TL;DR: If you run a short story magazine and it takes you longer than six weeks to respond to submissions, you should allow simultaneous submissions as a courtesy to your writers.

A simultaneous submission is when the writer sends the same story to multiple markets at the same time, instead of going down the list one-by-one and waiting for a rejection before submitting it to the next market. Multiple submissions are when the writer sends multiple stories to the same market at the same time. Generally, most sci-fi magazines do not accept simultaneous or multiple submissions.

I can understand why you don’t want to open the door to multiple submissions. A lot of us are fairly prolific, and if you allow us, we can swamp you with manuscripts in very short order. But simultaneous submissions are completely different.

Of course it’s frustrating to find a great story, only to learn that the writer has sold it somewhere else. But you know what’s even more frustrating? To watch your stories languish in slushpiles for months and even years while you know that you have readers who would eagerly snap them up the moment you publish them yourself. When you don’t allow simultaneous submissions, you are effectively demanding exclusivity for the length of the submission period, and exclusivity hurts readers and writers alike.

See, the publishing world has changed. The magazines aren’t the only available option for publishing our stories anymore. It is entirely possible for us to publish those stories ourselves, and to do quite well by them. In fact, if we have a story that’s ready to go, we’re putting off the money that we could be making if we decide to submit to the magazines instead.

The current status-quo regarding simultaneous and multiple submissions was made back when publishers held all the power, and writers could not realistically be their own publishers. It’s a holdout from the era of the gatekeepers, before the golden age of self-publishing. But that era is over, and we’re no longer as dependent on you as we used to be.

Which is not to say that the magazines have no value. On the contrary, you provide a great deal of value, and we want to support you with our content. That’s why we’re still submitting our stories to you instead of publishing themselves. When you publish our stories, it allows us to reach new readers and boosts our reputation in the field. We’re all in this together, and we want to support you just like you want to support us.

But look, can we meet in the middle here? When our stories are locked up in your slushpile for five months at a time, it makes us think twice. If you’re going to take your time, let us send our stories elsewhere while we wait to hear back from you.

I’m not going to lie: when it takes you three or more months to respond to our submissions, demanding exclusivity all the while, the word that comes to mind is “unprofessional.” I don’t care if your magazine has been in print for longer than I’ve been alive, or that you published such-and-such big name author before he was famous. It’s 2015 now, and that’s what it looks like.

I understand that you might not have the resources to respond to every submission in a timely way. That’s totally understandable. But if that is the case, there is no good reason why you can’t allow simultaneous submissions as a professional courtesy.

There are a lot of magazines that I would love to be published in. Many of these are semi-pro and token paying magazines that still want to support, in spite of the fact that they don’t pay very well. But even the pro-paying magazines make me think twice when my stories are locked up with them for months at a time. If your goal is to keep your slushpile manageable by getting me to self-reject, the best I can say is that it’s working.

If you run a short story magazine and you aren’t able to give us a timely response to our submissions, then please, do your writers a favor and allow us the courtesy of simultaneous submissions.