ZOETROPE BOYCOTT

So I posted a few weeks ago on the response times of literary journals - those who respond quickly and those who take a year or more. Zoetrope: All-Story, the literary journal published by Francis Ford Coppola, was one of my main culprits. I had limited data at the time - simply my correspondence which revealed it took two months for them to log my submission in, and over ten months to respond. I've been gumshoeing around since then, and found evidence that this is hardly the exception. I've talked to multiple people in my creative writing program who either haven't heard back yet or have received a rejection in over a year. Also, if you look at the website Submitting to the Black Hole, which takes reader information about literary journal response time and posts it, you can see that other people don't receive responses for as long as 388 days. In contrast, if you look at ZYZZYVA, run by Howard Junker, the minimum response time is two weeks, the maximum two months, and the average one month. Junker linked to my last post on journal response times, saying:

1. Our crosstown colleague [Zoetrope] is said to get 25,000 submissions a year; we get 2,500.
2. They have 25 "readers." We have just me.
3. They publish virtually nothing from the slush pile, which is where we get almost everything.

After the MFA also spoke up in response to my post, encouraging writers to resist this type of abuse.

So as of this date, I am instituting (unveiling fanfare: da-da-da-DA!) the ZOETROPE BOYCOTT.

Please do not send to Zoetrope. Please send to a literary journal that actually needs and might want you. Please understand that if you keep sending to Zoetrope I will not hold anything against you, but I might pity you.

I'm instituting this boycott for two reasons: One, so that the Zoetrope editors can realize that those who submit to them are respectable writers, unwilling to be mistreated, and we insist on reasonable response times (at the Maximum, four to six months). Two, if Zoetrope really can't find a way that their (fairly large staff) can't respond to submissions in under a year, then we should do them the service of reducing their inbox.

I invite writers who have submitted to Zoetrope recently to post in the comments the dates they submitted and the dates they were rejected (Also, if you have a blog, to link here in solidarity with the cause). Also, to halt this boycott requires only one thing: I invite anyone on the Zoetrope staff to respond to these allegations with a defense, an explanation of when things will get better, and some kind of reason why anyone would submit to them again.

Comments

[Howard Junker]

negative actions, like boycotts, are useful, but limited. positive actions should also be initiated, like everyone subscribing to zyzzyva because of our prompt response time.
http://www.zyzzyva.org/subscribe.htm

best regards,
howard junker
editor, zyzzyva

[Elaine]

Duotrope has statistics on response times. Their top 25 "most slothful" list has Zoetrope at the top.
http://www.duotrope.com/rtstats.aspx

[Gordon]

Awesome. I love action.

If I still lived in California, I would submit avidly to Zyzzyva. However, I will do my part and get a subscription. I should have a long time ago.

Best,
Gordon

[Joy]

I don't mind slow response times. What bothers me are publications that don't bother to respond at all. So why not boycott the journals that are completely non-responsive? Like these: http://www.duotrope.com/rtstats.aspx.

[Former Zoetrope Reader]

I can't refrain from offering my own testimony. I was a volunteer reader at Zoetrope All-Story for more than a year. The minimum commitment required of readers at that time was 4 hours weekly, with all reading to be done in the Zoetrope offices. The Zoetrope editors have always stated that they actively seek new voices through their open submission policy, and rely upon their readers to help them in this regard. However, my experience during a year spent reading "slush" submissions and observing the editorial climate of the All-Story office was that this claim is patently false, and that the editors pay precious little heed to the recommendations of the volunteer readers.

We volunteers were asked to categorize our responses to particular stories on a scale of 1 to 4 as follows:
1: accept this story
2: accept with recommended changes
3: reject with encouraging comments
4: reject
Additionally, in the Zoetrope database, we were to track each submission we read with at least a few lines describing the work and the reasons for our categorization. Stories that we designated with a #1 or #2 rating were to be given directly and personally to an editor. The editors made sure to emphasize that readers should be scrupulous in their ratings of stories, and that stories with a #1 rating would be exceedingly rare. In fact, my first conversation with a Zoetrope editor, at my reader’s “interview,” went exactly like this:
Me: “How much accountability is there in the reading process? Is there a dictated percentage of work that you expect the readers to pass along to you from the slush?”
Editor: “No.”
Me: “How many stories published in Zoetrope are solicited?”
Editor: “Most of the published work is solicited from agents. Or a writer will be given an idea commission-style. You’ll read a lot of bad stories as a volunteer.”
Me: “How often do stories make it from the slush into the magazine?”
Editor: “We’ve published three.”
(Note that the magazine had been around 6 YEARS when this comment was made, and had ostensibly welcomed unsolicited submissions for that entire period.)

In my year as a reader, I gave three stories a number #1 rating, passing each along directly to an editor. Each was by an unknown, previously unpublished writer. The first story remained on the editor’s desk unread for more than three months, and was finally rejected—-not by the editor himself—-but by a Zoetrope intern.

The second story likewise remained unread for a number of weeks, and when I inquired regarding the piece, the editor admitted to misplacing it. As far as I know, it never turned up again.

The third piece was not read promptly either. After several months, it finally appeared as a closed file in the Zoetrope database; it had been summarily rejected, with no comments at all.

After more than a year of weekly reading sessions in the Zoetrope office, during which time not a single Zoetrope issue was published containing an unknown writer, my conviction became that the editors so sorely lacked confidence in their own literary acumen that they would never dare accept “unknown” writers of great substance and merit, despite the informed judgments of the carefully screened readers sorting through the piles and piles of yellow envelopes down the hall.

The moral of the story, I suppose, is don’t bother with this magazine unless your name already stands big in the current literary limelight. The volunteer readers may care about your work, but the editors will not be swayed from their blind determination to publish the already-praised.

And oh yes, this should not seem like utterly discouraging news, because the fact remains that good work will find a deserved home despite such short-sighted editorial reflexes as those of the Zoetrope editors; that first story I gave a #1 rating?—-I found the writer’s work included in the new edition of “Best New American Voices” soon after.

Unpublished writers: you don’t need these snobs at Kearney Street.

[Cdnsurfer]

But isn't that true of every journal? The higher up the food chain you go, the less likely a piece is going to get read by an editor unless it's from a "heavy weight?" Not saying it's right ... it is the habit of the beast.

[bookfox]

Yes, Cdnsurfer, that's true, and I'm glad that journals are so selective - if they weren't we'd be stuck reading stories that aren't so good. But the problem is that if a journal offers an open call for submissions, then they should at least pay attention to what their readers tell them - if a reader reads for a year and selects one or two stories as the best, and then the editors don't pay attention to those stories, then the "open call" is really a marketing scam, not a legitimate desire to find new writers.

[John Lowry]

You guys should keep in mind that Zoetrope is one of the best journals in the country and that having a story in their pages is a huge, huge opportunity for an aspiring writer.

At the risk of sounding cold, they don't really need to go to the trouble of reading submissions at all. They could get buy soliciting famous people to fill their pages (Dave Eggers, Woody Allen).

The fact that they respond to unsolicited submissions at any rate suggests that their whole operation is a crime of passion and, no matter how long it takes, any of us should feel lucky that our story had its day in court.

I know how frustrating it can be to get that rejection slip in the mail after 8 months or even 12, but don't shoot yourself in the foot by not sending your stories to a magazine that's essentially a career maker.