Swings & Misses V: The Rejection Streak Returns

Anecdotally, a good acceptance rate for short fiction tends to be around ten percent. With regards to rejections, that percentage generally works out to a statistically consistent ten to fifteen noes in a row . . . except when it doesn’t, and you go on a rejection heater like the one I just ended. To whit, my last acceptance ended the longest rejection streak of my career, a staggering FORTY consecutive rejections before Incensepunk Magazine (bless them) put me out of my misery with yesterday’s yes.

So what the hell happened? We’ll discuss, but first some stats.

• Duration: 1/18/26 to 5/2/26 (105 days)
• Rejections: 40
• Stories: 22
• Markets: 32

Those 40 noes in a row eclipses my second longest streak, way back in 2018, by 13 rejections. Oof and also yikes. The only thing you can do when you hit a rough spot like this is to keep writing and submitting, but it’s hard not to start questioning your talent, your skill, and your sanity after about thirty not for us’s. Of course, me being me, I want to know WHY. There are no concrete answers, unfortunately, but I can put on my rejectomancer hat and make some educated guesses, and maybe we can learn something from them.

1. Luck. As I’ve said many, many, many times, getting an acceptance is about putting the right story in front of the right editor at the right time. Get any one of those wrong, and you get a rejection. Obviously, it’s possible to get that wrong A LOT, and when that happens, the noes pile up in your inbox and you eventually post about it on your blog. Seriously, though, luck does play a part in getting published, and here’s some fairly compelling evidence for that. The story that broke the streak was also rejected three times during the streak. So, if I’d sent that story to Incensepunk first, well, I wouldn’t be making this post. 🙂
2. Market Changes. When you’ve been submitting fiction as long as I have, you see publishers come and go pretty frequently. Usually, this is no big deal, but recently, a couple of markets that I could generally rely on to publish my work have either gone on hiatus or changed their guidelines with regards to how often they publish individual authors. This is not to say that I was in any way guaranteed an acceptance from these markets, but I generally like my chances, and they’ve broken up rejections streaks before.
3. Trends. We’re getting further into what I’d call pure speculation at this point, but I have noticed a change in market and editorial preferences of late that might have contributed to this latest streak. Essentially, what I’ve seen, especially with newer markets, is a move away from darker more downbeat stories to those that are more hopeful and uplifting (I can’t possibly imagine why). This speculation is backed up somewhat by a few of the personal rejections I received in this latest string of noes where the editor flat out said they’re looking for stories with a more positive vibe. My work does tend to be pretty dark, and though I don’t want to make any wholesale changes to my style, it might not hurt to write a few stories that aren’t so relentlessly grim.
4. It’s not them; it’s me.  When you go on a long rejections streak like this, you should absolutely take a good, long look at your work and see if it’s lacking in any way. This ties into point three somewhat, but during prior streaks I noticed that my work had gotten a little stale. I wasn’t taking chances, and I was defaulting to concepts and narratives that were comfortable rather than challenging. I’d say that definitely happened here, too, so it’s time to stretch a little, challenge myself, and write outside my comfort zone. When I’ve done that in the past, the acceptances came more frequently.

It’d been a while since my last one back in 2022, so I was overdue, and boy, did the streak come back with a vengeance. Still, surviving these little (or not so little) statistical blips is just part of sending out a lot of submissions, though, as I listed in point four above, it can often be an indicator that’s it time to make some changes, too. So, don’t let a long rejection streak get you down too much, and maybe even take it as an opportunity to fine tune your work and your submission targeting.

Thoughts on my record-setting rejection streak? Care to share one of your own? Tell me about in the comments.