Can you give us some history of Albedo One? How was it founded?

Around 1989, or thereabouts, I met Bob Neilson and Dave Murphy at an Irish Science Fiction Association meeting. I overheard them talking about the possibility of meeting up on a regular basis to workshop short stories they had written. I pounced on this idea and asked if I could be included. And so the Tuesday night workshop was born. After a year or so, we got involved as a group in editing FTL, the magazine of the Irish Science Fiction Association. Unfortunately, after 11 issues, this magazine died and we were left with a void on the Irish scene. So we decided to start our own magazine. We spent a lot of time on the name and came up with Albedo One, 'albedo' being the percentage of light reflected back by a celestial body and 'one' standing 1 or 1.00 or 100%. The idea was that SF holds up a mirror to today's society and asks questions. A bit of a grandiose concept but there you go.

Anyway, the first issue was published around February or March 1993. We decided not to date the issues, as we didn't know how many issues a year we would produce and didn't want to get too tied into a rigid schedule. However, for the first few years, we produced three issues a year. In the beginning, it was an A5 sized photocopied publication with a card cover and stapled spine. However, over the years, we have graduated to an A4 sized printed magazine with perfect or square binding and full colour covers. Along the way, we have picked up three European Science Fiction Society Awards and last year we were longlisted for the Hugo Award for Best Magazine. We placed eighth. Unfortunately, the cut off was the top five, but we're still dead chuffed.

Apart from featuring work from older more established writers such as Brian Stableford, Norman Spinrad, Ian McDonald, Anne McCaffrey, Ian Watson and others, we have published stories by Liz Williams, Chris Butler, Lauren Halkon, Neil Williamson and others.

The current editorial team consists of Bob Neilson, Dave Murphy, Frank Ludlow and myself. Roelof Goudriaan, Peter McClean and Brendan Ryder are also involved in various aspects of producing the magazine (layout and design of the magazine, the website, distribution, etc.). The last couple of years, we've been lucky to get one or two issues out a year. As we have gotten older, life has intervened to make our time on the magazine more difficult to manage. However, as of this year, we are determined to return to producing three issues a year.

What do you like to see in a cover letter?

Just the basics:

Dear Editor (or Bob, Dave, John, Frank, etc. if you've had communication with us before),

Please find enclosed a short story called 'xxxxxx'. I have been published in x, y and z (if you've been published before). I hope you like the story and look forward to hearing from you.

Regards

xxxxxx

We don't like long-winded cover letters extolling the virtues of the writer. I've lost count of the number of letters we get asking if we are courageous enough to publish the enclosed masterpiece, which, in the opinion of the author, is an idea that has never been dealth with before, or is groundbreaking. Invariably, these submissions are unutterable garbage. However, if a writer has won a fiction award, it's nice to mention it to us, but it won't predispose us to like the submission.

We also don't like to see letters that include a synopsis of the story. Often, the story will not live up to the synopsis (as in 'this story is a tale of redemption' or 'this story is about the value of true friendship' or somesuch). Sometimes a synopsis will mentally steer the editor in a certain direction or colour the editor's perception of the story in the wrong way. There is certainly a need for a synopsis when you're dealing with a novel, but it's not needed for short stories. We'd rather be surprised.

What makes a manuscript stand out for you?

The first page. If I'm grabbed by the end of the first page, I'll stick with it. If I'm not, I'll find it hard to get through it. If it's a really standard, traditional piece or just plain badly written, I'll end up skimming after the first page or two. If writers are offended by this realisation that their magnum opus may (and I stress 'may') get barely a glance, they have to understand that we get something like a thousand submissions every year. And this is growing all the time. We have five readers (Bob, Dave, Frank, Peter and myself). A story has to grab the first reader, then it's passed on to a second reader. If the second reader also likes it, we accept it and it goes into inventory. Every issue, we publish the oldest story we have in inventory and then pick from the rest of the inventory to offer a balance of SF, fantasy and horror, word count and style. It's an imperfect science, but the order in which we present the stories in an issue is given careful consideration. Sometimes, two readers will violently disagree on the merits of a given piece. In this case, it goes to a third reader and the majority vote wins. However, this rarely happens (about three or four times in the history of the magazine).

Now by grabbing me, I don't mean that a story has to have all sorts of pyrotechnics going on on the first page. If a story is well thought out and sets the scene and introduces the main character in an interesting and natural way, I'll be happy to give it my full attention. Many's the story I've read and thoroughly enjoyed that was a slow burner, taking its time setting the story up and bringing the reader along at a leisurely pace.

What is your biggest pet peeve about slush pile manuscripts? Feel free to rant.

I have a few:

1. The poor or pedestrian quality of 99% of the submissions. Many writers are reinventing the wheel over and over again. Many writers are writing SF, fantasy or horror based on an understanding of the genres primarily gained from movies, TV, comics or, at best, the more recent books. Many writers are generating 10th generation (or division) work based on rehashes of rehashes of the original material. Now I'm not saying that the novels and short stories of the 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s are this golden motherlode of originality and that everything published today is derivative (Sturgeon's Law applies in any era), but I do think, as Jack Williamson once said, that anyone seriously considering making their way in this life as a writer should read the classics. This gives the writer a grounding in the genre and a real understanding of the breath of the field. The place to start is Gollancz' SF Masterworks and Fantasy Masterworks series. Many of the books in this series are still genuine eye-openers and wipe the floor with some of today's work. 

I honestly don't want to discourage anyone from submitting to us. We take every submission seriously and a writer must always believe that they fall into the 1% that is the very good material we receive.

2. Stories that are totally not what we publish. Perhaps e-mail is the culprit here. We have debated the issue of whether or not we should accept e-mail submissions many times. We always end up sticking with our policy of accepting e-mail submissions because we want the opportunity of picking the best material from as large a pool of submissions as possible. However, the downside is that submitting by e-mail is so easy that many writers don't bother to find out what kind of stories we publish. It would be nice if every submitter purchased a sample copy of the magazine (or subscribed!), but I'm not suggesting this. I myself am a writer and I certainly don't have the money to be buying six gazillion sample magazines. But we do have sample stories posted on our website (www.albedo1.com). Please check it out before submitting.

3. Completely the wrong return postage. We often get snail mail submissions with stamped addressed envelopes that have the wrong stamps on them. We are based in the Republic of Ireland and we can't send a writer a response using an envelope that has US or UK stamps on it. It has to have an Irish stamp on it or it won't make it through the Irish postal system. What we do when this happens is we send an e-mail response if there is an e-mail address supplied or we send the response in the stamped envelope provided. In this situation, if a writer doesn't receive a response from us, there's nothing we can do. We certainly can't afford to pay the postage ourselves. Again, writers need to make the effort to find out about us, check the website. There are writers' guidelines there. I myself submit to US magazines and I went online and bought US stamps before doing so. Writers can buy Irish stamps online at: http://www.irishstamps.ie/IrishStamps/

Sorry if I'm being negative here, but you did say feel free to rant.

Albedo One sponsors a yearly short fiction contest. Why should a writer enter a contest, rather than send a direct submission?

It's not quite yearly, more like every 18 months. The current competition is open until the end of June and the winner, chosen by Ian Watson, will be announced at Eurocon in Copenhagen in September this year. There is no doubt that being able to say (in cover letters and elsewhere) that you have won an award, or even been shortlisted, is good for the CV. Writers could do worse than check out David D. Levine's website (www.spiritone.com/~dlevine/sf) to see just how he has managed to garner awards from all the right places. He has also managed to place several of his stories in foreign language publications. The man is a genius at self-promotion. I, myself, plan to take a leaf from his book in this regard (if I can ever get my act together and produce a reasonable volume of material).

I would say, however, that submitting directly to magazines is equally important. In our case, typically, we receive submissions from many writers directly to the magazine and also to the competition (different stories of course!). I think it's important, however, to pick your competitions very carefully. Some competitions are little more than money making rackets with little or no exposure or gain for the winners. These competitions tend to be the ones that have prohibitive entry fees.

Check out the Aeon Award competition at: www.albedo1.com/html/aeon_award.html and Eurocon at: http://www.eurocon2007.dk/en/

Many of your authors appear in Year's Best collections. Other than being a great honor, how would inclusion in such an anthology help a writer's career?

You are being very generous by saying 'many'. We've had Philip Raines and Harvey Welles' 'The Bad Magician' (Albedo One #28) feature in Ellen Datlow's (and Gavin Grant's and Kelly Link's) 18th Year's Best Fantasy and Horror (covering 2004) and we will have David D. Levine's 'I Hold My Father's Paws' (Albedo One #31) published in Gardner Dozois' Year's Best Science Fiction this coming July. But we do get Honourable Mentions most years in both of the above anthologies.

I think appearing in Year's Best anthologies is very advantageous to both the magazine and the writer. For the magazine it increases exposure, promotes higher numbers of quality submissions and, to a smaller extent, increases our subscriptions base. For the writer it obviously increases exposure, but it also opens doors all over the place. When I said earlier that an award won't predispose us to liking a submission, perhaps I was fibbing a little. It doesn't predispose us to liking a short story but our ears do prick up when we see an award mentioned in a cover letter and it sensitises our reading of the piece. And I would consider inclusion in the major anthologies to be equivalent to an award.

You recently changed your pay scale. What are your feelings about writers' guilds drawing a line between pro and non-pro markets. Does it help or hinder writers and publishers?

We recently scrapped the prize of EUR100 for the best story in the issue as voted for by the readers in favour of paying all the writers. The reason we did this was twofold. One, we wanted to attract submissions from writers who, on point of principle, don't submit to non-paying markets. Two, we wanted to encourage web-based reviews of the magazine by webzines that review only paying markets (e.g. Tangent Online: www.tangentonline.com). It's a paltry amount of money (EUR3 per 1,000 words) but we have found that many writers don't mind this; they simply want to achieve professional sales.

Now as to definitions of pro and non-pro markets, these vary greatly. According to the Hugo rules, we qualify as a Semi-Pro Magazine, according to Ralan (www.ralan.com) we are a Paying Market as apposed to a Semi- & Pro Market. I don't think it has a huge affect on magazines or writers. It makes sense that to be defined as a Semi-Pro or Pro Market is better for a magazine in terms of eligibility for awards and the prospect of getting quality submissions. As you can see, it also has an impact on whether or not you get reviewed. For a writer, it figures that it's better to feature in the higher profile magazines for all sorts of reasons (payment, reviews, awards, general exposure, etc.). So I suppose if we were to be arbitrarily defined negatively, it would hinder both us and the writer to an extent, but we are clearly a Semi-Pro publication and we've been more or less defined in that manner by any and all organisations and webzines that are worth mentioning.

Your guidelines say "we love to see material which pushes at the boundaries." How do genres help or hinder writers, editors and publishing houses?

I used to think that every magazine stated something like this in their guidelines, but it's amazing how many magazines there are out there that want traditional and specific sub-genre stuff (light-hearted SF - Andromeda, SFnal horror - Apex, trad hard SF - Darker Matter). Of course, I don't mean this as a criticism. Those magazines are fine organs catering to specific tastes. I'm not sure the work we publish necessarily pushes boundaries, but what we ultimately want are stories about people, with good characterisation and a fully realised scenario taken to its logical or ultimate conclusion. Many readers say there is an Albedo style of story. I don't know what that is, but generally we don't like to be restricted too much in what we publish.

I think particularly or narrowly defined genres or sub-genres both help and hinder writers. They only help editors and publishers. For writers, it really depends on what they want to write. Some writers will find themselves too constricted by genre conventions. Others will revel in them, finding comfort in dealing with well worn concepts and themes, or tackling the challenge of coming up with something new within the defined structures. Editors (I assume you're talking about magazine editors here) tend to have particular likes and will define their magazines in those terms. Publishers generally like something they can easily pigeonhole, or that their marketing and sales departments can label. Increasingly, marketing and sales departments are dictating what publishers publish. Not that there is nothing good coming out of the major publishers, but I think a major safety valve for writers, editors, publishers and readers who want something different or unusual is the small press scene (although let's not forget that Sturgeon's Law applies here as anywhere else). Golden Gryphon (www.goldengryphon.com) and PS Publishing (www.pspublishing.co.uk) are bringing out some wonderful work and we should be very grateful that they exist.

John Kenny,

Editor of Albedo One Magazine

Albedo One is Ireland's longest-running and foremost magazine of the Fantastic. Since 1993, we have published
stories of both Irish and international authors which push at the boundaries of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror.

Albedo One also sponsors the prestigious Aeon Award.

Look for my story “Larry’s Shrine in an upcoming issue of Albedo One