Too much talking makes Relvan a hard sell
Filed under Market Report on February 1, 2010
Tagged: Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, Relvan's Rescue, submissions
I heard back from the editors at Heroic Fantasy Quarterly over the weekend. Return time was ~2 months. They felt the beginning was “too talky” for their tastes. That’s the second comment about the start of the story, so I took a hard look and did end up cutting a couple lines of dialogue that really added nothing to the plot. I’m not sure it makes that much of an impact overall, like going from “too talky” to “kinda talky,” but it’s all I’m willing to prune at this point.
The editors also admitted that “pirate-related” stories are a hard sell for them. I can’t do much about that, but it is good to know for future submissions, which they invited me to send, and a nice nugget of information to pass on to folks considering this market.
Relvan’s next stop is Beneath Ceaseless Skies. I recently discovered this e-zine via an article I read somewhere online. They publish new issues roughly every two weeks, with two short fiction pieces per issue. You can download issues as PDFs or PRC ebooks if you don’t like reading from their website.
Unlike many similar markets, BCS pays professional rates. It appears their main source of income is donations (their parent company is a non-profit), though they do purchase an option to buy anthology rights, leading one to believe they have plans to sell collections at some point. Until then, the donation model appears to be working for them. They’ve been producing issues since October 2008 without a break in publication.
Their submission guidelines are pretty standard. I really appreciate the acceptance of manuscripts as attachments and simultaneous submissions. You’d think the former would be standard practice in today’s markets (it’s not), and the latter is a rarity. While return time is 5-8 weeks, BCS offers another unique feature in the form of posts to their forums that announce when they have replied to all submissions emailed by a certain date. If you’re submission falls into that slush pile, but you did not receive a reply, they welcome you to query them.
