Ten Years of Rejectomancy: Year One – To Pro or Not to Pro

I started Rejectomancy in July of 2015, a period of time that coincided with me getting serious about short story submissions. So, in many ways, Rejectomancy is kind of detailed record of my writing journey as I transitioned from game designer/writer to a fiction writer. The first year of Rejectomancy was a pretty eventful one. I sent out more submissions than I ever had, and I started getting some good acceptances, too. The real theme of this year was trying to figure out where my work belonged. Was I good enough for the pro markets? Or should I spend more time sharpening my game with token and semi-pro publishers. Let’s take a look. 

Here are my total stats (pulled from Duotrope) for the year of our lord 2015. 

I sent forty-six submissions in 2015 and seven of them were accepted. That gave me a respectable acceptance percentage of just over 11%. Not bad. In addition, I scored my first and second pro sale. Below, are the details of all seven of my acceptances for the year. I also pulled in the princely sum of 185 bucks, which I’m pretty sure when directly to Door-Dashed burritos.

Just one bit of clarification on the acceptances. Duotrope counts an acceptance for the year the submission was sent not the year it was actually accepted, which is how I tend to calculate things. Since I’m pulling screen shots from Duotrope directly, we’ll go with their method for consistency.

Anyway, my first pro sale was to the now-defunct DarkFuse Magazine, a zombie-apocalypse story told from the perspective of a seven-year-old boy called “Where they Belong.” My second pro sale was to Pseudpod, and it was actually a reprint. I’d sold “Night Games” first to Devilfish Review in 2014. The rest of my acceptances were semi-pro or token, but it should be noted that the second story I sold to Devilfish Review, “Scare Tactics”, I went on to sell twice more as a reprint, and to pro markets. Obvs, this year I began to submit a lot of stories to The Molotov Cocktail, a practice that would continue for the next decade.

In all, a pretty good year, especially since I was really just getting warmed up. Looking back, I wish I’d had the confidence to send my work to pro markets right away. The fact of the matter is I didn’t think I was good enough yet, but two sales to two pro markets would seem to indicate otherwise. This is not to say that the markets I did sell to weren’t quality or that I’m not grateful, more that I wish I’d been able to see the quality of my own work and realize that I could sell it anywhere. Oh well, live, learn, and resubmit. 🙂

So that’s Rejectomancy Year One. In addition to ramping up my submission efforts, I also left my job at Privateer Press in June of that year with an agent and a book deal. To say I was optimistic about my literary future would be an understatement. Of course, things have a tendency to change in unexpected ways, but all you can do is keep writing and keep going.

Thoughts or opinions about my first year as a baby blogger? Tell me about it in the comments.