I had some interesting comments by e-mail and on Facebook about my blog so I thought this opened up the subject wider and I’d continue in the same vein.
When we first started this company we decided we wanted to appear “friendly” and as a result we had a very relaxed set of submission requirements. Even then, we didn’t necessarily enforce them strictly.
We had all sorts of strange submissions sent in, including one very early on that was clearly the scanned handwritten copy of a school essay, complete with the marks given to it by the teacher – I won’t embarrass the young lady by telling you the mark just in case she actually reads this. Actually, that sounds a bit pretentious, so I will, it was a C+.
That kind of “silly” submission can be dealt with easily enough, it is so clearly a rejection it only takes a few minutes to write a polite rejection, without even reading it. We can’t process it ergo we can’t accept it.
The more subtle mistakes do take time to deal with, so when our submissions page reopens we will have a much harder set of requirements, and this time we will be enforcing them.
Look at it from our point of view. Each guideline breach takes us time to deal with. It might not be much time for each one, some of them are time consuming, but if you add it up for twenty to fifty submissions a month it will add up. Time is money, and neither of us involved in this part of the business has that amount of time to spare not if we want to grow the business and heaven forbid actually start making real money from it!
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