Contacting Bewildering Stories

page index: anchor links
General e-mail Forwardings Acknowledgements	Submissions Preferred file formats Book reviews

General e-mail

We welcome submissions, reactions, comments, questions, and suggestions. Please send them to The Managing Editor.

Please do not use the address bwstories@bewilderingstories.com. We’ve had entirely too much trouble with it, and your message may be lost.

We enjoy hearing from our readers and appreciate your helping us make our webzine even better.

If you send us a letter of general interest, we may want to publish it. We’ll send you a message saying we’d like to include it in our Letters department unless you say otherwise. Of course we’ll edit out any routine personal or editorial matters.

We will not publish or otherwise divulge your e-mail address, postal address or telephone number unless you explicitly ask us to.

Exception: Submissions often contain the author’s complete coordinates. That’s perfectly okay, but the Managing Editor will remove them from the file only in the final editing process. In the meantime, the file may circulate to the Coordinating Editor and one or more review readers. Only the Publisher, the Managing Editor, and the Coordinating Editor are authorized to correspond with contributors.

Forwardings

We will forward mail on request, within limits. A request to forward any message also constitutes a request to include the sender’s e-mail address and any other personal information in the message.

We often receive “fan mail” or other requests to contact our authors. We forward the mail to the author’s last recorded address and encourage the the author to reply directly to the sender.

A request to forward a message must say for whom the message is intended, otherwise it may be disregarded. Do we get such messages? Honestly, you’d be amazed...

Our mail footer says “Would you like to compliment the author? Offer a comment or suggestion?” It ought to go without saying that any critique has to be constructive. The Managing Editor does not edit or censor mail, but he will not intentionally allow Bewildering Stories to become involved in impolite exchanges. Thankfully, almost all correspondents consider that a matter of course.

Acknowledgements and replies

We do our best to reply to or at least acknowledge all e-mail. If you expect a reply and haven’t received one within three days, please inquire. In some cases we try to reply, but the e-mail bounces for various reasons.

Certain e-mail services may block e-mail from entire domains as a defense against spam. The mail may not even bounce; it may simply be deleted. We have been unable to reply to some contributors because their spam filters apparently prevented them from receiving any e-mail at all.

Submissions

Please see our Submissions page for details. Here’s the gist, as far as e-mail is concerned:

The genre in full caps followed by the title, e.g. POETRY: "Daybreak on Mars." That helps separate the real mail from spam.

If you have a question or some news, it may be wise to start the subject line of your message with “QUERY.” That will prevent the mailer from mistaking your message as spam.

Texts in the format easiest for you:
1. Plain text in the body of an e-mail message. Obviously this is most practical for shorter works. You can specify special formatting in a note at the top.
2. Attachments: RTF (rich text format) almost always works best. Exception: if you use WordPerfect, please send a regular .wpd file; WordPerfect’s RTF tends to garble some features of text.
3. File compression: File compression can come in handy if your mail server has severe bandwidth limitations or you’re using a dial-up connection. If your e-mailer zips attachments automatically, please don’t worry about it. In the unlikely event we can’t decompress the file, we’ll let you know and see if we can find a workaround.

Summary:

Macintosh — probably anything
Word — RTF yes; .doc yes; .docx yes; .xml no
WordPerfect — RTF no; .wpd yes
Adobe Acrobat Reader — yes, but a word-processor file is much simpler.

“No” means we have had problems with those file types.

However, if you’ve sent a submission without having seen these guidelines, please don’t worry about it; we’ll be glad to hear from you!

Reviews

Those wishing to send us books to be reviewed may send them to:

Bewildering Stories
10075 Rd H N.E.
Moses Lake, WA 98837-9379

If the book is in PalmPilot format (specifically Mobipocket) the file may be attached to an e-mail sent to bwstories@gmail.com; however, actual dead-tree books will be read first.

Return to top