On Wed, 14 Jan 2004 05:05:24 GMT, andy asberry
wrote:

I'm a freelancer, so I never can count on an article getting printed. I
submitted the accident series to KITPLANES, but haven't heard whether
they're going to take it, yet.

I curious, Ron. How long after submission do you wait for
acceptance/rejection before submitting to another publication?
Is there an industry standard?

In the pre-email age, it used to take three months to find out whether an
editor was going to take an article or not. Actually, it generally took
three months or more to find that the editor was NOT going to take
it...they'd usually get hold of you fairly fast if they decided to go for
it.

For individual authors, it's considered bad form to send a piece to more
than one publication at a time. For some weird reason, it's perfectly OK
for an author's *agent* to do that. So I'd never send an article to a
second magazine until I got a definite "no" from the first one. In the
past, I've waited three months before politely "pinging" the editor.

It's best to be sure before sending the article on to another editor...if
the editor of the first magazine thought he'd told you and put the article
in the production cycle, the SECOND editor will be very miffed if he or she
sees the article they bought appear somewhere else, first.

Now that email is so prevalent, notification comes a lot quicker. The
accident series is the first non-solicited article I've sent the new editor
at KITPLANES. While I've done several articles for him on assignment, one
doesn't really need confirmation of acceptance on those, since one already
knew the editor wanted an article on a particular subject. But in this
case, it came "out of the blue" for him...and since the editorial office
just moved to the opposite coast, things are still shaking down.

If he decides it isn't right for him, there are other outlets (Like CBS or
ABC's "20-20" :-). If all else fails, I just post it.

The wait for notification could be worse. My wife (a romance novelist) has
had editors take ten months or more to get back to her about novels she's
submitted.

Ron "It's fun helping with research" Wanttaja