2025: A Short Fiction Rearview Review

Welp, 2025 is over, and it’s time to tally up my submissions, rejections, and acceptances and see how I did. I set some lofty goals for the year, and though I fell short of more than one of them, it wasn’t a terrible year, and in fact, in at least one way, it was one of my best years. Lets get into it. 

Short Story Submissions

Here are the basic numbers for my short story submissions in 2025.

• Submissions: 122
• Acceptances: 10
• Rejections: 86
• Pending: 20
• No Response/Withdrawn: 6
• Publications: 8

So, 122 submissions is my record for a single year. I’d hoped to get closer to 150, which would have given me 1,000 submissions total since I started tracking them, but that’s gonna have to wait until the end of Q1 this year. Ten acceptances is solid, and once you factor in pending stories, no responses, and withdrawals, I’m sitting at just over a 10% acceptance rate. Not too bad. That number could even go up if some of the pending subs I sent in 2025 come back as acceptances. (Duotrope counts them for the year a sub was sent not when it was accepted.)

The 86 rejections feels a little light for the number of submissions I sent, honestly. The last time I hit 120 subs, I had over 100 rejections (more acceptances, too). I think some of that has to do with the fact that markets are taking longer to respond to submissions, likely due to an increase in the number of submitters, and some of that likely has to do with an increase in the number of AI submissions. 

I also got A LOT of close-but-no-cigar and final-round rejections this year. I haven’t yet confirmed, but it feels like more than any other year. Lots of heartbreakers from pro markets, and it feels like I could have easily had another five or so acceptances if I’d had a little better luck/timing, but, you know, c’est la vie. 

Publications

Despite getting ten acceptances, I only managed eight short fiction publications in 2025, and a few of those were from sales I made in 2024. Some of this has to do with pro markets having a longer lead times for publications. For example, the stories I sold to Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine and Abyss & Apex were sent in 2024, accepted in 2025, and will publish in 2026. 

Anyway, here are some of my 2025 publications that you can read for free online. (The others are behind a paywall.)

1. “Care and Fiending” published by Factor Four Magazine
2. “Coin Flip” published by Flash Point SF
3. “The Other Side of Empty” published by Dream, Theory Media
4. “Thicker Than Water” published by Radon Journal
5. “What Hope’s Worth” published by MetaStellar 

2025 Goals

As I said at the beginning of the post, I set some lofty goals for 2025 for short fiction. I met some of them, and well, others, not so much. I was tracking them in a bingo format (another goals I failed to meet), which I updated for this post. 

Damn! Just missed the O!

As you can see , I did okay with submissions, production, and, of course, rejection goals. I struggled with sales goals. Still, there’s more green than white, so not too terrible. I might do something similar to this for 2026, but I’ll likely tone down the new story and sales goals just a tad. 🙂

And that’s my 2025 short fiction review. How was year in the submission trenches? Tell me about it in the comments.