Dear Geist,
I've been sending out stories to publishers for years but usually don't even get a brush-off. Just silence. Either I'm a terrible writer or my stuff is somehow missing the current trends in what is demanded by editors. I don't select my topics, they select me, so I cannot fall in line with any pre-set notion of what the content should be. Is my case hopeless, or, not? Be honest. I can take the truth because I'm a fool. (Didn't Nietzsche say we have art so we don't die of truth?)

Dear Bill,
Your non-connection with a publisher to date likely has much more to do with the state of writing and publishing than the quality of your work or your approaches to editors. With good reason, writers speak of “breaking in,” although there is no secret code to crack. Even regular contributors to a magazine don’t get all their ideas and manuscripts accepted automatically. Like other magazines,
works hard to define what we want by setting out our tastes, our mandate, our range and our history; but these can only be described, not quantified. The same goes for the excitement we feel when we see something that works for us.
As for publishers’ silence, that’s not personal either. No one in the business feels good about the endless wait times for responses to manuscripts, a product of shrinking resources for publishers combined with better access to writing and submitting by many more writers. If publishers had an objective, consistent yes-or-no formula for what we want, we’d tell writers first.
In short, blind luck plays a pivotal role in the writer-publisher connection, and the plain fact of critical mass slows down the process. We can only encourage writers to keep writing and keep submitting. For a bit more on this subject, check out our posts
.
—The Editors