Poking around on the Glimmer Train site, I find a sterner than usual warning about simultaneous submissions:
Simultaneous submissions are not okay, I’m sorry, especially in competitions. (It breaks our hearts to fall for a story we can’t publish.)
I have heard writers occasionally complain that it breaks their hearts to submit stories and not hear back from editors in a timely fashion, which is one reason why they submit the same story to more than one place. Glimmer Train’s average response time as reported by Duotrope users is 71.7 days. If you take that as the average response time of all litmags you might submit the same story to, that means you could send your story out 5 times a year.
Be that as it may, you can’t mess around with Glimmer Train. Now that they’ve gone to an electronic submission format, there is no way to contact anyone at the magazine to withdraw your story, should it be accepted somewhere else:
OOPS! Can I change, exchange, withdraw, or otherwise alter my submission?
No, I’m sorry. It is not possible to edit or withdraw a submission. Once a submission is made, it is entered into the editorial process, which—especially in the case of competitions—is quite involved. (We actually CAN’T remove a piece from consideration once it’s submitted…. Story accepted elsewhere? We simply don’t have a mechanism for extracting a story from the editorial process so if we call you to accept it ourselves, you’ll have to break our hearts. (Which is why we ask that you please not send simultaneous submissions.)
I don’t know about you, but I’ve broken too many hearts already. I just wouldn’t have the nerve to do it.
I just crunched the numbers in VQR’s submission system to determine our average response times. Nonfiction takes 54 days, fiction takes 56 days, and poetry takes 83 days.
We, however, have a withdrawal function, and can intercept submissions anywhere in the process. Oddly, though, that’s precisely because we have an electronic system. I’ve actually used Glimmer Train’s electronic submission system. I’d think they’d just give people a “withdraw” link. That’s easier said that done, of course.
I wonder if Glimmer Train doesn’t have a withdrawal function because they run so many contests. Maybe they have accountability or some kind of auditing built into the system in such a way that it’s not possible to pull a submission out once it’s in. That way if an entrant has a dispute they can trace their submission. Does that make sense?
Glimmer Train has broken *my* heart five times, so I’m up for breaking theirs at least once.
I think it’s ridiculous to expect authors to offer their work to one customer at a time. Tell me another business that works this way. Imagine going into a car lot and saying, “I’m thinking about buying this car. Don’t show it to anybody else till I make up my mind. I’ll get back to you in a, oh, two or three months.”
One more reason why I no longer submit (or subscribe) to Glimmer Train. Lots of journals with electronic submission systems have “withdraw” capability. The GT sisters just don’t like simsubs. Tough.
[...] 6, 2007 · No Comments If you’ve been avoiding Glimmer Train because of their nix on simultaneous submissions, avoid no more. By way of Practicing Writer I have learned that GT now accepts simultaneous subs: [...]