As of today, I’ve made a small change to how we at Escape Pod choose our rejection letters.
In short, rejection letter type now reflects where the story got in our editorial pipeline. The criteria for Tiers 1&2 have been updated, so that now:
- Tier 1: Rejected by Associate Editor (first reader)
- Tier 2: Rejected by Assistant Editor (me)
- Tier 3: Rejected during Assistant Editor Second Pass
- Tier 4: Rejected by Co-Editors
Note that, as a result, we will be sending more Tier 1’s than in the past. We have tweaked its text accordingly.
Now more than ever, tier is not an estimate of story quality. “Who detected that the story wouldn’t be a fit for Escape Pod” is not highly correlated with the (subjective) question of “how close the story came to fitting.”
If you miss having some subjective opinion in your rejection letter, fear not! We continue to provide personalized rejections whenever possible for original story submissions.
If you want to learn more, including how to identify which tier you received, check out my full Submissions and Rejetomany post.
Thanks for posting this and the Submissions & Rejectomancy post. Getting rejected is always going to be part of the equation when submitting stories, but as an author who sends out a lot of submissions, I’m extremely grateful when an editor sheds a little light on the process. Thanks again.
I’m so glad this helps! As a short story writer myself, I (and the rest of the EP team) am committed to providing the kind of transparency I always wanted from other markets.