Ah, the perils of an editor

Was browsing the archives of another e-zine yesterday, & came across a poem I recognised. Not surprisingly, since it was one of a number of poems I'd accepted from the author & had uploaded to the under-construction issue four of Otoliths less than 24 hours before.

So I went googling, & discovered that four of the poems - plus a number of the remainder of the submission - had previously appeared online. I thought about pulling them all for some time, but decided to give the author the benefit of the doubt &, provided I received a reassurance that the remaining two hadn't or weren't going to appear elsewhere, pull only the four that had appeared before.

I emailed the author when I'd revised the page, received an email back - "Sorry. Honest mistake. Humblest apologies."

But it nagged at me because said author had also appeared in issue three of Otoliths. Back on with the uniform of the thought police, back into Google. Found that of the four poems in issue three, two had appeared once previously, one twice previously & one three times previously. Plus there were postings to a couple of poetry lists. (& I discovered another publication of one of the poems from yesterday.)

It's too late to pull the print editions - they've started going out - & because of that I decided to leave the poems online in issue three but add an acknowledgment of where they'd previously appeared. Four poems, six acknowledgments: people will do the math.

I don't mind publishing work that's appeared on blogs or in lists. I don't mind publishing work that's appeared in print, provided there's a decent time interval. I don't mind publishing work that's previously appeared online if what Bruce Sterling calls "linkrot" has occurred. I don't mind publishing complete series or sequences where the various parts have appeared before but never all together. But at all times, acknowledgment is given to the place of original publication. It's a basic courtesy, one that I give to my editors, one that I expect given to me.

Needless to say, I'm pissed. I'll still leave the poems there - though, after today, I was having second thoughts - but since I said I would, I will. But from now on in it looks like there's going to be a Google step within the process, & the idea that it is necessary to do that pisses me off even more.

Merry Christmas. Bah humbug.