Contents

About eSCENE 1997

Diana Gabaldon, 1997 Guest Editor
Jeff Carlson, Series Editor
Shannon Christenot, Assistant Editor
  1. What Is eSCENE?
  2. Register with eSCENE
  3. The eSCENE Process of Selecting Stories
  4. Writer's Guidelines
  1. What Is eSCENE?
    eSCENE is the world's only yearly electronic anthology dedicated to providing one-click access to the Internet's best short fiction and authors. The stories featured within are culled from a collection of electronic magazines ("ezines" or "epubs") published on the Net from across the globe, and feature both established and previously unpublished authors.

  2. Register with eSCENE
    This registration is purely for my own use in counting the number of people reading eSCENE and seeing where they came from. I won't sell the list, or use it for any marketing purposes, or anything of the sort.

    I would, however, like to build up an informal mailing list of eSCENE readers, so that I can send out short messages when something has changed or been added to the site.

    To subscribe, simply send a blank email message to escene-on@list.moo.com. To unsubscribe, send a blank email message to escene-off@list.moo.com.

  3. The eSCENE Process of Selecting Stories
    After explaining to people what eSCENE is, we're usually asked about how we select the top stories each year. Here's our Method:

    1. Request Nominations: We honor the hard work that ezine editors put into their publications, and therefore believe that they represent the best front line of selecting the year's best stories. eSCENE queries a large number of ezine editors, asking them to nominate the top 25 percent of pieces that appeared in their journals during the year.

    2. Request Permission: Once the nominations have been received, and before a single word is read, we contact the story authors and request permission to review their works for possible inclusion in eSCENE. In the case of most ezines, the rights to a story revert back to the author upon first publication (usually defined as the point at which the material becomes publicly available on a Web site, or sent out via email). We also want to avoid any complications arising from publishing a story that the author may have submitted elsewhere.

    3. Reading Blind - Round One: When an author grants his or her permission, the author's name and originating ezine title are stripped from the manuscript, which is then read onscreen or in printed form by Jeff Carlson (series editor) and Shannon Christenot (assistant editor). The stories are rated on a three-point system (3=accept, 2=consider, 1=deny). After the stories are read, the scores are tabulated, and the top 15 to 20 stories are chosen to proceed to Round Two. At this stage, most of the selections are obvious, though there's always some amount of arguing and championing stories.

    4. Guest Editing - Round Two: The first round stories are sent to the year's guest editor, who reads the collection and marks stories on the same three-point system. This usually narrows the field to between 10 and 12 stories, at which point all three editors jointly decide which stories will appear in that year's edition. It's usually at this point that we discover which authors and ezines will be represented.

    5. Final Editing and Production: The authors are notified of whether or not their work will appear in eSCENE. The chosen stories are edited where necessary; if significant changes are required for a piece, the author is consulted and brought into the process of editing his or her story. The guest editor writes the year's Introduction. Production begins, and eSCENE is assembled. After a last round of copyediting, the year's best online fiction is published on the Web.

  4. Writer's Guidelines
    eSCENE is an anthology of work that has previously been published online, and is therefore not in a position to accept manuscripts directly from authors; each year we query magazine editors, asking them to send us the top 25% of material they published during the previous year.

    To be regarded for inclusion in eSCENE, your work must first appear in an online magazine. For a near-comprehensive list, check out John Labovitz's "E-Zine List" at:
    http://www.meer.net/~johnl/e-zine-list/index.html.
    I highly recommend that you submit your work to one of those.

eSCENE 1997




Contents

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