Radio silence on an accepted story and the clock's ticking...

I see nothing you can do that would matter. Pestering them won't help, especially at this lat date. I have a firm "submit and forget" policy. It's really out of your control at this point, and I'd be patient, wait and see what happens.

Personally, I'd query them about it. What's the worst that'll happen?

But in my experience (and I've never had an especially good experience, so YMMV), when a publisher goes quiet and starts pushing release dates back, it doesn't end well. At best they're disorganized (and often unprofessional), at worst they're about to go under.

Lately, lack of communication and shifty timelines is my queue to jump ship. But then, maybe an email just went astray in your case. Never hurts to ask. The worst you'll get is an "oops, we decided not to publish after all." Better to have news than no news.

I sold a story in 2012 for an anthology that was due out 2013. Feb 2014 the anthology finally got released. We were paid 3 months late.

Honestly, I wouldn't sweat it. It will either get published, in which case you can then worry about getting paid, or it won't, and then you can send the story somewhere else.

For a short story, it's seriously not worth worrying about. Just get on with writing and subbing. Some editors are on the ball, some aren't. Some editors are wrestling with publishing companies who muck them about.

Either way there's nothing you can do that will make a difference, and if your only worry is the fate of your story, you are wasting effort on, what, 4k? 6k?

Spend the time and energy on something else.

K.

CL_Hilbert said:

Personally, I'd query them about it. What's the worst that'll happen?

But in my experience (and I've never had an especially good experience, so YMMV), when a publisher goes quiet and starts pushing release dates back, it doesn't end well. At best they're disorganized (and often unprofessional), at worst they're about to go under.

Lately, lack of communication and shifty timelines is my queue to jump ship. But then, maybe an email just went astray in your case. Never hurts to ask. The worst you'll get is an "oops, we decided not to publish after all." Better to have news than no news.

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I just don't worry about it because nothing I say or do is going to change anything. Too, I made one of my biggest, and most profitable, sales after the publisher went silent for a bit more than two years. When the acceptance letter came, I had to check my records to be sure there wasn't some mistake because I didn't even remember writing a story with the title mentioned in the acceptance letter. I sure didn't remember what the story was about, or anything else.

I looked in my records, and there it was, but I had to read it again to remember anything about it.

My experience is that no news is always better than bad news, and you can often make bad news happen by pressing.

Things happen that cause delays, or editors change their minds, or can't decide one way or another, etc. Pressing can cause them to decide against you.

The thing is, I write steadily, at least five days per week, and I submit something, somewhere, almost every week. This means no one story, or no one article or essay, which has been my primary writing the last few years, matters at all.

It doesn't matter whether I hear something tomorrow, or two years from tomorrow because I do hear back from this publisher or that publisher, or the other publisher, from someone, week in and week out.

I used to write short stories almost exclusively, and I sold joust over a hundred, and I took the same approach. It worked very well for me. Submit and forget, give editors all the time they need or want, and spend my time getting other stories in circulation.

I might feel different, if I only wrote a short story every great once in a while, and only had two or three in submission. I don't know. I do know I've been on both sides of the editor's desk, and very often there's nothing an editor can do about a long delay. He often knows as little as you do because one decision after another is made over his head, and he's the last to know.

Anyway, unless there's a reason to worry about a story, such as the subject of the story is time sensitive, waiting it out has always worked best for me. That two year delay was the longest, but I've had several end with good sales after a year or so.

The problem is, sometimes stories get lost in the editor's pile, and unless you ask the story will likely stay lost forever. I've had two stories go astray out of the 20 or so I've submitted. They'd been rejected but I hadn't been told, so those stories would have been a wasted effort if I'd never discovered they were available to submit elsewhere.

Abderian said:

The problem is, sometimes stories get lost in the editor's pile, and unless you ask the story will likely stay lost forever. I've had two stories go astray out of the 20 or so I've submitted. They'd been rejected but I hadn't been told, so those stories would have been a wasted effort if I'd never discovered they were available to submit elsewhere.

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You know, I've heard that, but in thirty-five years, I've never had it happen. With paper stories, I always go first class, with envelopes marked accordingly, and that has probably helped.

With e-stories, it's been no problem, either.

Anyway, I have nothing against a query to see what has happened, or will happen, but wait a long time before doing so, and the OP has already sent out that one polite e-mail.