Very interesting....

I think I agree with you for the most part, but I believe you’re confusing two separate issues. I can’t speak with any authority to the question of whether print or online magazines get better submissions, because I have only done print. Intuitively I believe you’re right in saying that submitters have a better idea what to submit to particular online magazines because they’re more accessible. Heaven knows, next to no one who submits to Not One of Us ever bothers to buy a sample issue. In any case, I see no reason to believe that online magazines receive worse submissions than hardcopy magazines do.

But the matter of accepting electronic vs. only hardcopy submissions is totally separate. Mine is a hardcopy magazine, but since January 2004, when I finally bought a good enough computer at home to handle the traffic, I have been accepting submissions by email. The main difference I’ve found is the sheer volume of submissions. Compared with 2003, I now get easily three times as many submissions. Not surprisingly, that means I receive a larger number of good stories and poems, so it’s been to the good. But it simply hasn’t been the case for us that the submissions on average have been better. The sheer number of submissions that are instant rejections has grown enormously.

I only bring up this distinction because I think the strength of your argument does not depend on the quality of hardcopy vs. electronic submissions. I agree with you in rejecting the idea that online magazines do not receive submissions as good as hardcopy magazines do.

Do you know if the number of short fiction has actually gone up, or if the increase has been in poetry?

The increase in poetry has been greater than the increase in short fiction, but the number of short fiction submissions (especially long ones) has more than doubled. I hasten to point out that my magazine is very different from yours. Although we have been around for a large subset of forever, Not One of Us is not nearly as well known, nor do we pay more than a fraction of what your magazines do. This probably makes a difference.

When I started accepting e-submissions, the number (not just the proportion) of hardcopy submissions went down. That's because writers who can do both generally find electronic submissions easier. I don't believe that's a matter of "investment", as the critics of e-submissions seem to believe. It's more a matter of age. Younger writers are far more familiar with computers and email and such, so it's totally natural to submit stories that way.

I'm not a younger writer, but boy, I sure do prefer doing e-subs to snail mail, once I got used to them. Time and paper add up after a while. I don't miss doing hardcopy submissions one little bit.

Thank you. Yes.

I'm with Joyce. Started writing freehand, grew up and bought a typewriter, got my first computer (IBM 286, state-of-the-art at the time) and have not looked back.

In 2004 I went online and discovered a whole world of genre fiction. E-mail gets me instantly in contact with editors, writers, publishers...it's wild.

Back in the mid 1980's, when I started in writing short fiction, I made it a point to keep a couple of dozen stories out there. Burned through scads of paper and buckets of postage.

I loves me e-mail, yes I duz!

Electronic submissions are a godsend for editors/publishers who don't have a big staff. I've been on the other end, too. For about a decade while my wife was a prolific author, I served as her "secretary", printing copies of her stories, typing cover letters, packaging the mss and SASEs, then waiting for months sometimes to hear back from editors. And I used to walk five miles to school barefoot in the snow, uh, I mean, our first computer was a used K-Pro. So this old-timer really appreciates the joys of e-submission.

God bless the Kaypro!

I cut my teeth on a Kaypro 4 and its floppy disks that could only hold 40 pages.

I'm still daily amazed by the storage capacity of my USB drive since my memories of electronic storage are direct descendants of the Kaypro.

Great to know, thanks for debunking!

One side benefit of electronic submission is that you never get the handwritten scrawl submission. Or the unreadable photocopy.