Slush Like Fine Wine?

Quote of the Day: "Bee-bop-bop-ba-da-bo!"
--Scatman John, Scat Man

Today I had the absolutely incredible, mind-blowing opportunity to tour Tor, my own personal Holy Grail when it comes to the publishing industry. I learned a boatload, met some wonderful people, and had a very enlightening lunch with an editor and three editorial assistants. I'm still processing all I've learned, so expect more of the gems of wisdom they dropped on me as the week continues.

But for today we'll start with an interesting fact the editor told me, and an amazing term that as far as I'm aware Tor has coined themselves: they "age" their slush.

Apparently they're good enough at staying on top of slush that they could have very short turnaround times if they so chose--but in the past when they've gone for that approach authors have refused to believe that their submissions were actually read and re-submitted, leading to a lot of wasted time and postage overall. So now they "age" their slush in piles based upon when it was submitted, and it was generally agreed upon that the best vintage is about 3 months.

I was amazed because the situation made perfect sense (I can easily imagine jilted authors assuming that their submission must have simply been rejected summarily, because it's so good that if anyone read it they would love it), despite its utter absurdity. Only in publishing, friends, only in publishing...

So moral of the story, if your submission got rejected, it got rejected. Don't resubmit or you'll ruin the short response times for the rest of us!

...also Tor is awesome and I got more free books than I know what to do with.