In July 2013, I served as the “editor-in-residence” for the Codex Writing Group, which meant basically I was asking a month-long AMA (“Ask Me Anything”) interview. With Codex’s permission, I’m re-posting the Q&As here on my blog. The questions were all provided by members of Codex.

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I see, on occasion, sales in which you requested a story from the author directly. How often does this happen? How do you choose (and how open are you about) who to invite? And, how many of those direct requests end up as rejections?

There is a pretty large number of writers who I have approached directly about submitting stories, though most of the time it’s just a general nudge to let them know/remind them that we’re around and we’d love to see something by them.

Much rarer is when (for Lightspeed), I request an author write some specific type of story for me. For example, I asked Ken Liu to write me a dystopian story (“The Perfect Match”) because I was releasing the 2nd edition of BRAVE NEW WORLDS, and I wanted to get something new that I could add to the book and simul-pub in Lightspeed. I also specifically asked Sarah Langan to write me a SF-Horror hybrid story back in the early days of the magazine, when we did our October 2010 Horror issue of Lightspeed. (I had one SF-horror story in inventory, and had my reprints lined up, but I needed another original SF-Horror story to round out the horror issue.)

As to how often are such stories accepted–I’m not sure of percentages, but I’d say pretty often. That’s not to say I never reject them; I certainly do sometimes. But most of the time if I reached out to you personally, you’ve written at least one thing that I really, really liked, and so I have good reason to suspect that something else you write would be to my liking as well.

As to how I decide… it’s mostly about figuring out which authors I wish would send me stuff but haven’t been, and nagging them enough until they do. :)

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