While I sorted some things out in my live over the past year and a half, my short fiction submissions trickled down to nothing. Yes, I still have work in inventory, but it has sat on my hard drive.
Last night, I started looking for markets to send that material. I use Ralan for two reasons, it gets me to markets that prefer the type of material I write, and I have financially supported him in the past.
I discovered a few things while going through my inventory and the available markets on Ralan. First, I was astonished that it had been 572 days since I last submitted to John Joseph Adams’ wonderful start-up publication Lightspeed. I tweeted something to the effect that I had a 565-day margin of error on the Lighspeed 7-day wait period between submissions.
It was an innocent enough tweet meant to get people to chuckle, but it was apparently misunderstood out of the context inside my head. For that misunderstanding, I apologize. I certainly meant no harm to Lightspeed or to John by that remark. John has always been the utmost professional in his editorial endeavors, and his success in that area underscores that sentiment. I have the utmost respect for John and his work.
That said, I did run across another publication listed under the professional rate markets. This one is called Digital Science Fiction.  I do not know anyone involved with the production of this online market, nor have I even heard of the names on the editorial board. My first impression of this market came from their submission guidelines, where they demand compliance to something they call Editorial Schedule “A.”
This is something I find abhorrent and completely objectionable in a fiction market. Substantially, it says that if the editor demands a change, the author MUST comply and make the change or the contract is revoked. They also reserve editorial authority to make changes without notification to the author in situations they deem to be minor.
I sent some commentary into the twitterverse after I had sent that innocent tweet involving Lightspeed, and I suspect the DSF tweets became convoluted with that one. Again, I want to emphasize that those tweets, which encompass what I am saying in this essay, are directed only at DSF and are completely irrelevant to Adams and to Lightspeed. His is a class operation.
Editorial Schedule A, on the other hand, is either arrogant or ignorant, and perhaps a little of both. Let me be clear. When I write, regardless of whether it is fiction or non-fiction, it’s my name that goes on the byline. It’s my reputation that is at stake.
Editorial professionalism is not dictating changes to an author, it is a negotiation. The professional editor recognizes that the work belongs to the author. that doesn’t mean that there will be no conflict, nor does it mean that the author will always be allowed to stet everything.
The editor with a strong concern will approach the author with that concern. While the concern may be a deal-breaker, the solution is not for the editor to demand a certain change. The professional editor will voice the concern and make suggestions, sometimes emphatically. however, the actual change is left to the author because often the author has an even better solution. A good editor does not want to disallow that better solution.
If the author and editor cannot come to an agreement on changes, generally the editor and author both come to the decision that the material is not right for the market and both part ways amicably.
This is not the case for Digital Science Fiction. In their case, the editor will dictate a change or pull the contract. This makes the editor a de facto co-author, something that neither author or editor likely desire.
To me, this Exhibit A is a complete deal-breaker. I will not submit to such a market. Here is why. I have published non-fiction material that was modified without my consent. In fact, it was modified after I expressly stated that the change in question changes the sentence from true to false, yet the change was made anyway.
The article in question discussed the construction of the Lick Observatory. When the new telescope was originally tested, it could not be focused. The telescope-maker used a hacksaw to remove a portion of the tube containing the ocular. The editor refused to believe that, despite the fact that I had well-documented proof. When I received my contributor copy, I learned that the telescope-maker had now removed the end of the table. Not only is it false, it is both the only mention of a table in the entire 5000-word article and it is a completely absurd statement.
Bottom line is this: I will not submit to Digital Science Fiction until the editorial mandate described in their Exhibit A is removed from their policies. It is bad policy, and thoroughly unprofessional regardless of the professional payment offered by this market.