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Originally Posted by Sil_liS
From my point of view, it does, and your comment enforces my point. In the time of George H. Scithers you could find 10% of the authors with manuscripts good enough to publish as they were, but that is gone now.
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It wasn't much better than what you quote from Making Light.
The people submitting to Asimov's and Amazing were all targeting the same limited market, and had at least some idea of what the market was and what they should submit. Back then, submissions were
hardcopy (It was the late 60's/early 70's). Email didn't exist, and everyone was at pains to explain the format needed on your hardcopy submission to get it looked at. (Double-spaced in a readable font with decent margins, printed with a fresh ribbon, and your name/address and a word count up top on page 1, and include a stamped, self-addressed envelope with sufficient postage to cover costs if you wanted the editor to
return it when it was rejected.) A depressing number failed that first step...
Aside from Asimov's, the SF short story market included Analog also published by Dell Magazines), Fantasy and Science Fiction, Amazing, Fantastic, Galaxy, and Worlds of If. Only Analog, Asimovs, and F&SF still exist.
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Most of the people that belong to numbers 1-10 shouldn't have gotten the idea that they can write. In fact, some of the ones from numbers 1-7 shouldn't have graduated primary school. But here they are, submitting manuscripts. And why? Because they think that they did a good job, and an editor out there can make it great.
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No, they submit because they think they did a good job and an editor will
buy it. Many of those same folks shriek loudly at editorial suggestions for
changes. They can't handle the idea that their deathless prose might not be up to snuff as submitted.
I was in various electronic forums back when aimed at writers looking for critiques of works in progress. It rapidly became obvious that 99% of them
weren't looking for critiques. They wanted to be told how wonderful their writing was, and would bellow like they were being gelded at any suggestion it wasn't.
Most of them were unlikely to ever be published. Writing requires a thick skin and a tolerance for rejection, because you
will get rejected, a
lot, before you reach published status, and even when you have there are no guarantees. There was an SF con on the West Coast years back, with a panel whose topic was "How do you know you've made it?", and the panelists were all published SF pros. Each panelist described how
he knew he'd arrived. Then the mike went to the late Harry Stubbs, who wrote under the name "Hal Clement". "I
still don't know!", said Harry. "I get rejected all the time!" After various hemming and hawing, the other panelists admitted that yes, the occasional rejection slip still arrived. If
Hal Clement, SFWA Grandmaster, could admit
he got rejected...
(I knew Harry for years before he died of complications of diabetes. There wasn't a pretentious bone in his body. He'd freely admit to still getting rejected because it was the simple truth and he'd see no reason to lie about it. It wasn't like he hadn't proven his worth as an SF writer.)
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Dennis