Correspondence With Agents and Publishers

by Don Webb

It’s become apparent to me that the letter from the Ethan Ellenberg literary agency, in issue 356, may have missed an opportunity to clarify an order of business that often disappoints contributors, namely correspondence.

From my on-line conversation with the Ellenberg representative, I gather that the agency receives a whopping amount of mail: an average of fifty submissions a week. And most of them come in as paper mail, not as e-mail.

It goes without saying that a self-addressed, stamped envelope or postcard is de rigueur for paper mail. No editor or agent is going to spend his own funds on postage for a simple acknowledgment. Unfortunately, even an envelope or postcard with the correct postage is often not returned.

The problem is that mail can get lost. Not often, but often enough to make the sender wonder if it was received. An acknowledgment at least validates the mail’s existence. But agents and editors are short-handed. Few, I imagine, have a secretary working full time to sort the mail, let alone respond to it. Ideally, a secretary could photocopy a boilerplate letter to the effect: “Thank you for your submission. It will be read. If we’re interested, you’ll hear further from us.”

Or, if the submission comes by e-mail, it would be simple to send the same thing without having to go the trouble to photocopy it. That would at least provide contributors a token of good faith: the representative has assured me that Mr. Ellenberg reads all submissions.

Bewildering Stories doesn’t have that problem. Or, more exactly, we have it to a lesser extent. We average perhaps 20 to 25 submissions a week. And none comes in paper mail.

Well, one did, several years ago. Talk about time warps: it came from someone who couldn’t handle e-mail and had cranked out a novella on a manual typewriter. But we publish on the Internet only. What was I to do: scan 38 pages with an OCR?

Bewildering Stories’ correspondence makes extensive use of boilerplate; I know how important it is to keep in touch. I hate its impersonality, and I love conversing with contributors. But our canned messages tell contributors what they need to know. Even so, it’s physically demanding to keep up with the mail. Since our first priority is preparing the next regular issue and we have one week in which to do it, delays and oversights in the mail follow inexorably.

Many’s the day I’ve wished for a secretary. Bill Bowler is not one: as Coordinating Editor he’s indispensable to the day to day functions of Bewildering Stories and rates a secretary of his own. But what would I do? I’d have to teach a secretary the job, and that would be more trouble than it’s worth. Besides, it would be a never-ending task: such a reliable, skilled person could earn a nice salary as an executive assistant — somewhere else. And that leaves us right back where we started.

Compared to agents and many print publishers, Bewildering Stories is a big operation. And we’re still understaffed. To echo Candide: if such is life in this world, what are the others like? We can tell our colleagues in publishing what we do, but we can’t tell them how to run their business. They have our every sympathy.