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All responses Most smiled responses
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The grind. It's intensely wearing to keep up with deadlines every single month. CG also has a very fast turnaround which makes it more intense; we can't select stories far ahead of time like other zines. Selection-to-completion in 1 month, every month, is rough.
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asked by JeremyCShipp
Not sure what this has to do with running CGP. But obviously, the answer is: kraken.
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The majority of people follow the guidelines. For those who don't, our slush readers are instructed to mark them for automatic rejection.
There are a few situations where minor mistakes may be overlooked, if the story is exceptional. We don't like being hardasses. But that's not an excuse to be sloppy! The guidelines exist for good reason. We have to narrow down submissions - don't give us extra reasons to reject yours! -
This is a bit broad... there's plenty of advice I could offer. Could whoever asked this be a bit more specific?
If you mean really general advice: Don't do it thinking you'll make money. At all. In fact, be prepared to lose money, possibly for a long time. If you can, get funding for all expenses sorted out for at least a year's worth of issues ahead of time, and have a good plan to draw in funding for it. That plan should *not* involve large numbers of sales, because there are absolutely no guarantees that you'll make it, no matter how well-prepared you are. If you don't have outside funding lined up, be prepared to pay 100% of expenses out of pocket.
Do it because you love it. Do it so that you can hold a copy in your hand (or if an online zine, see the completed issue posted publically) and have your heart skip when you think "I made this!" Do it because sometimes, you get to be the first place to publish a new writer, and literally change their life forever. -
asked by postapocalypso
I'll share one good and one bad.
The bad: although I won't name names, one particular contributor during our first year violated the terms of their contract. Not slightly, either, but posted their work elsewhere online, even though the contract explicitly says they can't. BEFORE our release date, too. Worse, they acted cavalier and flippant when we insisted they take it down, insisting that it wasn't a big deal. We eventually had to threaten legal action before they finally complied. It was a terrible experience and made us tighten up our contracts to (hopefully) prevent it happening again.
The good - well, there are plenty I could choose from. One of the best, though, actually came out of a bad situation: the whole mess with our LGBTQ ad being rejected by Flash Fiction Online (Link for those who don't know about it: http://crossedgenres.com/blog/sff-market-rejects-our-lgbtq-ad/). The experience of dealing with the difficult situation was made much easier by the great support we got from members of Outer Alliance (http://outeralliance.org), to whom I initially brought the situation. Ironically it ended up growing CG a lot, in exposure, traffic, submissions etc.
But more than that, it resulted in our meeting some great people. If it had never happened we might never have gotten to know Natania Barron, Jaym Gates, Chris Fletcher, Brandon Bell, Cheryl Morgan, and lots of other great folk, many of whom we met through Outer Alliance. While it began as a bad and difficult thing, it ended as something good for us, especially in the people we met and friends we made. -
This is kind of difficult to answer. We have slush readers who go through them first, so we don't read them all.
Don't worry about picking a common topic though. Write what you think is the best story. We pick the best stories, not the best from each particular area. -
Just on the magazine itself? I'd say between Kay and I we probably put in 25-35 hours a week. Of course it varies a bit - there's always more to do in the first half of the month, when we're making our decisions on which stories to accept, and then contacting the writers and putting together the issue.
But that doesn't include the time we spend on the rest of all the Crossed Genres projects: novels we're serializing, the Science in My Fiction blog, other things we haven't announced yet, etc. etc. Put it all together, and I think on average Kay and I EACH put in 25-30 hours a week. Again, it'll vary... for a week leading up to the start of a new project, for example, we'll each put in full 40-hour weeks. -
Depends what I've got on hand. I think pasta with mango/jalapeno chicken sausage sounds good any time.
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Nope. No initial funding. Everything started (and remains) from our own pockets. Everything we've built Crossed Genres into, we did it all ourselves. (and recently, with the help of our wonderful volunteer staff!)
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Bart Leib’s Bio
Co-founder and editor of Crossed Genres, Science in My Fiction, et al.
