Contacting Bewildering Stories
| page index: anchor links | |
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General E-Mail Acknowledgements Submissions Headers |
Preferred file formats Reviews and Excerpts Forwardings |
General E-Mail
We welcome submissions. Here’s how to smooth their path. Just below, in this initial section, we give direct links to the appropriate editors.
- Please check the length. We cannot consider submissions that are longer than 9,000 words in prose or poetry or that exceed 3,000 words in a drama script. A temporary moratorium on long works is required on account of a large backlog of serials, novellas and novels.
Please initiate correspondence by sending to the Managing Editor. Direct correspondence with a Coordinating Editor may ensue in due course. Flash fiction or poetry may be sent initially to the appropriate Special Editor with a Cc copy to the Managing Editor. The e-mail addresses are listed in the table following this list.
Please include the submission’s title in the e-mail subject line. Generic or outdated subject lines may cause the submission to be lost.
Please supply a title and byline in each submission. Explanation here.
Please include a cover message with the submission. We sometimes receive blank e-mails that contain only an attachment. They are assumed automatically to be simultaneous submissions. Please follow the directions under Preferred file formats.
Correspondence concerning the author’s bio page or other interests should go directly to the Managing Editor.
Enter the date of submission in your calendar. We try to reply promptly, but mail applications sometimes misfile legitimate mail. Please inquire if you do not receive an acknowledgement within three days and a response within four weeks.
| The names and titles in blue and boldface are “mailto” links. | |
Simultaneous Submissions |
Submissions sent to more than one publication at the same time are special cases and should be directed to the Managing Editor. Please see the explanation here. |
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ESL and
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Manuscripts in English as a Second Language or translations from languages other than English should go to the Managing Editor. |
Flash Fiction |
Charles C. Cole (Flash Fiction Editor) — “Flash fiction” is prose between 500 and 1,000 words in length. |
Poetry |
John Stocks (Poetry Editor) — “Poetry” is anything in verse, or prose poetry, or lyrical essays. |
Longer Prose |
Fiction and non-fiction other than poetry and flash fiction should be sent to the Managing Editor. |
Drama |
Drama is published by invitation only. Unsolicited submissions cannot be considered. |
Some older browsers may not understand the mailto links. If you have trouble with any of them, please follow the instructions under “Mailto Link” at the bottom of this page. If, for some odd reason, your e-mail returns a bounce notice, try one of the other editors.
Please do not use the addresses bwstories@bewilderingstories.com or donwebb@allstream.net; they are defunct. Even if your message doesn’t bounce back to you as undeliverable, it will be lost.
We enjoy hearing from our readers and appreciate your helping us make our webzine even better.
If you send us a letter of general interest, we may want to publish it. We’ll send you a message saying we’d like to include it in our Letters department unless you say otherwise. Of course we’ll edit out any routine personal or editorial matters.
We will not publish or otherwise divulge your e-mail address, postal address or telephone number unless you explicitly ask us to. See also “Forwardings,” below.
Exception: Submissions often contain the author’s complete coordinates. That’s perfectly okay, but the Managing Editor will remove them from the file only in the final editing process. In the meantime, the file may circulate to three or more editors. Only the Managing Editor, the special editors, and the Coordinating Editors — who are listed on our Info page — are authorized to correspond with contributors.
Acknowledgements and replies
We try to acknowledge all submissions. If you don’t receive an acknowledgement within three days, please inquire. If you don’t receive a reply to the query within three days, please contact one of the other editors; there may be an emergency.
Certain e-mail services may block e-mail from entire domains as a defense against spam. The mail may not even bounce; it may simply be deleted. We have been unable to reply to some contributors because their own or their providers’ spam filters apparently prevented them from receiving even legitimate e-mail.
Submissions
Bewildering Stories has the simplest submissions guideline on the Internet: “Please send us something, we’ll be glad to consider it. If we have questions, we’ll ask.”
Our Submissions page has important information in the header section. Otherwise it serves as a reference work. We frequently link to various parts of it in correspondence, as a time-saver. The Review Readers’ Checklist summarizes succinctly and offers solutions to the 12 problems most frequently encoutered in submissions.
Headers
We try to give all submissions at least two readings. In the process, manuscripts may circulate between as many as four editors. Every submission needs a title and byline; otherwise, we may lose track of who wrote what. For example:
- The Other World [Title]
- by Cyrano de Bergerac [Byline]
File Formats
Please send texts in the format easiest for you. If we have trouble opening a file, we’ll let you know.
- Plain text in the body of an e-mail message. This is most practical for works shorter than 1,000 words. You can specify special formatting in a note at the top.
Attachments:
- Word.doc and Word.docx are commonly used.
- RTF (Rich Text Format) is also available in most word processors.
Please do not use:
- Download links. They often don‘t work, and BwS does not trust their security. When they do work, the resulting webarchives are too hard to work with.
- Word.xml
- WordPerfect RTF. WordPerfect garbles RTF files. We can read plaintext WordPerfect files only in NeoOffice.
- Open Office (.odt), for the same reasons as WordPerfect.
- PDF files. Adobe Acrobat has its uses, but it makes submissions very hard to work with.
- .txt files. Not all readers have Text-Edit and may not be able to open the file. Also, the paragraphing, punctuation and even spelling may be lost.
- Zipped files were useful in bygone times for contributors who had only slow, dial-up connections. Today, they are commonly used by criminals to send malware, especially Trojan Horses. E-mail hacks occur frequently; we can’t assume that compressed files actually come from the putative sender. Sorry, files that are zipped or compressed in any format will be deleted unopened.
Summary
| Yes | No |
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Plain text in e-mail Macintosh — in RTF Word.doc or .docx RTF in most word processors |
Adobe Acrobat Reader Compressed files Download links Open Office .txt Word.xml WordPerfect RTF |
However, if you’ve sent a submission without having seen these guidelines, please don’t worry about it; we’ll be glad to hear from you, and we can talk about any transmission problems.
Reviews and Excerpts
Please see our Submissions page at Reviews and Interviews.
We will probably accept reviews from veteran contributors to Bewildering Stories. The authors may review anything they wish except their own works.
We offer a special opportunity to our veteran contributors: excerpts. They are free advertising for works in print. Complete information is available on our Submissions page and under the related links.
Forwardings
The Managing Editor will forward mail on request, within limits. A request to forward any message also constitutes a request to include the sender’s e-mail address.
We often receive “fan mail” or other requests to contact our authors. We forward the mail to the author’s last recorded address and encourage the author to reply directly to the sender. If the forwarding bounces, we’ll let you know.
Caution: The Managing Editor will forward mail in one direction only: to the author. If the author chooses not to reply, the sender has the right to complain but will probably be told only that pursuing contact may be hopeless.
A request to forward a message must say for whom the message is intended, otherwise it may be disregarded. Do we get such messages? Honestly, you’d be amazed...
Mailto Link
Some older Net browsers don’t understand the “mailto” link. If you have trouble with it, do the following:
- Copy this e-address: donwebb@rogers.com
- Open a new e-mail message.
- Paste the address into the “To:” line. Proceed normally.
The message will go to the Managing Editor.
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