This past week has been wonderful. We’ve gotten about five orders for our Avery bundle, plus we’ve gotten two donations. It’s so heartening to see that people are interested in our project and that these fantastic stories are going to get out into the real world. I can’t tell you how awesome it is (I’m pretty fond of adjectives this morning) to open up our email and see a new order or a new donation. This is the first time in months that someone’s donated to us, and it’s no secret that we’ve had a dry spell with orders for much longer than that.
So, please: keep it coming!
This progress means that we won’t have any trouble printing Avery 3. It also means that, since we’re only going to accept four stories this time around, we might even have some money left over!
Yeah, you heard me: we’re accepting four stories. All three of us agreed on these four, so we’re not going to worry about who chose which story. All three of us agree that these are the four strongest stories – they were the ones that stood out – so we’re quite comfortable accepting only these.
I know I’m sounding like a broken record here, but rejection letters (and acceptance letters) will go out very soon. Some are already out, actually. And more importantly, you should know this: we’re not going to have time to personalize any of the rejection letters. So, even if we read your story a dozen times in an attempt to make a decision; even if we chatted back and forth about your story more than once; even if there are elements of it that we like; even if we totally want you to keep submitting to us: we simply don’t have the time to articulate all this to you and you’ll therefore only be getting our standard rejection letter.
Which totally sucks and which totally goes against what we feel we’re trying to do with Avery. But, we have three weeks to get Avery 3 to the printer. We still don’t have our internal photos for the stories; we still can’t agree on a cover (though we have an idea of what we’re going to do); we still have to edit the stories and send the edits to the authors and wait for their okay; we still have to tweak the layout …
Must I go on?
We have to update the website, once we’ve accepted our stories and once we have a cover. We have to order packing/shipping supplies.
Anyway, the point is this: I really liked so many of your stories, and I know that Adam and Andrew did, too.
And we’re so sorry that we won’t be able to tell you why.
Thursday, April 10, 2008
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
8 comments:
Is it safe to assume all of the acceptance letters have been sent, just not all of the rejections?
Well, at least it's nice you have this blog to impart info of the "no comments this time" variety. One thing that might negate the necessity of more personal comments might be sending out the rejections as you go rather than doing them all at once, though. That way you have more of an indication if you made it through hurdle one or not, and when there are no comments with the rejection, it is nice to have that semi-assurance instead of the false hope that your story might have been one of the ones in that "maybe" folder.
Yeah. We usually do send rejections as we go along. We usually send out rejections in "waves," which makes things a lot easier. But we only had three months, total, this time around, and we fell behind.
So, your recommendation is exactly the way to go.
And now that you mention it, perhaps we can at the very least tell you if your story made it into the maybe or Maybe folders. We wouldn't be able to comment on the story itself, but it might be nice just to know that we thought a lot about your story and that it came very close to making it.
I'll pass this info on to Andrew. Thanks for the recommendation.
Thanks, that is very kind of you--assuming my stoy made it that far!
Is it safe to assume all of the acceptance letters have been sent, just not all of the rejections?
No, it's not safe to assume that. We're still talking about accepting one more story, even though I just blogged about the fact that we've decided on four.
So, things are still up in the air.
Now I wish I hadn't said anything because you're going to think it's rude to discuss the fact that we'd like to accept four (five?) stories when we haven't even sent out all the rejection letters yet.
Ugh.
Not rude, really, we're just all hoping that fifth story is ours.
Well, poop.
Post a Comment