Lately, I’ve noticed a trend in cover letters. A lot of writers seem to be growing discouraged after a few rejections and think that they should give up submitting stories to F&SF, or they think that they’re wasting our time.

And now in the gender debate over on Charlie Finlay’s blog, I see people saying that a lot of the women writers they know have given up sending stories to F&SF completely, because of a perceived gender bias.

The question I’d ask to both of these groups is: how are you ever going to crack a market if you quit submitting stories to it?

I can understand becoming frustrated after being continually rejected, but keep in mind too that F&SF’s response times allow us to evaluate more submissions during any given time frame than most other magazines. So, for example, say you submit a story to F&SF every time you finish one (provided there’s not already one there). You could send us four stories, and theoretically all four could be bounced back in the span of a single month. Whereas if you’d submitted those same four stories to say, Asimov’s, you probably wouldn’t get all four back for four months or more. So I wonder if people perceive F&SF as being harsher than other magazines, or that we inspire this “give up” impulse primarily because we stay on top of our slush.

To the women who say we don’t publish enough women writers, I say that the way to change that certainly isn’t by refusing to send us your stories. How is that going to help? Is it not worth a week of your story’s time to take the chance?

And to the other writers who have become discouraged: sending us stories does not annoy us. Just because what you’ve written thus far hasn’t clicked, the next thing you send in might.

If you don’t even send us your stories, then the only person you can blame for your story not being published in F&SF is yourself.