Blogger and author John Scalzi admits he doesn’t own a printer. Big deal, you’ll say. Well, apparently it’s some deal, because several of the more important science fiction publishers refuse to accept electronic submissions. Even when I read the reasons why, I still find that hard to wrap my brain around. I can somewhat understand publishers not selling books electronically, but insisting on print when buying?
Read the comments at Scalzi’s blog too, they’re at least as interesting as the entry itself.
The F&SF explanation has things that are both idiotic and insightful:
http://www.sfsite.com/fsf/eitems.htm
They don’t come out and say it, but I think the last sentence gets to the real reason,
“But as long as there are only a handful of us in the office and 400 – 600 submissions each month, we have to ask you to send in manuscripts.”
If they open it up to e-mail, they would get *a lot* more — probably more than they can reasonably review.
So creating a small barrier to entry (print and mail the submission) is probably a very good way of managing their workload. Obviously, they’ll lose out the occasional person like Scalzi who doesn’t own a printer, but clearly they find more than enough quality fiction to run on a regular basis.
Brian Carnell says “So creating a small barrier to entry (print and mail the submission) is probably a very good way of managing their workload.”
Curiously, John Scalzi himself makes this filtering claim in a comment below the article where he says:
Hmmm….I suspect we’ll now see more of the “we should charge people $X pennies to send each e-mail to cut down on spam” jumping up and down saying “I told you so, I told you so.” 🙂
You guys are talking about bozo filters. There are other ways to implement these. Something that was suggested at Scalzi’s or elsewhere, is to have strict technical restrictions on how you e-mail your manuscript. For instance: “no attachments”. You can then let a machine do part of your slushpile filtering.
Anyway, you’re still talking about going out of your way not to catch up with technological progress. For any given type of human endeavour there will always be areas where the old analog way is better than the new digital one; the question therefore always is: do the advantages of the digital method outweigh the advantages of the analog one?
In this particular case the result of that comparison may be a much closer call than I imagine. It is the authors — regardless of their quality — who have to jump through hoops. It is the publisher that determines the nature of those hoops. The first thing says something about the power that publishers hold over writers, even over good ones. The latter says something about publishers’ view on technology.
Seen today at the contact page of a website, after a list containing amongst others a phone number and an e-mail address:
“Fax: I’m sorry, we’re not a museum”
That made my point much more succinctly (apart from making me LOL).