Closed: The Society of Misfit Stories Magazine

Bards and Sages Publishing closed in March of 2024 with the following announcement:

Closure Announcement



Effective March 6, 2024, I will begin the process of winding down Bards and Sages Publishing. There is a lot that needs to be unraveled and sorted out before I can formally close everything down. The most immediate impact is the closure of the Bards and Sages Quarterly and ceasing publication of new issues.

If you are an author or artist who was previously published in an issue of the Bards and Sages Quarterly, those issues will remain on sale until the end of 2024. After that, all back issues will be removed from sale, and all rights will revert to their respective authors.

The same is true for back issues of The Society of Misfit Stories and all of our anthologies. These will remain on sale through the end of the year and then unpublished. At that time, all rights will revert back to their respective authors and artists.

I’ve already informed our authors that we have stand-alone publishing contracts with about the decision. I will work with those authors individually to make sure all of their rights revert to them in a timely manner, and provide them with any raw files we have of their books. They will be free to use those files to either self-publish or take to another publisher if they wish.

Regarding our RPG offerings: I own all rights to the RPG materials through work-for-hire agreements. If other publishers are interested in buying the rights to any of our RPG products or properties, I will entertain offers. Email [email protected] to discuss.

With that out of the way, I want to provide the reasons for this decision.

As I have noted previously, I have been struggling with mental health issues for some time now. I am being treated for generalized anxiety and depression, and though my condition has improved, I’m still not where I feel I need to be to properly commit the time and effort needed to being an effective publisher.

At the end of last year, I was diagnosed with additional physical health issues that will require surgery and treatment. While none of them are life-threatening, they are an additional weight that requires my attention.

As most people who have known me a while also realize, publishing has always been my love, but it has never been my primary income source. Like a lot of micro presses, I have a proverbial “day job,” and that day job has become increasingly more complex over the last few years.

All of these issues impacted my decision. However, I also have to confess to what may have been the final straws. AI…and authors behaving badly.

I am spending four to five hours a week trudging through submissions just to weed out AI-generated trash. I have editorial assistants who actually read and review the submissions, but I still look at every submission myself first to make sure I am weeding out the obvious junk before wasting their time, otherwise the submission response rate would take 20 months. Just over the weekend, I rejected twenty obviously AI generated submissions. My inbox is flooded with it.

Meanwhile, Amazon and other ebook retails are pushing full-steam ahead to promote AI-generated content at the expense of real authors and artists. Publisher who actually pay authors and artists and editors now have to compete with AI-generated material churned out in bulk and sold at 99 cents. And while it is easy to shrug this off if you are outside the industry and claim, “Well, the cream rises to the top,” anyone that has been around the industry long enough knows that what rises to the top is what Amazon’s algorithms push there. And the AI bots are much better at manipulating the algorithms that real people.

Two to three times a month, I need to fight with Amazon over negative reviews that get spammed on multiple books because an author got upset about a story being rejected. Or I get some snark response back about how my reviewers need better training, or that I am not a “real” editor, or something outright vulgar. Or I get a prank call to my phone. These sort of people have always lurked around the industry, so I am not unaccustomed to dealing with them. But it seems like they have grown more emboldened, and there seems to be this weird social currency tied to the bad behavior now.

With everything else I have going on right, I do not have the mental energy to deal with these people.

To be clear, the majority of authors and artists I have worked with over the decades have been wonderful. But the number of badly-behaving individuals, and the increased level of hostility they bring to the industry, has gotten to be too much.

My goal is to have everything closed down by the end of the year. Emails to Bards and Sages will still be active, so if you are an author or artist or publisher with questions, you will still be able to reach me. The Contact page will get updated with this information to make it easier to communicate. Social media accounts will also remain active so I can be reached through those as well.

To those of you I have had the pleasure of working with over the decades, thank you for being a part of Bards and Sages Publishing. I am extremely proud of the works we produced over the years and I hope you are as well.

With Love and Respect,

​Julie Ann Dawson

The following guidelines will be stored for posterity.

Payment: $50, $25 for reprints
Theme: All speculative genres (horror, fantasy, science fiction, slipstream, steampunk, magical realism, etc), as well as mysteries, thrillers, and action-adventure stories.
Note: Reprints Welcome

Accepts:

The Society of Misfit Stories is a journal published three times a year. We are interested in all speculative genres (horror, fantasy, science fiction, slipstream, steampunk, magical realism, etc), as well as mysteries, thrillers, and action-adventure stories.

Stories should be between 5,000-20,000 words in length. 

Payment details:

Previously published short stories: $25 for the non-exclusive, perpetual right to publish the story in the assigned issue. 

Original, unpublished short stories: $50 for non-exclusive, perpetual rights to publish the story in the assigned issue.

Send Submissions to

[email protected]

General Guidelines for All Projects

All submissions must be electronic only. We do not accept hard copies of submissions.

Stories must be complete, stand-alone stories. We will consider stories that are part of an existing setting (for example, a “prequel” story that ties into an author’s novel) but the story must be self-contained and have a clear conclusion. No “cliffhanger” stories.

The subject line of the submission should indicate the name of the publication you are submitting for and the title of the story.

Examples:

Bards and Sages Quarterly: Title of My Story

The Society of Misfit Stories: Title of My Story

This is very important to make sure that your story is processed correctly. I get hundreds of emails A DAY regarding everything from legitimate business correspondence to not-so-legitimate SPAM. So that I can get your story routed to the correct reviewer, please make sure that the project and name of your story are in the subject line.

Bards and Sages Quarterly can be abbreviated to BASQ and The Society of Misfit Stories can be abbreviated to TSMS to accommodate long story titles. Best Indie Speculative Fiction can be abbreviated to BISF.

Body of the email. Please include the following information:

  • Author Name
  • Title of Story
  • Primary Genre of the story
  • Estimated word count
  • A short summary or blurb about the story
  • If the story has been previously published, please include publishing information
  • If you would like to get a copy of the reviewer’s scorecard and comments, you must explicitly state such. We do not automatically send out this information. If you don’t request feedback, you will get a generic response if the story is rejected.

The above information is extremely helpful to reviewers for managing their workloads. There is no need to include an author bio or a list of previous publishing credits. Such information will be stripped from the email before it is forwarded to the reviewer. If we accept the story for publication, we will request such information then.

Do not submit stories in the body of the email, even for flash fiction.

All stories should be submitted in Word doc, docx, or rtf formats only. We work in Microsoft Word. Most of the major word processing programs can output your file to one of these formats without issue. You will receive an automatic rejection if you send us a PDF, a zip file, or a link to download your submission from a third-party site.

Do not use headers, footers, or watermarks. These are the types of things that have to be stripped from a file before it can be converted for publication. Do not bother adding page numbers.

Do not use custom fonts or custom icons. Many of these are copyright protected by their creators and even if we wanted to use them because they are so cool we legally can’t. Limit your font choices to basic fonts like Arial, Garamond, and Times New Roman. If your story is accepted for publication, we will be formatting it to match the style we intend to use for the entire project. We aren’t going to use the individual fonts authors may embed in their files.

Do not use Headings for body text. Don’t use Headers at all. We’ll just have to remove them if the story is accepted.

Do not tab at the beginning of a paragraph. In fact, break the tab key on your keyboard right now. Kill it with fire. No key causes more drama with epub formatting than the tab key because tabbing can interfere with text autoflow functions in ereaders. Use your word processing program’s paragraph style options to set your paragraphs to indent the first line.

Do not use “typesetter” marks. Nobody is manually setting type. If you want something in bold, put it in bold. Don’t type *asterisks* around a word to indicate bold or _underscores_ for something that should be in italics. Just use bold and italics. These errant marks have to be stripped from a file before it can be converted to other formats.

Single space only. You can use your word processing software’s style options to set the line spacing to single space. There is no reason to double space. This is a holdover from the days of hard copies being manually written on by editors.  Everything is being done digitally.

Use American English for spelling and punctuation. We are a U.S.-based publisher and the majority of our business comes from U.S. consumers. Most word processing programs allow you to set the proofreading language of the document.

While I don’t expect authors overseas to follow the Chicago Manual of Style to the letter (we do edit and proofread, after all), there are a few basics that will make our lives much easier.

  • Collective nouns: In American English, collective nouns like team, group, band, etc are treated as singular words. Example: The team is scheduled to play Friday.
  • American spelling generally drops the “u” from words like labour (labor), colour (color), and honour (honor).
  • Words that end in –ise  in British English usually end in –ize in American English. Realise (realize), finalise (finalize), organize (organize).
  • Honorifics and titles include a period at the end in American English (Mr., Mrs., Dr., etc)
  • American English uses double quotes for quotes, not single quotes.

The one exception to the above guideline is if your story is actually set in the U.K. We won’t Americanize your story set in London!

For more information on how we grade stories, please review our Scorecard.

Additional Recommendations:

These are recommendations and not required, but they do make our lives easier.

Scene breaks: Because so many authors do their own thing with this, it isn’t always clear in a story where there is supposed to be a scene break. We suggest that you use * * *, centered, with a blank line above and a blank line below the asterisks.

Use scene breaks instead of chapters for short stories: in the majority of cases, we are going to suggest during the editing process to get rid of chapter breaks in anything less than 10,000 words anyway. In shorter works, scene breaks are much smoother transitions that full chapter breaks.

Additional information:

Unless otherwise noted on a project, we are requesting a non-exclusive, perpetual rights to publish your story in the project. Once a project is published, it remains available for sale forever. We won’t unpublish a work to remove a story just because you decide nine months down the road to self-publish it exclusively with Amazon. Please keep this in mind when submitting work.

Payments are always made upon publication unless otherwise noted.

We pay by either Paypal or Google Wallet.

Via: Bards and Sages.

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