I sold a reprint to an audio market earlier this week, so another of my stories is going to be podcasted at some point! That leaves me with just one story out on submission right now, down from a peak of 9 submissions earlier in the summer. Seems like a good time to look at my submission stats so far this year (hat tip to The Submission Grinder for keeping all this data manageable!):
- 31 total submissions to date, the highest for any year in my career (the runner up is 2019, with 26)
- 5 acceptances (4 original, 1 reprint, and for those interested in this sort of thing, 2 of the original sales were to places paying pro rates) – again, this is the highest in my career thus far, beating 2019 by 1
- 19 form rejections
- 6 personal rejections
I’ve made less money from short fiction than I did in 2019, despite the additional sales, because in 2019 I sold a story on the longer side to a pro-rate market (Annotated Setlist of the Mikaela Cole Jazz Quintet to Clarkesworld), whereas this year a bunch of my sales have flash length or not much over.
This is the first year I’ve done simultaneous submissions (where the markets permit it). It seems to me, just based on vague memories from the period when I was last submitting seriously (2018-2020) that there are more markets that are open to simultaneous submissions, which is great for writers. I did have one story that was held by two markets at once, which made me nervous, but it resolved happily when one market eventually rejected it off the hold and the other accepted it.
The obvious “lesson” from all this (not that you necessarily need to learn anything from submitting, but there’s a reason I like looking at data) is that the more you submit, the more you up your chances of selling. Obviously there can be dry periods — in fact I started off the year with six months straight of rejections, mostly form, before getting a string of acceptances, holds, and personal rejections — but it’s helpful to have the data show that you do, in fact, miss all of the shots you don’t take, whereas some years you land 16% of the shots you do take. (I think that’s an unsustainable acceptance rate, but who knows.)
Some quick comment on the stories I’ve had out there this year: two of them I had completed full drafts of back in 2019-2020, and they underwent some significant edits earlier this year before selling. Two of them I had messy, half (or less) complete drafts of from 2019-2020, and I came back to them with a new vision and focus that enabled me to finish them off. One from each of those categories had been put in the folder in Scrivener labelled “trunk” — in other words, I thought they were unsalvageable and not worth continuing. The last one, the one that’s still out on submission, was drafted entirely new this summer.
I expect to make at least four more submissions this year, maybe more depending on how the writing and editing end of things go, with a stretch goal of making 40 submissions by the end of 2024. I’ll report back!