A conversation I had with a fellow poet this month, went as follows:

You're working on a poetry zine?
Yes.
Online?
Yes.
Hmm. Does anyone actually read those things?
I hope so. No, seriously, you'd probably be surprised.
Hmm.
Have you ever tried submitting to one?
Yes. Never heard back from them. How do you know those things are real anyway?
What do you mean?
Well, how do you know it's not just some guy jerking off on his home PC... Jerking you around as well... Anyway, I've seen poetry on the net; it's crap.
Ha ha. There's a lot of that around, yes, but you probably didn't look in the right places.
Yeah, probably... Anyway, I do wish you luck with it.
Ok, thanks.

Well, this conversation ties in kind of nicely with what I have been pondering this month, since a certain issue kept coming up in my correspondences with contributors. That issue being, the length of response times to submissions. And what I have been pondering, is why more online zines don't seem to be willing to make the most of the advantages that this medium provides, the chief one probably being the convenience and the speed at which information can be traded.

On a number of occasions this month, after notifying a contributor approximately within a week of their submission that it has been accepted, I have received replies stating how "pleasantly surprised" they were to have received a reply so quickly, and how it made a "very nice change". Why should this be so? If you ask any writer out there to name their biggest peeves about submitting, the issue of response times will come close to top of the list each time. The online medium, for obvious reasons, provides great resources to alleviate this grievance. I do not see any valid reason why I must wait for longer than a month for a reply from an online zine, given that the zine aspires to any degree of professionalism.

In the end, any publication, online or otherwise is only as good as the material it publishes. It's not only a responsibility, it simply makes sense from any angle you choose to look, to treat the people who supply this material with all the respect and consideration at one's disposal. Personally, I go with the oldest and most reliable approach: I treat the submissions received in the same way I would like the ones I send out to be treated.

Enjoy this month's issue!

Mark Melton
Editor,
3rd Muse Poetry Journal