First, I’d like to thank our Kickstarter backers. UFO4 raised nearly $8500 during its campaign, enough to buy full slate of stories. interior illustration, and some exciting initiatives to be announced soon.
To date we’ve received nearly 200 submissions. Approximately 150 of them have already been responded to. We’re still considering a handful of stories from the first week of submissions and several have been advanced into the hold pile, to be decided on at the end of the submissions window. I post fairly regular updates on Twitter as to the status of the slush pile, so folks could query if the response has gone awry. Most authors should hear within 1-3 days.
If you haven’t submitted yet, please keep sending your stories! Don’t wait til the last minute. We always see a huge upswell of submissions in the last day and that’s fine, but consider this: if a story is pretty close but needs a rewrite, we’re more likely to ask for one if there’s time for the author to deliver. If we’re at the very end of the reading period and are on the fence about the story, there may not be enough time to ask for a rewrite. Of course, if a story truly wins us over, that won’t be an issue at all — but submitting earlier is good strategy in this case.
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Alex Shvartsman's Speculative Fiction 