Example Submission Acceptance Letter

Dear author,

PLEASE READ THIS MESSAGE!  It may take several weeks for your
submission to be archived at Gossamer.  We have a regular
update cycle in which groups of stories are archived.  If
your story was submitted within a few days of an update, it
will probably miss the cut-off and be posted in the following
update.  Be assured that the method you have chosen (direct
submission) is the fastest and most efficient way to submit
your work to Gossamer.

Your submission to the Gossamer Project was accepted by our
"pre-screening" process.  This means that your submission will
proceed to the next step, where a Gossamer volunteer will
screen it for formatting problems.  Below is a flow chart of
the process for handling direct submissions.  At this time,
we cannot provide accurate estimates as to the amount of time
it takes for a story to proceed through all of these steps.
We handle all submissions in the order they were submitted.
Submissions that are plain text, contain clear classification
instructions (this includes "not rated/summarized by author's
request"), and are well formatted will be processed the
fastest, while others may be set aside while we contact the
author for more information or a resubmission.

Please address any questions regarding your submission to
help @ gossamer.org.  Be sure to provide your name and the
title of your story in all correspondence.

DIRECT SUBMISSIONS FLOW CHART
=============================

1.  Author e-mails submission to 'submit @ gossamer.org'

2.  Submission is "pre-screened" automatically.

    This process identifies most word processor documents and other
    documents which are not completely plain text.  Any submission
    that the program identifies as one would be rejected.  An
    automatic information message will be sent to the author
    outlining the reasons why the submission was not accepted and
    providing basic instructions on how to fix the problem.  No
    further action is taken by Gossamer.

3.  Submission is screened by a volunteer.

    The volunteer attempts to correct any minor formatting problems.
    Formatting problems that require more extensive work, but do not
    render the submission unreadable, will be left as is.  Unreadable
    submissions will be passed to another volunteer whose
    responsibility it is to work with authors to get the story
    formatted properly and resubmitted.

4.  Submissions for other archives are routed by a volunteer.

    The volunteer will determine whether the submission is an
    unfinished story, poem, filk, non-fiction, or serial.  If any
    of these conditions are satisfied, the submission will either
    be routed to the Gossamer Specialty Archive or set aside
    because it is incomplete, as appropriate.

5.  Duplicates and revisions are separated from new submissions.

    If the volunteer finds more than one submission of the same story,
    one will be chosen and the others will be deleted.  If one appears
    to have been revised or is better formatted, it will be chosen
    over the others.  If the volunteer determines that the story
    already resides on Gossamer and the submission is a revision of
    the story, the submission will be placed into a group of revisions
    instead of a group of new submissions.

6.  Stories are grouped by date received.

    The volunteer will group all files received within a given time
    period and send them to the database administrator.

7.  Stories are databased.

    The database administrator adds database entries for all
    submissions received within a given period of time.  Revisions,
    database updates, and e-mail address changes are handled as they
    are received and generally go online at the same time as updates.

8.  An update is distributed to the Gossamer web sites.

    The database administrator packages up the latest version of the
    database with all of the revisions and new submissions that are
    to be added to the web sites.

9.  The individual site maintainers update their Gossamer web site.

    Each site maintainer adds the stories to their site.

If you wish to resubmit a story or make other changes, please inform
us as soon as possible at help @ gossamer.org.  Depending on where
we are in the process, we may be able to quickly effect the desired
changes.  Often, however, you will need to wait for an entire update
cycle before the requested change is propagated to the web sites.
For this reason, we strongly encourage you to carefully review your
story before submitting it to Gossamer.

For more information, please view our submissions web page at:

    http://fluky.gossamer.org/local/submit.html

Thank you,

Gossamer Submissions (automated)

Please address any questions regarding your submission to
help @ gossamer.org.  Be sure to provide your name and the
title of your story in all correspondence.

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