Although 2021 wasn’t a terrible year for submissions, I definitely went into 2022 hoping to improve, and in some ways I did. Mostly, though, I kind of held course with a solid but not exceptional year. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it was definitely one of those years where I felt like I was just treading water in a lot of ways. (Spoiler alert: 2023 will show me the error of this thinking.)

Okay, let’s have a look at Rejectomancy Year Eight.

Total stats for 2022. 

Although I didn’t hit the vaunted 100 submissions mark in 2022, I still sent out a respectable number of stories. Also, my acceptance percentage improved quite a bit over the year before, jumping from 9.6 to 15.2. That ain’t bad. I was also paid more than double for the stories I sold in 2022 over those I sold in 2021. The money I make from shorts is not anything I rely on, but it’s always good to get paid. Looking at it now, three years later, I likely misjudged this year. It’s better than I gave it credit for.

Here are my acceptances for 2022.

I sold 11 stories in 2022, though one of the stories was actually a novella, Effectively Wild, that I sold to Grinning Skull Press. Most of my other sales were to pro or semi-pro-paying markets, though there’s a bittersweet sale in here. The story “Where the Bodies are Buried” is the last story The Arcanist published before going on indefinite hiatus. Fun fact, my story “Cowtown” was the first story they published back in 2017, so I bookended the publishing run of that market. God, I miss those folks.

The other positive here is that four of the stories I sold where new-to-me markets, which is always great, and one of them, Radon Journal, has become one of my absolute favorite publishers on the planet. I’ve since sold them three more stories, and I’m quite active on the Discord server. I also managed two sales to Factor Four Magazine, another market that has become one of my go-to’s for flash fiction.

And that’s Rejectomancy Year Eight. Not bad, not great, but serviceable. Again, spoiler alert, in 2023, I will definitely look back on this “mediocre” year and realize how good I actually had it. 🙂

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

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

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.