Ten Years of Rejectomancy: Year Three – Maybe I’m NOT Good at This?

Year three of Rejectomancy was a bit of a wake-up call. After three straight years of increasing submissions and acceptances, I kind of fell off a cliff in 2017. It was one of those years that tests you, makes you ask the question: am I good enough to do this? As usual, the answer is not a simple yes or no, it’s always a frustrating maybe? So, let’s look at year three and see what happened.

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Total stats for 2017. 

I went into 2017 determined to send more submissions than I ever had, and I succeeded. Seventy-five was twenty-one more than I sent in 2016. Of course, I received nine acceptances in 2016, so if my math is right, I should have received twelve or thirteen submissions in 2017. Uh, no. That’s, unfortunately, not how publishing works, and I netted a measly SIX acceptances in 2016. That earned me a miniscule acceptance percentage of 7.4%, nowhere near the rarified 20% I had achieved the year before. I did manage to make a couple of bucks, though, so it wasn’t all bad news.

Okay, let’s look at the acceptances, then we can discuss what the hell happened.

Even though I only sold six stories in 2017, there were some very good sales in here, and three of the six would be considered pro sales. My favorite sales this year are the stories I sold to The Arcanist, a market that would continue to be a safe-haven for my dark and goofy stories for the next five years. The story “Cowtown” was, in fact, the first story The Arcanist ever published, and they would go on to publishing another fifteen of my stories before they sadly went on indefinite hiatus.

So, what happened here? Why did my submission numbers go up, but my acceptance numbers plummet? Looking back on this year through the lens of another eight years of submission experience, it’s pretty easy to see what happened. The simple answer is I started regularly submitting to pro markets, and forty-one of my seventy-five submissions went to top-tier publishers, with Apex, Daily Science Fiction, Flash Fiction Online, Clarkesworld, The Dark, and Pseudopod claiming the lion’s share of those subs. As you may have heard, those markets are kinda hard to crack, and truth be told, I send them some stories that weren’t ready for pro-publishing. So, yeah, it’s not exactly surprising that my acceptance percentage fell off a cliff. It wasn’t all bad news, of course. I did manage a couple of holds and final-round rejections from some of these big markets, and those stories I did go on to sell in the years to come.

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And that’s Rejectomancy Year Three. Although my submission efforts were less successful than I’d hoped, it was a pretty good writing year overall. I wrote and published my second novel, Aftershock, as well as a slew of articles and short fiction pieces, for Privateer Press. I also started writing a novel based on my own IP that I am still shopping to this day. Not sure if that’s a good thing, though. 🙂

Thoughts or opinions about Rejectomancy Year Three? Tell me about it in the comments.