"No Sale" (CC BY-NC 2.0) by Jeremy Brooks

On January 27, 2018, Johnna, a friend of mine who is in my Tuesday night writing group (The Forum Writers), sent me a link to Spectacle Magazine with a note that said, “Have you tried here? When I saw this, I thought of you and your short stories. I think you could submit something here and have success.”

I looked at the site and discovered that they had literally just published their first issue, and that they were paying nicely.

I had just finished editing two short stories and thought, “Why not?” One of them got sent off to Spectacle and one elsewhere. Both deadlines were sufficiently into the future that I didn’t obsess (much) over checking (much) my email (much) every day to see (much) if I had a response (much). Nada (MUCH).

On the evening of February 15th (the submission deadline), just as I was about to shut down my computer to head upstairs to prepare for bed, *ping*.

A new email on the account I use exclusively for writing. Well, I mean . . . it wouldn’t hurt to look, right? A rejection just before bed is nothing new, after all. So I called it up. Yep. From Spectacle.

“Dear Gary,” yadda yadda blah blah blah “loved your submission” blah-de-blah-de-blah and here it comes . . . “and want to publish and illustrate it for an upcoming issue.” Yep! Exactly what I figured. Crap. This story is– <sound of record being scratched>

Wait. What?

I read it again. It still had that last sentence. And again. Still had not changed. I — and I’m a little embarrassed to admit this — got on Facebook and sent the email to a trusted friend and said, “Does this say what it looks like it says?”

I’ve been through this before, after all. My acceptance into Viable Paradise went much the same way, including taking a printout of the email with me on the plane up to Boston just in case somewhere along the way it changed to “Psych! Your writing sucks and you should be ashamed for making us read that dreck,” so I could just slink off to a different hotel and hide for a week. I wish I were kidding.

Impostor Syndrome is . . . yeah.

I held the news while Spectacle worked out some issues with its author contract. The original one was . . . very rights-grabby. The second one was . . . better. Then they started working with SFWA and I figured time would tell. It was clear that the publishers were new to publishing and were trying to do better. So we were hopeful.

By the end of April, however, I was getting worried. They were still replying to emails and saying, “We’re almost there!” Then, at the very end of April, they sent an email with the new contract (blank) for us to look over, and a note that said they were going to get the new contracts sent off to all the writers who’d had stories accepted “within the next day or so!”

So, I waited. And I waited. May. June. The publishers stopped replying to tweets and emails. Still, I waited. And then, it was July. I withdrew my own story from consideration because it was clear to me that they were never going to send anything. I never received a response to that email. I can’t prove that they ever knew I’d retracted my submission. Issue 2 had not come out. In fact, their website had not been updated since before April. In fact, their podcast had petered out at episode 5 in May. It concerned me at the time that only one of the two publishers bothered to take any time to say a few words on the podcast, but I thought, “Hey, it’s probably a small, two-man shop and he’s busy.”

Finally, in September, one of the other affected writers confronted them and got them to admit that they were shutting down after one issue. None of the writers whose stories had been accepted were going to see print. And those who’d been paid were the lucky ones because they got free money. But they asked the confronters to keep it under wraps so they could “reach out personally” to inform all the other writers. So they kept it under wraps. Nothing was said publicly.

Well, now it’s December. A full year since they opened for submissions. They still have said nothing in public. They didn’t bother renewing the SSL certificate on their website, which speaks volumes. As far as anyone can determine, no writers were informed. Not even the least effort was made. So it was deemed safe to go ahead and say it: Spectacle Magazine is gone. Kaput. Done. If you got paid, keep the money and resubmit the story elsewhere. If you signed a contract and didn’t get paid, you should probably consider the contract null and void and resubmit that story elsewhere. And if you never heard squat, move on. Everyone probably already had (like me), but it reflects really poorly on the publishers to not own up to anything to the people who they kept saying they wanted to work with and communicate with. I don’t know what status the signed contracts are in from a legal point of view, but it would be truly interesting to see what the law would say about the validity of a contract that one party had no intention of ever keeping.

So much for that. So my “first sale” turned out to be a “first bad experience” instead. Huzzah?

Does it leave a bad taste in my mouth? Yes, it does! Does it mean I’ll never submit anything ever again? No! Does it mean I’ll be less trusting of new markets in the future? <sigh> Probably? Maybe? A little? Will I still submit to them? Probably, yes. But will I give them the benefit of even the most minuscule doubt? Hell no. Spectacle has removed that gene from my writer DNA. At the first sign of flakiness, I’m outta there.

Back in July when I posted about this on my Facebook page and very carefully didn’t name the magazine, I said, “I think they bit off more than they could chew, and are probably scrambling to figure out what they can salvage. If they ever get their act together, I’d still like to one day publish something with them.” Well, not any more. If I ever see the names of the publishers of Spectacle associated with literally anything else, I will avoid it. Because they’ve demonstrated their true colors. They’ve shown us who they are in the most honest way possible: their (complete lack of any) actions.

To be crystal clear: I don’t fault them for biting off more than they could chew or being not savvy in the publishing industry. Those could happen to anyone. And they seemed to be trying very hard to make their contract work, including listening to experienced writers and SFWA. What I fault them for is not behaving like responsible adults when it became clear that they were going to call it quits.

1. This was not mere speculation. Their bios said as much. They were, if I recall correctly, software people from Silicon Valley who decided to publish a magazine.