Sorry, @noobienieuw, but you're not even submitting short stories. And it really seems like you are trying to give a lot of advice about things you're not all that familiar with. Like @Spencer1990 isn't going to find the answer to his question in the guidelines. I'm sure if it was there, he wouldn't have asked. And @Laurin Kelly and @BayView and others know that you don't have to be famous for a publishing company to market your book or need a huge social media following. You may want to believe you have all the answers, but as some of us have pointed out, they might not be the right answers.
It's definitely not correct for me. I did not have a website or an author Twitter account until well after my first novel had been accepted for publication. I was first published in 2016 and my website's not even a year old yet. In an attempt to offer some useful feedback, some of your opinions are being worded as if they are fact, not opinion. At least that is how I and it seems like others are interpreting them.
You're making a lot of statements of fact, and I'm pretty sure that a very high percentage of them are wrong.
I think it depends on how many submissions a place receives and how likely they are to notice that you were just rejected by them. Since you have duotrope, look at how many submissions are currently pending and the recent responses. If they have a few hundred pending and take five months to respond, then I would say it's fine to submit something new right away. If they have 12 pending submissions and seem to be responding in a day or two right now, I would hold off for about a month. If you're unsure, I would say give it a week. With Threepenny, I would always wait at least a week between my submissions to them. My mentor told me it's usually good to wait a month between submissions to the same place, but I can't say I always follow that. If you want to send me a message with the publication, I can let you know if I have any experience submitting to the same place and how I've handled it.
Sometimes they'll say in their guidelines. If they do submission periods instead of being open all year around, it's usually a safe bet that they only want one story per author per period unless they specify otherwise.
Yes, plenty of flab espoused on the thread. ... Literature's a good game. Some of us can't do Physics or Chemistry... ...and we marvel at the easy-reader hardback sitting outside of the second-hand bookshop, on the street - dog-piss scents the folios. The author lives somewhere with his dog-piss. Inside the shop, middle shelf, under P, is some other, some more decent crap - written by the Lithuanian, who harboured his tuberculosis in '79 - and retails at 99c, and now he's dead, obviously. She/he, who knows - wrote something very odd about something fucking dreadful/or strange, once, who cares, I don't understand half of it. Such is paradise.
You're lacking any critical nous, or insight. You're saying decent 'everyman' kind of stuff - to be applauded. I'd do the same if I walked into an 'old' thread.
I am familiar with lots of things. I was a small publisher for a number of years. I do not have to be submitting anything to understand how the process works. I gave him the answer. I also told him to check the guidelines. You would be surprised how many writers do not bother to do that. I do not have all the answers, but I have a lot of them and they are very correct if not perfect.
I just wanted to say about the dog-piss... - this was a very enjoyable read on my holiday, so probably the Lithuanian was a chronic masturbator. I didn't mention. It came out years later. ...
How long ago was this? Because the industry has changed a lot in the past few years, and everything I've personally observed about publishing through my own experience or the experiences of other recently published writers I know contradicts a whole lot of yours.
"Observations". That sounds like you're admitting that it's all anecdotal? Like, maybe you know a few authors, and they all had web sites before they were published, and therefore you state, as a firm fact, that an author can't be published without a website? If it's that sort of thing, I'd suggest that you learn to rephrase your assertions of fact.
I care about communicating. The battle is not always to the strong, nor the race to the swift. But my bookie says to bet that way. You will be a winner if you take my advice. And be a big winner if you verify it first. But still a winner if you don't.
See, the flaw here is that you seem to be unable to process the possibility that your advice might be wrong. We can process that possibility. Easily. I think we have the clearer view of your advice.
I am admitting that that is what people and those in the industry including F+W have said. Stuff changes. I doubt that publishers have gotten more generous recently when they were moving away from promoting new writers on spec.
I would have no idea, I've never read Writer's Digest. I didn't even know it was still being published, to be honest.
Hilarious - check out my post at https://www.writingforums.org/threads/yet-more-conflicting-critique.158150/page-2#post-1682438
I remembered it from Stephen King's On Writing, which was written 18 years ago. It used to be the bible for where to submit, but I was under the impression that online resources replaced it a long time ago.
