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Call For Submissions - Sherlock Holmes, etc.

Saw this on Twitter. Might be of interest to some people here:

From Mystery Weekly Magazine:

Call for submissions ... Sherlock Holmes or other pastiche stories ... deadline September 1, 2021 to be in the October issue.

I don't know anything about this magazine or their style/preferences. I've never submitted to them. According to their website, they pay 2 cents/word (US).

https://mysteryweekly.com/submit.asp

3 comments

3 Comments

Ted Vician

May 18, 2021

According to this person's data, 37% of Holmes shorts stories are less than 7500 words. He builds a whole statistical model that indicates that story quality (as judged by some sort of poll of Sherlock Holmes experts) increases with word count. It's really amazing what one can find with a bit of searching.

https://www.christianpeccei.com/holmes/

G.L. McDorman

May 26, 2021

Replying to

Wow, this is incredible. The conclusions here are the exact opposite of what every publisher wants now.

Longer stories are better. The quality of a story increases by 1 star for every 2,934 words in a story.
Lots of dialog is a bad thing. The quality of a story decreases by 1 star for each 20 percentage point increase in the amount of dialog.
Longer sentences are better. The quality of a story increases by 1 star as the average sentence length increases by 4 words.

G.L. McDorman

May 06, 2021

That's a very short word-count for a Holmes story. I yearn for a magazine that only wants to publish novelettes.