I had a number of responses to the simultaneous
submissions entry. A couple of them mentioned that it’s acceptable to
put an “expiration date” on a submitted manuscript. That is, in your cover
letter you can state that after X weeks, the story is automatically withdrawn
from consideration.

I admit that this method is a bit more efficient than having to manually
send the editor a withdrawal letter.
It probably has psychological benefits, too — it sets a hard limit, and
thus prevents you from dragging things out too long. “Well, I know what
I decided back in February, but maybe just a couple more weeks…”

As for the root of the problem:
Tim Cooper sent me an excellent
letter, which provided me with the only cogent
arguments I’ve seen so far for disallowing simultaneous submissions.

First, he points out that editors send out acceptances and rejections for a
magazine at roughly the same time:

Suppose I have stories in my slush that I like, from Writer A, Writer B, and
Writer C. I only have the ability to buy one of the stories. So, after much
agonizing, I accept Writer A’s story and reject Writer B’s and Writer C’s.
The next day, maybe I choose to buy a very short piece from Writer D because
it works well with Writer A’s story. The day after that, Writer A writes back
to me and says “Oh, wait, I already sold it to Editor X.” At this point, I can’t
recover the stories form Writer B and C, which could very well be better than
anything I’ll get in before the issue comes up. And I now have a short piece
I’ve committed to buy that doesn’t fit with anything in the issue at all…

Which is fair enough: perhaps given a busy magazine’s schedule, it isn’t practical
to hold off on rejecting Writers B and C until you have confirmation from
Writer A. (I don’t see how book publishers could use this excuse, though.)

Tim also mentions that the no-simultaneous-submissions rule serves as a barrier
that limits inappropriate submissions.

If someone can send a story to every market in the field at once, quite a few of
them are going to do it, regardless of how appropriate the story is for that
particular market. If sending
Stan
Schmidt a high fantasy story isn’t going to cost
the writer anything, a lot of them are going to say “why not?”

And then there are authors who send cover letters that say
things like “I have finished over 250 stories” — with no sales. As Tim puts it,
“I know that if simsubs were ok across the genre, the moment I opened for submissions
I would have gotten every one of those 250+ stories. I’m going to get all of them
eventually, anyway, it seems, but at least they’re coming at a speed I can handle.”

I sympathize with this. Barriers are necessary. After all, isn’t that
why so many publishers still require paper submissions?

However, I suppose that again
this explanation makes more sense for a magazine editor than a book editor.
First, unless our author writes with demonic speed, he or she will not have an
outrageous number of unsold novels. Second, while a book editor’s
slush pile might be large if you count pages, my guess is that it is
relatively small if you count manuscripts. This means that the burden
of rooting out the inappropriate submissions should be lower for book editors.
Finally, novels are expensive and time-consuming to print out and ship — so again,
fewer submissions.

Finally, Tim makes a very valid point (jeez, why didn’t I just print his
whole letter verbatim?) about the responsibilities of authors. If authors
could be trusted to track their submissions and inform editors when a
simultaneous submission is accepted somewhere else, the rule would be
unnecessary. I couldn’t agree more.

The flip side is that publishers
should at least be honest about why they do this. The non-explanation in the
SFWA FAQ just doesn’t cut it.