Q: Describe what you publish in 25 characters or less.
A: Erotic F/SF short stories
Q: What other current publications (or publishers) do you admire most?
A: PodCastle
Escape Pod
The Magnus Archive
Kakos Industries
Circlet Press
Q: If you publish writing, who are your favorite writers? If you publish art, who are your favorite artists?
A: N K Jemisin
Cecilia Tan
Shanna Germain
Q: What sets your publication apart from others that publish similar material?
A: There are no other erotic science fiction and fantasy short story anthology audio podcasts.
What sets us apart from PodCastle and Escape Pod is that we publish erotic stories.
What sets us apart from other erotic short story podcasts is that we publish science fiction and fantasy.
What sets us apart from Circlet Press is that we publish audio stories.
Q: What is the best advice you can give people who are considering submitting work to your publication?
A: Read the submission guidelines.
The deficit we find in most of the submissions, is a lack of beginning-middle-end. The story should ask a question and answer it.
Q: Describe the ideal submission.
A: In addition to the usual (engaging characters, plot and setting) we really like being surprised with kinks that aren't usually represented in erotic fiction.
Q: What do submitters most often get wrong about your submissions process?
A: Weak plot, generic characters, uninteresting setting.
Q: How much do you want to know about the person submitting to you?
A: We're happy to see submissions from established names but we have found that some of our best stories have come from early career authors.
Q: If you publish writing, how much of a piece do you read before making the decision to reject it?
A: Our slush reader tries to be generous but some submissions are horribly tasteless. Anything with racism, sexism, homo- or transphobia will be DNF'ed, for example.
Q: What additional evaluations, if any, does a piece go through before it is accepted?
A: One slush reader, then final evaluation by me.
Q: What is a day in the life of an editor like for you?
A: I set aside an afternoon to read a half dozen or so stories that have been passed up to me by the slush reader. I give them quality grades, make note of the gender of the voice, the gender pairings, and then make selections. If I have gotten too many straight pairings then I'll decline all but the best of those; if I've gotten too many male POV's I'll decline all but the best of those.
Q: How important do you feel it is for publishers to embrace modern technologies?
A: Are there publishers who are still in the 20th century with submissions? huh.
Q: How much do you edit an accepted piece prior to publication?
A: We do extremely minor edits--usually to adapt for audio. For example, if there are a lot of dialogue tags, the voice talent might leave off the tag and instead use it to guide the dialogue narration.
Story submissions should be polished before they come to us.
Q: Do you nominate work you've published for any national or international awards?
A: It's generally not worth our time; the various podcast awards are not kind to erotic material.