Submissions Statement: March 2021

And March is in the books. Here are the results.

March 2021 Report Card

• Submissions Sent: 12
• Rejections: 8
• Acceptances: 0
• Publications: 0
• Further Consideration: 0

March was a good month in terms of the volume of submissions, but it marks the third month of 2021 without an acceptance. The good news is I received an acceptance this morning, so my April numbers won’t look so grim. I’m well on my way to 100 submissions for the year, and I ended March with 27, which worked out to an average of 9 per month. If I can keep up that pace, I’m looking at 108 submissions.

Rejections

Eight rejections this month.

• Standard Form Rejections: 4
• Upper-Tier Form Rejections: 2
• Personal Rejections: 2

The two personal rejection where the final-round, close-but-no-cigar type. Interestingly, when I’m in acceptance drought, as I have been for the last three months, I get a lot of these. They’re often from publishers who have published me before or for stories I go on to sell soon after. For example, the story that was accepted this morning was rejected twice in my 26-rejection-long streak. What I’m saying is, for me, the difference between 23 submissions that all end in rejections and the 23 before it that includes 6 acceptances is often razor thin. I’m going to explore that a bit further in an upcoming blog post.

Publications

My sole publication in March was another Rejectomancy article over at Dark Matter Magazine. This one is about sending submission status queries, which is kind of an evergreen topic in writing/submission circles. You can check out my thoughts on why and when you should send a status query by clicking the link below.

Ask Away: The Submission Status Query

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And that was my month. How was yours?