way I could have done this project without the assistance of the acquisitions editor. Don’t pester the editor with questions about the status of your submission since that takes time and will likely slow down the editorial process. It will also likely annoy the editor. If you haven’t heard back, it means your submission is likely still under consideration. Indeed, in our case, we try to promptly acknowledge receipt of each submission and add that, if you haven’t heard back from us, it does, in fact, mean your submission is still under consideration.
Our experience is that some of the best stories come to us late in the submission window. While about half of our submissions will have gotten rejection letters by the date the window closes, the other half are still “possibles.” In the case of our publication, there’s no advantage to submitting early or late. However, I’m guessing that might be unique to our situation and practice. So another thing authors should know is that it’s generally better to be early in the submission process than last-minute.
When I read the stories the acquisitions editor has put on her short list, at least a quarter of them have clunky first paragraphs. Because of this, I’ve added specific advice to authors on the website about opening paragraphs, giving them a list of ten things an opening paragraph should do. I’m amazed at how many authors appear to have never read that list and have done none of the ten things on the list, or done things it explicitly says to not do. Even if such a story makes it to the short list, it’s still almost certain to be rejected.
Another interesting thing has to do with length. We have a preferred length, a maximum length, and a minimum length. We still get submissions that are longer than our maximum and shorter than our preferred minimum. All the too-long-for-us stories get rejected without reading. Stories longer or shorter than than our preferred lengths have a much harder time getting published.
The lessons from these things—first paragraphs and length—are, first, that if a publication gives explicit directions, follow them, and, second, If a publication has preferences, know that your story will be an exception only if it’s actually exceptional.
Some of you will have requested and received critques from me on Writing.Com. When I do these, they are usually detailed ,in-depth, and offer suggestions. My current practice is to never give such a critique unless an author has specifically requested it. What I don't do, as an editor, is offer unsolicited writing advice or try to change the voice of the author.
That said, often a story submitted to Tales from the Crosstimbers will have bits that I’d flag in an in-depth review. Too many of these bits, and it’ll just get a rejection letter. As an editor, I have neither the time nor the inclination to offer unsolicited writing advice. I’m sure that’s true of most editors. There are plenty of stories with minimal-to-no such problematic bits. Heinlein’s advice on unsolicited advice comes to mind—it’s likely to just annoy an author and waste the editor’s time.
However, sometimes a story has many strengths—“good bones,” if you will—but needs some polish. On those rare occasions, I might offer to provide the author of such a story an in-depth critique. If I do, that means I want to accept the story, but want the author to polish it. On every occasion where I’ve made such an offer (to date, that's four out of 1000 submissions), the author has accepted the offer, followed my subsequent advice, and their story has been published. So, if an editor offers to give you advice, it’s a good idea to accept the offer.
The contracting phase is another interesting feature. We publish stories on our website, but also on Amazon, where both print and Kindle editions appear. Our contract gives us the non-exclusive right to online and print publication with a limited but renewable term. Authors retain copyright of their work and all aspects of its contents, its distribution to other publishers, or publication in other media, and can revoke our limited rights with advance notice. I note our contract is pretty generous compared with other publications, which often seek exclusive, non-revocable, first rights.
The lesson with respect to contracting is don’t try to re-write the contract. For us, this is a "yes" or "no" decision, not an offer to negotiate. Novels and longer works that are not a regular schedule are different, but this is a short story in a periodical. Moreover, it’s not likely to win the Pulitzer Prize or become a million-copy best seller. If it is, you’ve submitted to the wrong market. In any case, I had one (first-time) author who actually re-wrote the contract. At the contracting phase, we’re already on a short fuse to get the Amazon editions formatted and ready in time for the publication date. It took me about two seconds to withdraw my acceptance of this particular story and move on to the next story on the short list.
That said, rumor has it that some well-respected markets for short fiction are adding alarming clauses to their contracts--things like permanently granting them the right to re-write your story using AI!!! That's a clause I not only would never agree to, it would simply cause me to withdraw my story from submission, not to negotiate. Most author contracts, including ours, have a clause that permits either party to withdraw with appropriate notice, and most publications respect author opinions and their control over their published work. That's certainly our goal.
On the subject of AI, our website makes it clear that we do not intend to publish stories written using, in whole or part, generative AI. Our submission documents and contracts require authors to either disclose the extent, if any, to which the author used generative AI in the production of their copy or, alternatively, to affirmatively state they did not use generative AI.
Moving on to another topic, each story does get edited, but that's almost entirely with attention to formatting, spelling, and grammar. We can have a light hand as editors because we get high quailty stories from gifted authors. I've withdrawn stories from markets where the editor had a heavy hand, or, worse, rewrote my prose and changed the meaning. Grammar, in particular, is tricky since we get many submissions from overseas. Authors from Australia or the UK have appeared in every issue, and we try to honor the grammatical and spelling conventions of their versions of English.
When I make grammatical changes, I always follow the Chicago Manual of Style, per our submission guidelines for authors from the US. On the rare occasion when an author objects, I'm able to point to a particular paragraph of CMOS to justify my recommendation. CMOS also often notes the differences between US and UK practice. By the way, CMOS is available online at a reasonable cost and is certainly in every public library. It's a useful tool for authors to have.
Our editorial process has a couple more steps. Once we've settled on our ten stories, one of the editors--usually me--reads the stories for grammar, spelling, and formats it so that breaks and other formatting things are consistent with our practice. After this, each author gets a copy of the edited story to approve or disapprove, so the authors have a final say over their published story. We give them one week to approve or object to changes because of the tight publication schedule mentioned above. Each time we change the copy, Kindle Direct Publishing takes 2-3 days to approve the changes. So, another lesson for authors, is to reply as soon as possible when asked to approve or disapprove editorial changes.
A final step in the editorial process is to make the online version of the issue--the one that we publish on our website--available to the authors about ten days prior to release. That way they can make any final suggestions or corrections to their copy or author bios. Again, avoiding delayed responses to this opportunity are critical. So far, responses have not been a problem, but it's always a worry.
By the way, book publishers often give authors multiple shots at their copy prior to publication, but, at least in my experience, this is uncommon for short story markets. We do try to be author-friendly in this regard.
So, that's a behind-the-scenes look at our process. I'm not saying it's representative, but I think it's a pretty good overview of the steps in producing a quarterly publication. We've just finished all the formatting for our Fall issue, due for release on September first, and are getting ready for our next open call, which also starts on September 1.
An offer to Readers of this Newsletter
If you’ve gotten this far, you now know how our process works. It occurs to me you might be interested in submitting to us. If so, glance at the kinds of fiction we publish:
https://thecrosstimbers.net/what-kinds-of-stories-do-we-seek/
If you have a story you think fits that general description, I’d like to read it. I’m especially interested in Writing.Com members submitting to our little publication—three of the best stories we’ve published have come from authors on this site. So, I’m inviting you to submit a story to us. Click on the link below, enter the password “Select” (case sensitive), and you’ll get to an invitation-only link where you can submit your story.
Before actually submitting, please also read
https://thecrosstimbers.net/submission-requirements/
for technical information on formatting and related matters. If you do submit, I will personally read every submission sent via this link. I'll eventually let you know if it's on our short list, although that likely won't happen before October first when we finalize the list.
Give it a try! The worst that can happen is that you'll get a polite letter declining your story. See the lesson above: that doesn't mean I didn't like it or that it's a bad story. Just that it didn't fit in the next issue. Submitting is good experience for any author, and who knows? Your story might even make the cover.
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For Authors: August 27, 2025 Issue [#13309]
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