Ten Years of Rejectomancy: Year Six – Best Year EVAR!

When I set out to write this series, I knew I’d be writing openly and honestly about the ups and downs of the publishing business as well as the grueling grind of submitting short stories. As such, I’ve detailed decent years, disappointing years, and, yeah, even a bona fide good years. Today, I get to write about something even better, a stellar year, my best submissions year ever in the decade and change I’ve been doing this.

So, let’s jump into Rejectomancy Year Six.

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Total stats for 2020. 

So, as you can see, 2020 was a all kinds of good. I sent a solid number of submissions, and I managed an acceptance percentage over 21%. That’s pretty hard to do, and I was and am damn proud of my hit rate in that year. I also made a decent amount of money on short story sales, and while it’s not the kind of cash that you can make a living on, it ain’t bad for publishing flash and shorts in the SFFH market. If I hadn’t already been an SFWA member, I would have qualified for a full membership off this year alone. So, you know, not too shabby.

And here are all my acceptances for 2020.

I scored 17 acceptances in 2020, one less than than the 18 I scored in 2018, which remains my personal record. That said, the quality of acceptances in 2020 was much better than 2018. Eleven of my seventeen acceptances were to pro-paying markets, and there’s a first place flash contest win in the mix as well that netted me 300 bucks. Not bad.

In addition to the acceptances, I got a lot of close-but-no-cigar rejections from pro markets. It was already a great year, but I can’t help but feel that I was a stone’s-throw away from something truly epic. This is not to say that I look back on 2020 with any kind of regret. If I could put this year on repeat from now until the end of my career, I would absolutely do it.

Again, you’ll notice that many of the markets I sold stories too just five years ago have closed, gone on indefinite hiatus, or, in the case of Dark Matter, stopped publishing a periodical to focus on books and anthologies. This is, unfortunately, just an indicator of how hard it is to publish and sustain a magazine or journal. Something that’s only gotten more difficult in the past few years.

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And that’s Rejectomancy Year Six. We have climbed to the peak of my personal submissions mountain, and though I will have some decent years to come, I haven’t been able to quite reach the heights I attained in 2020. This year, for instance, has been okay, but we’re in no danger of using words like “best” or “greatest” or “stellar.” 🙂

If you’ve missed any of my Ten Years of Rejectomancy posts and want to catch up, here are the links to the others in the series.

1. Ten Years of Rejectomancy: The Pre-Blog Years
2. Ten Years of Rejectomancy: Year One – To Pro or Not to Pro
3. Ten Years of Rejectomancy: Year Two- Maybe I’m Good at This?
4. Ten Years of Rejectomancy: Year Three – Maybe I’m NOT Good at This?
5. Ten Years of Rejectomancy: Year Four – Back On Track!
6. Ten Years of Rejectomancy: Year Five – Consistency is Key

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