New Quarter Stats

The editors at FMM are back to work and have started going through the slush pile!

We have received 38 submissions so far and 8 are now before the editorial board.

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Nits so far this quarter:

1) Failure to follow our submission guidelines. The big things here people are having the word SUBMISSION and your story's title in the subject line, and having your name, byline, bio, and story in the submission. That really shouldn't be too much to ask for, yet we keep rejecting submissions that fail to give this basic information.

2) Weird formatting in attachments. We're not going to reject a submission for this, but it still amazes me how many people send in unprofessional manuscripts. The biggest nit so far is strange fonts. It's one thing to use an eye-catching font, but quite another to use one that makes all of the document's text all caps. I had to change the font on one before I could send it before the editors. I can't understand why anyone would do that...

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January Issue progress:

I have formatted all the stories for the online version of the magazine. We're going back to putting all of our regular issue stories online, and we'll be saving the other extras for the PDF subscriptions. It's more work for me, but posting only the Feature Story online didn't increase our subscriptions enough to warrant the change.

I am finalizing the coverart for this year, having gotten approval from our artist. Now it's just a matter of giving the covers a fresh look.

I still have to format the PDF version, which is the last thing I do after all the contributors have approved their stories.
It takes the most time, but subscription sales are what enables us to pay our contributors and I enjoy putting together a quality product.

That's it for now...
JDawson
Editor-in-Chief