• Any story published during 2007 in an online magazine journal is eligible. The caveats are that said online mag or journal must have an editorial process--meaning no self-published stories--and the story must be at least a 1,000 words in length. Readers may nominate one story for the award. Editors of online publications may nominate up to three stories from their publication. All nominations are due by March 31.
• A group of volunteer preliminary editors will go through the nominated stories--along with other stories that catch their interest--and select their favorites. These will become the Million Writers Award notable stories of the year. I will then go through all the notable stories and pick the top ten stories of the year. The general public will then vote on those ten stories, with the overall winner receiving the award and cash prize.

Complete information on all this, along with links to where people can nominate stories, is available on the award website. I will also be regularly publishing comments and information on my blog and website as the award process as it unfolds.

For six years now I've been editing storySouth, a literary journal focusing on Southern writers. I initially edited the fiction and nonfiction while my co-editor Jake Adam York edited the poetry. Whatever we were doing must have worked because storySouth grew to the point where we needed other editors to assist us. Now Scott Yarbrough edits storySouth's fiction, Dan Albergotti the poetry, while Jake and I continue on as overall editors and I still edit the nonfiction. If you read our guidelines or masthead, these facts are laid out for the world to see.

The problem is that far too many writers are not reading our guidelines, let alone our magazine. I know this because in the last week I've received nine fiction submissions snail mailed to my house. Our guidelines specifically state to e-mail submissions to the editors. Anyone who reads our ONLINE journal couldn't fail to note that gee, storySouth is an ONLINE journal! Perhaps they accept electronic submissions. Let me look at the guidelines. The answer: YES! And who edits the fiction? Why its a nice chap named Scott Yarbrough.

Obviously the writers who mailed these fiction submissions to me never even read our guidelines, let alone storySouth. They pulled up our listing in some print or online submission database and let loose their submissions. Several of them didn't even include SASEs for a response. Two asked that their stories be considered for storySouth's Million Writers Award, which is for PREVIOUSLY PUBLISHED fiction (another fact these writers could have learned by doing even the most basic of homework).

Now comes the clincher. After looking through all these short stories mailed to the wrong editor without looking at our journal or guidelines, some without a SASE, all without a clue, one pattern becomes clear--they all stink. Not one of them is readable past the first paragraph. And that brings us to this simple truth about publishing: Good writers do their homework. Bad writers do not. If a writer can't be bothered to do even a bit of reading about the magazine or journal they are submitting to, know that the editor will see this. And editors know that the truth behind a lack of preparation on the part of a writer is that their story is likely bad, bad, bad.

* * *

Scott Boyan at Thinksimian has completed a wonderful meta-analysis of storySouth's Million Writers Award to determine the best online literary journals and magazines. Basically, Scott crunched the numbers from the first four years of the award to see which online magazines placed the most stories in the notable and top ten listings. You can access Scott's complete analysis as a Google spreadsheet, but here are his top ranking online journals and magazines:

1. Pindeldyboz

2. Eclectica Magazine
3. Narrative Magazine
4. Agni
5. Identity Theory
6. Word Riot
7. FRiGG
8. Fiction Warehouse (Note: See my recent post about this journal)
9. Strange Horizons
10. Barcelona Review
11. Clarkesworld Magazine
12. Fail Better
13. Stickman Review
14. Mississippi Review
15. HOBART
16. 42opus
17. Summerset Review
18. Small Spiral Notebook (Note: no longer publishing)
19. Blithe House Quarterly
20. ChiZine
21. Thieves Jargon
22. Storyglossia
23. Barrelhouse
24. King's English
25. Gowanus
26. Drunken Boat
27. Intergalactic Medicine Show
28. Literary Mama
29. Write This
30. Danforth Review
    

Thanks to Scott for doing this analysis. And as a reminder, the 2008 Million Writers Award will start accepting nominations in about a month.