Ten Years of Rejectomancy: Year Ten – A Decade of Denial

Welp, here we are. Ten years of Rejectomancy. It’s been a long and bumpy road, and year ten certainly had its ups and downs, but it feels good to say I’ve been doing this for a decade, and I have no plans to stop. Our final year in this series is 2024, which was a definite improvement over 2023, though still short of satisfactory if I’m being honest. Things are getting tougher our there for a lot of reasons, but you gotta keep going, keep writing, and keep submitting.

Let’s have a look at Rejectomancy Year Ten.

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Total stats for 2024. 

Like I said, an improvement over 2023, but I wasn’t exactly setting the literary world alight with my submission efforts last year. Still, seeing that acceptance percentage crest 10% again certainly makes me feel a bit better. There are no queries in here (I learned my lesson there), and these are all short story subs or direct novel submissions to small publishers, which are close enough to submissions to count in my humble opinion. Sixty-eight subs is decent, though my goal is always to send at least a hundred (I did manage that in 2025, btw). If I’d been a tad more industrious, I might have hit double-digit acceptances, but what are you gonna do. I’d call this a decent enough rebound from a fairly disastrous 2023.

Here are my acceptances for 2024.

Seven acceptances in 2024, and most of them are to markets I’d sold to previously. The new market and one of my biggest short story sales to date is the sale to Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. That’s a big one, and I’m looking forward to it coming out in the 2026 March/April issue of EQMM. Another thing you might notice in my sales here are that four of the seven are either crime fiction or crime/sci-fi. I’ve often thought that I might have better luck selling to straight crime/mystery markets, and I have fairly convincing sample size. I’m not ready to make the switch yet, but it’s something I think about.

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And that’s Rejectomancy Year Ten, which brings us to a close (almost) in this blog series. It’s been fun looking back over the years and digging in to the highs and lows of my story submission career. I do plan on one more blog post to give you all the numbers for the entire ten years–subs, rejections, acceptances, etc.–so look for that in the coming weeks.

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
7. Ten Years of Rejectomancy: Year Six – Best Year EVAR!
8. Ten Years of Rejectomancy: Year Seven – The Whiplash Effect
9. Ten Years of Rejectomancy: Year Eight – Solid and Serviceable
10. Ten Years of Rejectomancy: Year Nine – A Question of Querying

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