Submission Statement: July 2025

I’ve missed the last few submissions statements, but I’m back on the beam for July, and ready to share all the glory and pain of the last few months. This’ll be a three-fer, and I’ll give you stats for May, June, and July. So let’s jump in.

May – July 2025 Short Story Stats

• Submissions Sent: 20
• Rejections: 21
• No Response: 2
• Acceptances: 4
• Further Consideration/Shortlist: 5
• Withdrawals: 2
• Pending: 11
• New Stories: 6

The number of submissions I sent over the last three months fell off considerably compare to the prior months, though I still sent a fair amount. Twenty subs averages out to about seven per month, which isn’t too bad. It also gives me a total of 72 for the year, which is just over ten per month. I should still easily hit 100 submissions, but my initial goal of 150 might be difficult.

The 21 rejections I received over the last three months are a real mixed bag. There are plenty of garden variety form letters, but there’s also more than the usual final-round heartbreakers in there, a few of which came after nearly six months of waiting. More about those in the rejections section of this post.

The good news is that I sold four stories in the last three months, three semi-pro and one pro sale. The pro sale was especially sweet because it came after six months of waiting, and those have NOT been going my way of late. This brings me up to seven acceptances for the year. Not too bad.

As I said in my last update, that one-story-a-week goal was getting tough to maintain. This proved very true, and I only managed six new stories over the last three months. That gives me a total of 20 for the year, which still ain’t bad, and I think I still have a good shot at 40 new pieces by the end of 2025.

Rejections

Twenty-one rejections between May and July.

• Form Rejections: 16
• Personal Rejections: 4
• Close-But-No-Cigar Rejections: 5

Although most of the rejections I received over the last three months were form rejections, there were some real heartbreaker close-but-no-cigars in the mix, three of which came from pro markets. That’s just how it goes sometimes, and though it can be encouraging to make it to the final round of consideration with some of these prestigious markets, there’s no denying how disappointing it can be as well, especially when the story in question has been final-rounded so many times before.

I’ll share the toughest of the heartbreaker rejections below.

Heartbreaker Rejection

Thank you for sending in your work. Unfortunately, we’re going to pass on “Trapping Disaster.”

There were many things about this story that stood out for us, especially the protagonist’s relationship to loss, grief, survivor’s guilt, and their own mental health. The pacing was brilliant and it had us on the edge of our seats. At this stage of decision making, we want you to know that a rejection does not speak to the quality of your work, and more to our inability to fund all the stories we are in love with.

We hope you find a great home for this story soon. We appreciate having the chance to read it, and we are grateful for the gift of your imagination and world weaving.

There’s a number of factors that made this rejection particularly tough. First, this story, “Trapping Disaster”, has been subbed twenty times and reached the final round of consideration with a pro market four times. Second, this is one of my bucket-list markets, one of those publishers I’ve wanted to place a story with since I started subbing seriously over a decade ago. Finally, as the rejection says, it’s not about the quality of the piece, and more about just not having the resources to publish everything they want to publish. I appreciate the honesty–I really do–but there’s something even more disappointing about knowing there wasn’t anything wrong with the story. Still, this is just the way subbing goes sometimes, and the only thing you can do is focus on the positives (and there are positives) and send that story out again, which is exactly what I did. 🙂

2025 Writing Goals Bingo

And, finally, here’s my updated 2025 Writing Goals Bingo card. Nice to see a bit more green on it now.

I’m finally starting to fill in some of the acceptance goals, which makes filling in the rejection goals a little less painful. At this point, I’m going to try and hit as many goals as I can, but even if I only get halfway with the acceptance and writing goals, it will have been a very good year.

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And that was May, June, and July. My goals in August are to send more submissions and write more short stories. Some of that will be tempered by the fact that I’m querying a new novel, but I should be able to improve on my numbers from the last three months.

That was my, uh, quarter, I guess. How was yours?