Alex Shvartsman's Speculative Fiction

Space Chicken is satisfied with all the success the most recent batch of submission brings.

We read and voted on stories #501-600 over the course of 11 days (longer if you count the time it took to vote on them, which is why I’m only posting this update now).

16 stories made it past the first reading and onto being read anonymously by the board.  And of those sixteen I bought two and advanced three into the third round. A great crop for an 11 day span! There’s also one that has a requested rewrite but is promising as well.

61 of the stories received personal rejections, leaving only a third as form Rs. However, a form rejection doesn’t mean we especially hated the story. There are a lot of factors that go into it — sometimes the first reader just didn’t have a particularly useful comment to pass along, sometimes I’m crazy busy and trying to handle the slush pile, and *need* that extra minute or two per story (whereas the same story would get a comment if I read it at a less-hectic moment).

Duotrope is showing 186 submissions out of 633 actually received to date. If you’re not using Duotrope to track and report your submissions, you should really consider it. It helps you and it helps other writers keep tabs on submission statistics from markets, especially markets that don’t post detailed reports on their submissions 🙂

There are presently 16 stories purchased for the book totaling 51,500 words.  16 stories in round 3 total 30,000 words. We’re now officially in the territory where round 3 cuts will become necessary, and we aren’t nearly done yet, with over 2 weeks of submissions to go.

Our Kickstarter campaign has been chugging along and, as of this writing, stands at about $1850. Still a very long way to go, and we have to hit $5000 to get anything at all. So if you plan on buying the book when it comes out, please consider pre-ordering it via Kickstarter so we can reach our goal.