There’s a phenomena in baseball and other professional sports where a player, usually a rookie, has a fantastic inaugural season, goes into the next season with massive expectations, and then, well, puts up mediocre numbers to huge surprise and disappointment. This is often called a sophomore slump, but I’ve always thought of it as the whiplash effect. It’s so hard to be at the top of your game on a consistent basis, largely because there’s a fair amount of luck involved in that kind of success, so regression is almost inevitable. When it happens, it can shake you up, make you doubt yourself, and wonder if your success was just a fluke. That’s what 2021 and year seven of necromancy was for me. Not a terrible year, but compared to the lofty heights of 2020, certainly a disappointment.

So, let’s have a look at Rejectomancy Year Seven.

Total stats for 2021. 

I was definitely productive in 2021, and it was the third time in my career that I exceeded 100 submissions in a year. The other results, however, were not so great. I managed a fairly meager sub 10% acceptance rate, less than half what I achieved the year before. I did make a fair number of sales, and even a few pro sales, but I struggled to sell anything longer than flash, which I’ll detail a bit more below. I wouldn’t call 2021 a bad year, but it was certainly a disappointing year.

Here are all my acceptances for 2021.

I landed 12 total acceptances in 2021, and if you look, you’ll see a lot of my usual suspects. Three stories to The Arcanist, two to Flash Point SF, and a smattering to other markets I’d sold to before and continue to sell to today. The new kids on the block were Wyldblood and Shotgun Honey, and 2021 marked my first acceptances with these markets. So, not a bad a year in terms of sales, but it was a struggle year, and let me see if I can explain why.

Twelve sales out of 102 submissions isn’t awful, but I can definitely remember struggling in 2021. As I look back at my submission record, it’s easy to see why. A lot of close-but-no-cigar submissions, and often for the same story. For example, “The Downer”, which I eventually sold to On Spec, received 16 rejections before that sale, many of them in 2021. Another story, “When Gods Walk” racked up 13 rejections before I sold it to Radon Journal in 2023. It, too, received many of these rejections in 2021. The list goes on, and it seemed to be a year of getting close, but not close enough. Timing is a big deal in this business, and selling a story is all about right time, right publisher, right editor. I just couldn’t line all those tumblers up in 2021.

And that’s Rejectomancy Year Seven. Quite the let down from year six, but overall not a bad year, and a far cry from my worst. THAT year is looming on the horizon, and we’ll get to it soon. 🙂

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!

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

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.

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.

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.

I set a lot of personal submission records in 2018 (year four), and though year five wasn’t nearly as good, I maintained both a solid number of submissions and a respectable number of acceptances. In other words, I was consistent, and that’s not a bad way to be in the grueling and often cruel world of publishing. This is not to say there wasn’t some regression, but it’s the kind I can live with. Anyway, let’s take a look at Rejectomancy year five.

Total stats for 2019. 

After the banner year of 2018, I was expecting more of the same in 2019. Unfortunately, it was not to be. This is not to say that 2019 was an awful year–far from it–but it was definitely a step back in terms of number of submissions and the number of pro sales. The number of submissions I made was solid, and I did manage an acceptance percentage of a tad over 14%, which is respectable. So, in all, a decent but not exemplarily year of submissions.

Let’s take a look at the acceptances for 2019 and see what they tell us.

I managed 13 acceptances in 2019, and while that’s not too bad, there’s only two pro sales in the bunch. The rest are semi-pro and even token/non-paying. Looking at my overall submissions for the year, the thing that jumps out at me is that, well, I was submitting a number of stories that I’ve since retired because they weren’t good enough. In addition, two of the acceptances, “The Back-Off” and “Paint-Eater” took me a LONG time to sell, despite them both being pretty good stories. Each racked up over 15 rejections. Of course, there are some bright spots here. I sold my first story to On Spec, which is a fantastic semi-pro Canadian market. I’d go on to sell them another of my hard-to-place stories a few years later.

You may notice once anomaly in my acceptance list, and that’s the sale to The Bronzeville Bee, a market that’s marked REMOVED and closed down shorty after I received an acceptance from them. I left it as an acceptance (because it was), though I maybe should change it to lost/returned now. I’d go on to sell that story for reals to MetaStellar, a much better market that actually still exists. 🙂

And that’s Rejectomancy Year Five. Not bad, but definitely a step back when compared to the prior year. I did write two novels in 2019, so I was pretty productive, and as it turned out, 2019 was simply the lull before the storm. The following year I would have my best submissions year EVER. Stay tuned for that. 🙂

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

After what seemed an unmitigated submission disaster in 2017, I really turned a corner in 2018 and had one of my best years to date. In fact, 2018 was so good, I’ve yet to equal it in either number of submissions or number of acceptances. That’s quite a rebound, and 2018 gave me a lot of confidence to up my game in terms of where I was sending my work in years to come. Anyway, let’s dive into Rejectomancy year four and see what we can see.

Total stats for 2018. 

When 2018 started, I thought it was gonna be just like 2017, maybe worse, but then the acceptances started trickling in starting in February and then hit a fever pitch that summer, where I netted eight total yeses in June, July, and August. The fall and winter were almost as good, and I closed out the year with a shipping 18 acceptances. Which is still my current record. I also set a record for total number of submissions, and 120 remains far and away my best effort to date. My acceptance percentage is the only part of 2018 that wasn’t record-setting (that would come in 2020), but hey, 15.4% is still pretty damn good.

Let’s look at the acceptances for 2018, and see if we can figure out why it was such an improvement over 2017.

So the story of my success here should be fairly obvious. Find a market that likes your work and keep sending them stories. I have multiple acceptances from The Arcanist, The Molotov Cocktail, and Ellipsis Zine. I went on to publish double digit stories with those first two, and a good half a dozen with the last one. In addition, there are some first publication with markets that I would go on to have repeated success with, like Factor Four Magazine and Flame Tree. In all, there’s a nice mix of pro, semi-pro, and even token acceptances here, and I have no doubt that sending well over a hundred submissions to a wide variety of markets contributed to my success.

Of course, sadly, a number of these markets, including my beloved Arcanist, have since closed or gone on indefinite hiatus. That’s definitely a reoccurring theme and one we’ll continue to see in the years to come. It’s a tough old market out there, folks.

That’s Rejectomancy Year Four in the books. This is definitely one of the years I look back on fondly, as it was definitely a year full of validation, not just in terms of short story sales, but also in other freelance writing, primarily media tie-in. In all, 2018 was just a damn good year. Five out of five stars. No notes. 🙂

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

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.

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.

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.