It’s been a month to the day since we launched this Arkham Tales website and made our first announcements looking for submissions.  I worried a little that there wouldn’t be sufficient submissions for us to put together our first issue in November; after all, it’s an untried magazine; would writers want to send their slaved-over words to a publication which had no track record and , for all they knew, would never actually come out?  I remembered the factoid in the back of my head that Asimov’s Science Fiction, probably the most prestigious science fiction magazine in operation, receives an average of 850 submission per month.  I thought we’d be lucky to get twenty or thirty.

In the last month, we’ve gotten 182 submissions.

One hundred and eighty-two. And that’s not counting the ones that were rejected at first glance because of improper manuscript formatting.

Of that number, 95 have been rejected, and 47 have been accepted.  Mixed into that number are eleven stories which were sent back with suggestions for revisions; some have subsequently been accepted, while others still didn’t make the cut.

(The rest haven’t been decided on yet.)

That tells me there are writers out there who have been waiting for a market for the kind of stories they write: unsettling, macabre, and entertaining.  And I can’t wait to put that first issue in front of you.

Nathan Shumate
Editor & Publisher