There are a lot of webzines out there. Before we started BWS, I had no idea how many. Certainly there are hundreds, all hungry for stories. Here at Bewildering Stories, our submission guidelines allow for sim-subbing (simultaneous submissions) and multiple publications of the same story. Hey, we're a webzine and didn't pay you for the story anyway, but, y'know, we'd like to know if a story has been sim-subbed. It's kind of a shock to check out "the competition" and discover that one of "our" authors is not only on another site (which is good) but the same story you just published has also just been published by them. Oh well.
Are webzines fungible? Is one just the same as another? We hope not. We want to be a site that spends some extra effort to make that story just a bit better, to make that writer grow and evolve. (Hmm and here I thought writers were a degenerate lifeform... truly a bewildering story...)
It has been said that the average writer needs to churn out a million words before he gets good enough to be published, and if a writer CAN be stopped from writing, he SHOULD be. We hope that BWS writers get enough "egoboo" from being in our pages that they continue to write, and finally, make the big time. If we can have a part in that evolution, then that is a good thing.
Lately we've gotten some really GOOD stuff. Kate Bachus and Tom Smith come to mind. But we are an insatiable maw... More! MORE!
Jerry. The Bottle Washer