We had a hard choice to make. We extended the submission deadline.
The overall submissions were far lower than we normally receive to start with. Perhaps the thin line of the theme made it worse because “supernatural thriller” and “heist” weren’t close, yet people submitted them.
A comment on guidelines: Publishers vary on the level to which they request and invoke their guidelines. Inkd Pub is on the less regimented end, but that means more work on our side. As an example: a fair number of withdrawals occur before the submission period ends, and most of those were marked as “submitted elsewhere”; which is against our “no simultaneous submission” guideline. On occasion, acceptances are rejected by an author because their story was accepted elsewhere (thus the reason for our “no simultaneous submission” guideline). We don’t automatically discard these submissions in the beginning, or keep a list of infringers, but many publishers do.
We apologize to those who have submitted a proper story and been waiting on their response, but we simply don’t have enough stories to fill an anthology.
