Submission Statement: June 2020

Another month come and gone. Here’s a breakdown of my short story endeavors for June.

June 2020 Report Card

• Submissions Sent: 4
• Rejections: 5
• Acceptances: 1
• Publications: 0

A lackluster month, unfortunately. I needed to get 8 submissions to stay on track for 100 subs for the year, and I got half that. This just means I’ll have to pick up the pace in July. I really need to finish some of the short stories I’ve got in various stages of completion. More stories always means more submissions . . . and rejections, of course.

Rejections

Five rejections this month.

• Standard Form Rejections: 3
• Upper-Tier Form Rejections: 1
• Personal Rejections: 1

Pretty much ran the gamut as far as rejection go. The standard form rejections were all from pro markets, while the upper-tier and personal were from a pair of semi-pro markets. The quickest rejection came in a single day, and the longest took 90 days.

Spotlight Rejection

The spotlight rejection is from a semi-pro market I’ve published with before:

I sold this particular story on the next submission. Now, this absolutely does not mean the publisher above is wrong and the one that accepted the story is right. This is a subjective business, and wrong and right are, well, dubious concepts. I bring this up only to again point out that selling a story is often about putting the right story in front of the right editor at the right time. Almost every story I’ve sold has racked up three or four rejections and sometimes A LOT more before it sold (this one scored seven). In other words, not every story, no matter how good, is going to work for every market and every editor, so you have to keep trying and keep submitting.

Acceptances

One acceptance this month, and a pretty exciting one. I sold my story “The Past, History,” to Dark Matter Magazine, a new pro-paying science-fiction market. I’d been shopping that story for a while, and it had racked up good number of rejections and a couple of revisions before Dark Matter accepted it. I was hoping to continue my streak of two acceptances per month in June, but it was not to be. I’ll just have to shoot for three in July. 🙂

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And that was June. Tell me about your month.