If you write science fiction, fantasy, or horror, you can't submit your novel manuscript to more than one publishing house at a time.

OK, you can. You can do whatever you want; you can shoot yourself through the head with a crossbow, too. But kid, if you're caught submitting your SF-genre manuscript to more than one editor at a time, you're dead. You'll never work in this genre again. Or, at least, the editors you've "burned" will never consider your work again.

Why?

I mean really, why? Because the editor doesn't want to waste her time reading your manuscript only to find out that some other editor bought it out from under her nose?

That's free trade. That's capitalism. That editor should have just read faster; if she missed the boat on your book, that's her problem.

Requiring that unsolicited novel submissions be exclusive is restraint of trade. It creates a limited-term monopoly purely for the convenience of (admittedly overworked and underpaid) editors. It doesn't make sense anyway: the editors didn't solicit your work, so how can they restrict where else you send it? It's not even a "rule," per se; it's a tacit agreement, a guideline, a policy, an understanding that has become codified, in our field, into a commandment. It's silly. And it's not fair.

Life is tough, sh*t happens, and the world isn't fair. The truth is that it's a buyer's market, and editors can make up any rules that they want to--any rules that make their lives easier. There's plenty of other slush where yours came from. They have no responsibility whatsoever to read your manuscript in a timely manner (defined for the purposes of this essay as three months ideally, six months at a stretch). They didn't ask for your manuscript; you just sent it to them, and you have no rights to particular treatment.

But they have no right to require that you refrain from submitting elsewhere until they have responded.

They might have a leg to stand on if they did respond in a timely manner. If you could send your manuscript in with a reasonable hope of hearing something back in three or four months (as you can with short-fiction markets, most of which have the same policy but for good reasons), there wouldn't be a problem here at all.

But book publishing is glacial. Time, in the book-publishing world, is measured geologically. After a while, you stop thinking "Geez, I coulda [had a baby/circumnavigated the globe in a sailboat/gotten a doctorate] by now, and there's still no response to my submission"; you accept that the genre of FTL is limited by the speed of cold molasses.

Many publishers sit on novel manuscripts for more than six months. Del Rey has been known to sit on submissions for anywhere from nine months to several years (they took 18 months on three chapters and an outline); DAW has been known to sit on submissions for three years; Tor has been known to sit on manuscript submissions for upward of two years and partials for a year or more. These are randomly selected examples, and these publishers don't always take forever, but the chances are that they will.

It's understandable. They are swamped. They are not in the business of reading unsolicited submissions; they are in the business of publishing books, and that requires a lot of work, of which reading an original manuscript for the first time is only a minuscule part.

What is outrageous is that, in the SF genre, "they say" that you can't submit your book anywhere else while you're waiting. The publishers' guidelines say "No simultaneous submissions." Which means that the editor has carte blanche to take as long as she needs to consider your book. She can put it on the backest burner there is; she can put it on the back burner of the ancient woodstove out in the shed and leave it there for years, while she attends to the dozen-and-one other things that she has to attend to. She has created a perfect situation for herself: she doesn't have to deal with the slush, because the slush ain't goin' anywhere.

If there were a threat that an editor at another house might find the pony in the pile of pony doo, this editor would have to figure out some way to deal with the slush lest she lose out. That would be a bummer, because editors have too much to do as it is, and economically, the one-in-a-thousand reward of a gem in the slush doesn't warrant hiring more staff just to keep the slush down. Most slush sucks and nobody asked for it anyway.

But there still might be a diamond in there. If the publisher wants it, the publisher will have to dig for it. The fact that the publisher sets it up so that he can dig at his leisure is something that unagented writers should be very angry about, because the publisher will take all the time in the world. He has exclusive dibs on that diamond, not by contract but because the author was afraid to send it anywhere else on penalty of Never Working In This Genre Again; he can take years to look for it. Nobody else is looking in that particular pile.

If this were just the way publishing worked, the only response would be to shrug and say "Life sucks, sh*t happens, deal with it." It would still be outrageous and unfair, but so are a million other things.

Yet the fact is that publishing doesn't work that way. SF publishing works that way. The rest of publishing doesn't. An exasperated post on a big-city bulletin board frequented by professional fiction writers, journalists, and other artists, lamenting the no-simultaneous-novel-submissions rule, was greeted by a slew of outraged responses. "That's totally bogus, I've never heard of that." "Your work is your work. Nobody can tell you where you can and can't send it." "It isn't that way at the houses I submit to." A romance writer said that as long as your cover letter informs each editor that the submission is nonexclusive, it's considered fair to send it to several houses at one time. Guidelines from several romance publishers bear this out.

People in the SF publishing community are so used to the uncodified "rule" of no- simultaneous-subs that they have codified their own acceptance of it. To know of this rule and pass it along conveys some illusion of professionalism. It is cool and jaded to tell new writers that that's just the way it is. We all pay our dues, we all live with the unfair Exclusive Slush Pile, we all crawled out of it, stop whining.

In SF, we have let overworked acquiring editors in a buyer's market set up a no-pressure system of convenience for themselves that leaves new writers hanging for years, and nobody has said boo about it, except (at best) to gently chide the newer writer for considering a simultaneous sub, or (at worst) to place the oh-so-experienced chip of jade on their shoulder and bestow upon newer writers the prevailing wisdom that if you simultaneously submit, you're gonna get it...

There is a solution to the agony of waiting. Get an agent.

There is another solution to the agony of waiting. While you wait for your manuscript to be read, write another one. If a publishing house sits on your first novel for three years, it's not so bad, because you're writing one, or two, or three more novels in the meantime, and you send those out when they're done, too. When one of your properties sells, you'll have lots more projects all ready to go; you'll be in an excellent position to capitalize on your sale. The pain of waiting absurd amounts of time is reduced when you're waiting on three different manuscripts; with several manuscripts rounding, you might average one whole response a year.

But the fact that a determined writer can make use of the time wasted by the absurd submissions policy in our genre, or politely try to work through it by using queries and partials as a filter, or, plain and simple, get an agent, does not make the policy any less absurd--or less unfair, or less outrageous. Neither does the fact that publishers don't owe slush authors diddly. So here is a call to civil disobedience:

Don't be stupid, don't do it so you get caught (don't send the book to two editors who are married to each other), but if you're a new, unagented writer with a book you care about, go ahead and send it to more than one place at a time--or at least think about doing so, instead of blindly submitting to a submissions policy that is not a law and allows publishers' response times to degrade to the point where they are now.

Of course you don't want to ruin your career before it even gets started. So it may be best not to take any risks. Playing by the rules is wise; if your book is going to sell, it's going to sell, the only difference being how long it takes to make the rounds. But when it can take nearly a decade for four or five publishers to consider your manuscript, it's time to reevaluate the "rules" you're playing by.

More and more, these days, houses refuse to read slush at all, and pretty soon the question of simultaneous subs will shift over to agents, who are not always real timely about reading their slush piles. Pretty soon you'll have to have an agent if you want any SF publisher to consider your work. Hey, that's OK; unsolicited is unsolicited. No publisher ever asked for slush. Certainly if everyone sent each book they wrote to every publisher they could think of, the results would be frightening indeed for the publishers' staff. Maybe, if the quality-filter of the agent speeds up the whole process, it will be a change for the better.

But what happens when you can't send your book to more than one agent at a time, and agents start taking years to respond because their slush piles are straining the ceiling tiles?

Better get your book out to as many publishers as you safely can, right now, before that happens. If you wait three years for Molasses House to respond to your good little rules-following exclusive unsolicited submission, it might be too late.

Send it to a few agents while you're at it, too.

Next week's columnist is Kris Rusch. Really.