Since we soft launched AE last week, we’ve seen talk online about your story submissions. Are they still under consideration? What’s the status? Are we really back?

We realize in our excitement to resurrect the site we should have done a better job in managing submissions. You trusted us with your stories, and we didn’t honour that trust as well as we could have.

To everyone who’s still waiting to hear from us, we hope you will accept our sincere apology. It’s not how we intended for things to go, and we’re committed to improving the process.

When we began the process of relaunching AE in Spring 2017, our goal was to get the site back online, re-open to submissions, and continue publishing amazing science fiction as quickly as possible.

But rebuilding the site proved harder than we’d first thought. Plus, we’re all volunteers and our personal lives took us away from this work, sometimes for weeks. Yet we were making progress and believed success was right around the corner.

Of course, you didn’t know this. What you saw was a site that would appear and disappear, seemingly at random, without any changes or improvements. Some of you gave us up for dead, and we don’t blame you for that. Others saw a submissions page asking for stories and sent them in.

We’ve put a huge amount of effort over the past few months to read the 400+ submissions that we’ve received over the past 18 months, and are only now catching up with the backlog. We’ve read through 90% of those submissions and while most of you have now heard back from us, the authors of some of the best stories waited (and in some cases are still waiting) far too long for a response. We are sorry for keeping your stories in limbo for such a long time. We know the market well, and we know that it’s not fair to ask authors to wait on a decision when they could be pursuing other opportunities.

If you haven’t heard from us, that means your story is still under consideration, and you’ll be hearing from us soon. We’re really excited by some of the stories we’ve received and can’t wait to share them with you, but we also know that some of you may have submitted (and sold) them elsewhere.

If you haven’t heard from us and want to check on the status of your submission, email us at editors@aescifi.ca with the subject line “Submission Update Request” and the title of your story. Please be patient—it may take a few days to get back to you since we anticipate a lot of questions.

Paul, Helen, Duff, and the rest of the AE Team