Gollancz unagented submission guidelines

One of the Gollancz team tweeted last night to point out that they do take unagented submissions, even if they take longer than they'd like to get around to reading them. He linked to a blog post on their website with the submission guidelines, the most important bits of which are

# Gollancz publish Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, Urban Fantasy, Steampunk, Dystopia and a little YA cross-over fiction. If you’re writing in these areas, we’re happy to take a look at your work.

# Only get in touch when you have a complete, spell-checked manuscript of 80,000 words or more.

I mostly have too much smut and not enough speccy plot in my stuff, but if I wrote Big 6 type material, I would be very, very interested in this. :-) Though I might be tempted to try to push the current WIP more towards a Big 6 manuscript, because it's not going to have enough porn in it for a lot of the epubs.

Harper Voyager Guidelines for Digital Submission

NOTE: Limited open submission period - 01-14 October 2012

I'm not sure who or what started this, but there seems to have been some sort of twitterfest last night amongst the Big 6 speculative fiction editors saying that they do *so* take unagented submissions. I've obviously missed some bit of gossip about yet another round of "go self-pub because the dinosaurs won't take unagented submissions". Anyway, Harper Voyager would like you to know that although they don't normally take unsolicited submissions, they're starting a digital-only imprint, it will take unsolicited submissions, and it's open for submissions from 1 to 14 October 2012. Details here:
http://harpervoyagerbooks.com/harper-voyager-guidelines-for-digital-submission/

As ever, caveat scrivener -- I have not read the fine print and don't know whether there are any interesting gotchas.

authors behaving criminally

Normal author behaviour on receiving the latest rejection from a literary agent: weep on their friends' shoulders and maybe curse the agent once or twice in a locked blog post or on an author's forum in a manner that it makes it clear they're just letting off steam, before sending the next query letter out.

Authors behaving badly: send abusive emails to the agent, post multiple self-pitying rants in public about !@#$%^ !@#$% who can't recognise genius when they see it, and stalk agent and agent's friends online for a while, maybe start posting 1 star reviews of books by agent's clients.

Authors behaving criminally: send threatening emails to agent, and then track down agent in meatspace and physically assault them.

No, I'm not kidding. Someone allegedly did this to literary agent and book blogger Bookalicious. Good round up at mybookgoggles. There are some more horrifying tales from publishing insiders in the Absolute Write thread discussing this incident.

And this, children, is why we can't have nice things like personalised rejections.