What I've Learned Since Launching Theme of Absence

Theme of Absence on its launch day

It's been a month now since I launched Theme of Absence, my attempt at an flash fiction ezine.  I originally planned to write a post about why I started the site, and what I'm hoping to gain from it, but I decided to instead talk a little about what I've learned so far.

One of the first things I learned was that I needed to do a much better job of tracking submissions, and more importantly, my correspondences with the authors.  I thought I had a pretty good system to start with.  The plan was to read each submission as it came in, and then either accept, reject, or shortlist.

The only problem was that I didn't document any of that, so I ended up having to go through my sent mail to try to remember which stories I accepted (including when I said I'd post them) and which stories I shortlisted.  It all worked out in the end and I got better organized by setting up a quick spreadsheet, as well as email folders for accepted and shortlisted stories.

There were a lot of smaller things I learned as well.  For example, I was surprised that I didn't get more submissions from the Duotrope listing.  In fact, the listing only has one report on it.  I'm not sure how many subscribers Duotrope has, but I figured I would have gotten a few more submission through it.  After all, I use Duotrope and so should you :)

One thing that came as no surprise to me was that I feel bad sending a rejection letter.  As a writer myself, I know how much it sucks to get rejected, especially from a non-paying market since non-paying markets tend to receive less submissions and therefore have a higher acceptance rate.  Nonetheless, I did have to turn down a few stories.  Since I don't get an overwhelming amount of submissions, I've been able to give personal feedback with each rejection, and hopefully soften the blow while remaining constructive.

One thing that did come as a big surprise was that over half of the rejections I sent out were because the writer didn't follow the submission guidelines.  I'm not a member of submission guideline patrol, but a lot of people did miss some pretty basic and important ones, such as genre or word count.  For those rejections, I just sent out a form letter.

The final, and perhaps most important point I've taken away from running the site so far is that a lot of the writers submitting make the same mistakes I make in writing.  I found plenty of sentences written in past progressive tense and strings of sentences beginning with the same word.  It's interesting to see how easy it is to pick that out in someone else's work, but so difficult to find it in my own.

So after a month, I'm still really excited about the site.  I think it will help my own writing in the long run, and I'm looking forward to watching it grow over the coming months.

I gave the site a make-over for its one-month birthday, so if you haven't seen it lately, click on over and let me know what you think about the new look.