Submission Statement: September 2021

September is no more, but it was a good month in submission land. Let’s take a look.

September 2021 Report Card

• Submissions Sent: 18
• Rejections: 15
• Acceptances: 2
• Publications: 0
• Further Consideration: 0

This might be the most subs I’ve ever sent in a single month. I’ll have to go back and check that. Anyway, a lot of stories went out the door, and, well, a lot of them came back. I did manage a pair of acceptances, which is great, and it rescued my year from the title of worst ever. Now it’s just plain bad. There’s still time, though, so I’m shooting for the moon and going for just okay. 🙂 I did set two personal submission records last month. First, I sent my 600th submissions, which is a pretty significant milestone. Second, I received five rejections in a single day. That’s tops for me in a decade of submissions. Yay?

Anyway, things are looking up a tad, and I hope that trend continues.

Rejections

A fairly staggering fifteen rejections in September.

• Standard Form Rejections: 8
• Upper-Tier Form Rejections: 5
• Personal Rejections: 2

Yeah, not gonna lie, fifteen rejections is a lot. One of the personals was a shortlist heartbreaker at a pro market, but I like my chances with this publisher in the future. The rest were a mix of standard and higher-tier form rejections and not particularly interesting.

Though I said the form rejections weren’t all that interesting, I’m going to highlight one for precisely this reason. One of the rejections was from a market I’d never submitted to before, and you never know what you’re gonna get from a new publisher in terms of rejections. In my opinion, this is a perfect form rejection.

Aeryn,

Thank you for the opportunity to read your story. Unfortunately, we have decided not to feature [story] at this time. 

Best of luck in your writing endeavors!

This is all I need out of a no. Just tell me you’re not gonna publish the story in a professional and straightforward manner. Other authors may disagree, but, for me, it’s easy to move on from a rejection like this. There’s nothing to read into here, and I can just fire the rejected story off somewhere else and send this publisher something different. (I did both.)

---

And that was September. How was your month?