Escape Pod: The New Rejectomancy

Good news for all you writers out there: starting immediately (last update February 5, 2019), Escape Pod is changing their rejection letters to a newer, more transparent pattern. Escape Pod rejectomancy is getting easier!

Escape Pod rejection letters will now be explicit and transparent about exactly where your story got in our editorial pipeline. From 2017-2019, the letters contained that information, but to interpret it you needed to read my website. No longer! That means you’re free to stop reading this post right now, its information is no longer necessary. But if you crave a deeper knowledge of rejectomantic arts, dive on in.

If the rejection letter provides no details about who enjoyed your story, that means your story was rejected after initial Associate Editor review. If your story passed any of the following milestones, the rejection letter will tell you whether:

1. An Associate Editor passed your story up to the Assistant Editor.
2. The Assistant Editor (me) held it for a second read.
3. The Assistant Editor passed it to Co-Editors for the final round of consideration.

Associate Editors read each story anonymized¹, but the Assistant Editor and Co-Editors can see the author’s name and cover letter.² This process gives each story an initial read where it must stand on its text alone, while still allowing the cover letter to play a role, especially if the author has experiences relevant to the story.

The new letters also provide approximate statistics about the stages of our pipeline (“about X% of stories reach this level”). We hope this context will be useful, especially for new authors.

Rejection “level” is not an indication of story quality. It only tells you what it says on the proverbial tin: whom in our staff thought it might be a good fit for Escape Pod. The visibility of an issue is not necessarily correlated with its magnitude.

The only exceptions to this formula are three rare cases, all of them self-explanatory. “Violated guidelines” (generally for stories that are too long or too short), “Revise & Resubmit,” and of course “Acceptance.”

Reprints and originals now receive the same rejection letters, but reprints are less likely to receive personal notes.

PERSONAL NOTES

When possible, we try to include personal comments in rejection letters, below the form text. Most personal notes are written by me based on Associate Editor input. In addition, sometimes the Associates write up the a note for me to paste in, and of course the Co-Editors write their own for the final round. The presence (or absence) of a personal note does not reflect how well we thought a story would fit at Escape Pod. Generally, six factors influence this choice:

1. Who on our staff read your story? (Are they someone more or less inclined to write personals?)
2. Did we think a comment would help this story or your future stories?
3. Was our reaction something we could meaningfully condense down to a sentence or two?
4. Was there something in your cover letter that affected our desire to provide feedback?
5. How hurried was I while sending out rejection letters?
6. Was the story a reprint? (Reprints almost never get personal notes, because the story has already achieved its final form.)

As you can see, many of these factors have nothing to do with your story. We offer feedback as often as manageable,³ but we’re not your critique group.

WHAT MAKES A STORY FIT (OR NOT)

If you receive a rejection letter of any kind, we didn’t think your story was a good fit for Escape Pod. This can happen for any combination of the following reasons:

1. The story didn’t suit our personal tastes.
2. We found problems with the story.
3. We’ve seen too many stories like this.
4. The prose would require too much editing.
5. The story felt more like fantasy or horror than science fiction.
6. The style wasn’t a good fit for audio.

This is fiction, not math: subjective taste is our only true yardstick. We encourage everyone to keep trying no matter what flavor of rejection they receive! Many of our authors received several rejections of various types before we bought one of their stories, and many of our staff still receive rejections from other Escape Artists podcasts.

NOTES AND EXCEPTIONS

We try to go through the main queue from oldest to newest, but there’s a lot of jitter. For example, if one of us downloads 10 stories to their Kindle, the next reader might come along ten minutes later and respond to the 11^th story.

The workflow can vary if I or one of the Co-Editors plucks a story from the queue. This skips a story over one or more of the early tiers. This is rare, is not usually faster than the usual pipeline, and doesn’t necessarily affect the ultimate odds of acceptance. You will probably never notice from the outside.

Special submission calls aren’t under my management. For example, Black Future Month followed a generally similar workflow, but only had three tiers, and used the same rejection letter for all three.

This is an explanation, not a contract. This process was different in the past, and will surely change again someday.

1. If you leave your contact info in the manuscript, we don’t trash it or send a “Violated Guidelines” rejection, but your failure to follow the rules will probably count against you.
2. Even if your story doesn’t get bumped upward, I still check the cover letter before sending a rejection.
3. If you’d like to know our current rate of personal notes, we recommend checking Escape Pod’s Submission Grinder page