Submission Top Ten: Shortest Waits
Last week I showed you my ten longest waits for submissions. This week, I’m gonna flip the script and show you the ten shortest waits. So, without further ado, here they are:
| Time Elapsed | Result | Sold | |
| 1 | 10 minutes | Rejection | |
| 2 | 17 minutes | Acceptance | Yes (2) |
| 3 | 46 minutes | Rejection | |
| 4 | 49 minutes | Rejection | Yes |
| 5 | 1 hour, 37 minutes | Rejection | |
| 6 | 1 hour, 52 minutes | Higher-Tier Rejection | |
| 7 | 2 hours, 30 minutes | Rejection | |
| 8 | 2 hours, 58 minutes | Rejection | |
| 9 | 3 hours, 22 minutes | Rejection | Yes (3) |
| 10 | 4 hours, 6 minutes | Higher-Tier Rejection | |
Instead of going through each one of these (they’re all pretty similar), I’ll just give you the highlights.
- Yep, 10 minutes is my record, and it’s one I’ll probably never break. You might be thinking, “Wow, they must really hate your work,” but that is apparently not the case, as they’ve since bought a story from me. This market is just one that rejects quickly, and they could likely tell within the first paragraph the story wasn’t going to work for them. You might also be wondering if I just really screwed up the formatting or missed some other crucial guideline. I thought the same thing, and I went back over the submission with a fine-toothed comb. As far as I can tell, the submission was formatted correctly.
- My second shortest wait was an acceptance, which is another record I doubt I’ll ever break. They bought another story from me a few weeks later, but the response took almost THREE DAYS, an eternity compared to the first submission. 🙂
- There’s ten spots here, but they only cover four markets. One of the markets has five slots, and another has three. These are both well-known for rejecting (and accepting) very quickly.
- Three of the stories here I’ve gone on to sell to other markets, sometimes multiple times as reprints. I’m only pointing that out because the speed of rejection often has a lot more to do with the market than your story.
- Most of these are form rejections, but there’s a couple of higher-tier rejections, and I’ve even gotten full-blown personal rejections with tons of feedback on next-day responses. So, just because a market responds quickly doesn’t meant they didn’t read your story or gave it due consideration.
- You might be wondering if these speedy rejections bother me. They don’t. I appreciate how quickly these markets respond, as it means I can send the story out again (or make revisions) almost right away.
That’s my top ten shortest waits. Tell me about some of yours, especially if you’ve beaten my record time for a rejection or an acceptance. 🙂
2 Comments on “Submission Top Ten: Shortest Waits”
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Aeryn Rudel's Rejectomancy 
Those are some spectacularly fast response times. My fastest rejection appears to be about 15 hours and fastest acceptance was two days.
I can recommend a couple of markets if you’d like to beat those times. 😉