Beginning this week, Apex Magazine is making some BIG changes to our slush process. For as long as I have been involved in the slush process for Apex, we have had one slush reader read each story and make the initial call about whether or not it is rejected or passed up to the editors. This has always worked really well, and has allowed us to keep our turnaround time pretty quick. Our slush team is amazing! They work really hard and I trust their calls on submissions.
Unfortunately, last week highlighted a very big flaw in this system, showing how one person could use their position as a slush reader to impact writers unfairly by rejecting stories due to personal grudges rather than the story’s merit. To be clear, none of the writers who contacted me fearing they may have been unfairly judged were impacted, but realizing that they could have been made Rebecca E. Treasure and I see that we needed to change our system.
Moving forward, every story submitted to Apex Magazine will be read by at least two slush readers before it is determined that a story should be rejected or passed up to me. We are breaking our slush team into three groups. The first group reads the story, rates it and makes notes about whether or not they feel that story should be passed up or not. The second group reads the stories the first group has already read and does the same thing—rates the story and decides whether or not they feel a story should be passed up to me. If a story has two yeses, then it comes to my desk. If it has two nos, it is rejected. If the first two readers are split one yes and one no, then the story goes a third group of readers who will be the tie breaker. Put simply, every story needs two nos before we send that initial rejection.
Making these changes eliminates any opportunity for a slush reader to use their position to unfairly reject a writer. It also means that we will be unable to get through our slush pile as quickly as we have in the past. We have added several new readers to our team in the past few days to help with this, but we are also pushing out the date when writers can expect to have the initial response. Moving forward, we will have initial responses out to writers within 60 days of submissions.
Another change we are making to the slush process is that moving forward we will allow simultaneous submissions. Since we know we’ll be holding stories longer than we were in the past, we don’t feel it’s right to ask the authors to hold off submitting that story elsewhere while waiting for us to make a decision. All that we ask is if you submit your story elsewhere and it is accepted somewhere else, please withdraw it from our submission pile as soon as you can. That way we aren’t taking time considering a story that has already sold.
Finally, our goal is for all stories to get 2 reads, but until we've expanded our staff further, stories over 7,000 words may only get one read from one of our Submissions Editors if they are getting close to our 60 day return goal.
If you have any questions or concerns, please don’t hesitate to reach out to either me or Rebecca E. Treasure. This is very new to us and it may take some tinkering to work out all the bugs.
