I logged on this morning to the awesome news that Analog now accepts–even prefers–e-submissions! Needless to say, this is a great source of joy to me, not in the least because of all the money it will save me in stamps. I never said I was not selfish.
When talking about Analog, I often detect a hint of headshaking and a slight sad smile. I think it is the last of the big magazines people expected to fall to the evil e-submission curse.
I think we’re probably at a stage where the remaining magazines accepting only paper submissions are starting to miss out on too many great submissions by newer writers who have never submitted anything on paper. They risk losing their edge by relying too much on the same old, shrinking, bunch of regular submitters. Change is here!
I subscribed to Analog recently and I think is a great magazine. Analog specialises in ‘realistic’ SF. From what I’ve read so far, that doesn’t necessarily mean hard SF, it means that the stories take place in worlds that are described as if they could really exist, in a way that a reader can easily envisage them. Those of you who complain that they find a lot of published short stories ‘too weird’ will find some great fiction here.
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I’ve got a few copies of Analog, and I enjoy them. It’s not stuff I would write, but I love to read it. Glad to hear they are joining the digital age at last 🙂
there’s not many paper-only magazines left now
What was their resistance in the first place – reading submissions on a computer screen?
I don’t know, and I don’t try to judge. It’s the magazine’s right to decide their submission policies. Most of the big print magazines held out for a long time, and still ROF and F & SF don’t accept e-submissions. Asimov’s only since mid-last year. Human beings are creatures of habit, and they saw their submission system as working fine for them, until, perhaps, they realised that too many of the young guns were choosing to submit elsewhere. But that’s only a guess.
I was thinking that with the rise of the ereader or the ipad it might have made the switch easier
I wouldn’t read submissions any other way than on the screen. It’s such a waste of paper otherwise. That would be my objection. There’s no need to print a piece a fiction until it’s being published, and even that may not be necessary.
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