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As an author, you write for free. The prospect of ever getting paid for your time is ethereal. After you've spent hours dreaming up, creating and editing your work, you then have to spend as much, if not more time (and money!) trying to convince people to publish it. All publishers have to do (and I know, I'm one of them) is go through the submissions and cherry pick what they want. The fact that they get 'a lot of submissions' is no excuse for the lousy, half-assed rejection letters they return - that's part of the business. If they don't want them, they should not accept submissions, or pay authors to write the stories they want.
But the lowest of the low are the publications that don't even bother to return your SASE (Self Addressed Stamped Envelope), or otherwise acknowledge you ever even submitted to them. Below is a list of such scoudrels I have encountered.
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Maisonneuve: An over-trendy, half-interesting/half Kill-Bill-esque navel gazer of a magazine out of Montreal. After waiting 9 months for a response to my submission of two lonely poems I politely emailed Maisonneuve and asked if they had received my submission and, if not, I offered to send again. 7 months later (as I am writing this) I have yet to receive a response to this reply either. SHAME!
The New Yorker: Of course, the New Yorker only publishes whichever author of the moment all the literati are drooling over. They belong to the pre-chewed school of publishing where only published authors that have been deemed worthy by a bunch of other fuddy-duddies with charts and scales and elite-o-meters - by which they judge 'literary merit' - have a chance. I knew this and yet still I submitted, either in pre-rejection naive optimism, or out of a desire to be proven wrong, that writing quality mattered over publication history. Mostly, I was looking forward to having their rejection letter in my collection. But I wasn't even worthy of that, apparently, as The New Yorker, no doubt inundated by hundreds of manuscripts, couldn't be bothered to reply. Still...SHAME!
Kyoto Journal: A magazine about asian culture - mostly written by non-asians working in Asia for some reason. Maisonneuve and New Yorker are schlitzy, well-funded rags. Their poor behaviour is almost expected of them. Kyoto Journal is an interesting little magazine that, for some reason, decided to keep me in total limbo concerning two little poems I sent them. SHAME!
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In fairness, I should mention here that several small internet zines have also failed entirely to respond to my submissions. I'm not listing them here because usually that means they've gone belly up.
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