Ideomancer ?

[C.E. Gee]

I’ve encountered a situation with a magazine that I’ve never experienced before. This is despite the fact that I’ve been submitting stories to SF mags since 1997!

April 20 of 2015 I submitted a story to Ideomancer. The submission was within their stated March-April reading period.

Market sources Ralans, The Black hole, The Grinder publish that Ideomancer’s average response time is a little over 30 days with a maximum of 50 days.

So, a little more than 120 days since my submission to them, I’d not heard anything.

I wrote Ideomancer a query – no response.

About a month later I wrote that if I heard nothing from Ideomancer by this coming Monday, I was withdrawing the story.

DID I DO THE RIGHT THING ?????????????????????????????????????

I’ve already dismissed one professional level magazine -– ANALOG
Analog once sat on a story of mine for seven months (7 months!!) before rejecting it. Not a word from them about sitting on the story.

I removed Analog from my submissions list.

In this day of scores and scores of SF magazines competing for publishable stories, can any magazine afford to tick off writers?

I dislike removing Ideomancer from my submissions list. It’s a decent magazine. And it’s online, which is what I favor, print magazines being a dying breed. But I’m currently inclined to remove Ideomancer from my submissions list.

There MIGHT be an unusual factor involved here.

As far as I can detect, about 80% of Ideomancer’s staff is female.

I randomly checked several back issues of Ideomancer, found that about the same percentage of stories published recently were written by females.

Now, I’m so old, I came of age during the cultural revolution of the late 1960’s, early 1970’s. Before that time, females were greatly suppressed, much, much more so than today.

I’ve noticed that there are some females, who because of the way they were (and still are) treated have a bias against males.

Could this be a factor in my above experience???

Any of your input would be helpful, though I’m so busy right now, I might not be able to pen individual replies.

Thanks in advance for any advice.

NAMASTE

C.E. Gee aka Chuck

 

[Jackie Bee]

On Duotrope site, it appears that the last time anyone got a reply from them was on 26 Jun 2015.
So it looks like for the llast 3 months they weren't answering anyone. Looks like something's happened. Maybe they went on hiatus but forgot to tell anyone.
By the way, it sounded strange to me about the "scores and scores of SF magazines competing for publishable stories, can any magazine afford to tick off writers?" Just think how many people all over the world are writing and submitting to a couple of dozens proper sci fi markets. I believe it's still writers who are competing to be published, and not the magazines chasing after writers. So I wouldn't remove anyone from the list...I'd recommend joining Duotrope, it helps to check the market there before submitting to it, and if you see it's been unresponsive for a while, you can choose something else...

 

[C.E. Gee]

On Duotrope site, it appears that the last time anyone got a reply from them was on 26 Jun 2015.

Just think how many people all over the world are writing and submitting to a couple of dozens proper sci fi markets. I believe it's still writers who are competing to be published, and not the magazines chasing after writers. So I wouldn't remove anyone from the list.,

Aahh, but just how many of the writers a good enough to get published?

..I'd recommend joining Duotrope, it helps to check the market there bfore submitting to it, and if you see it's been unresponsive for a while, you can choose something else...

I've never understood why people would pay good money to access Duotrope. Ralans, The Grinder, The Black Hole are all free!

NAMASTE

C.E. Gee