I’m going to take a second for a minor brag first, but I promise it’s relevant: I’ve had a pretty solid first half of 2024 when it comes to submissions. So far this year, I’ve gotten 53 responses from publishers: 50 rejections and 3 acceptances, for an acceptance percentage of 5.7%—about a full percent higher than my typical average. Adding in the 4 article pitches I’ve had accepted and the fact that Cryptid Bits came out in February, and I think it’s safe to say 2024 is shaping up to be my best year by far as a writer.

Even aside from the publications, though, one of the main things that has me feeling like I’m building momentum is the fact that 13 of those rejections (roughly a quarter of them) weren’t just the standard form letter. This included a short-list from Andromeda Spaceways, a long-list from The Masters Review, and a personal from Missouri Review, all places it feels good to hear a nice no from.

Being a writer—or at least, being one who actively tries to get work published—means hearing “no” a lot. I’ve been at this for a while and have developed a fairly thick skin, but even so it can be rough sometimes when the rejections stack up. I’ve had spans where I’ve gotten a dozen or more form rejections in a row, sometimes multiple on the same day, and it can be hard to muster the motivation to send work out again when I’m in one of those stretches—the doubt and imposter syndrome start to creep in, and this is when I’m most likely to self-reject myself out of opportunities, or to question why I’m even doing this in the first place.

Which is all to say that, while every writer gets rejections, it’s also fair if you want to get as few as possible—and have at least some good news to cling to mixed in there, too. Since I’m in an upswing, it seemed the right time to pause and reflect, and maybe learn some lessons on how to keep this momentum going.

Why so much good news lately?

That’s the first question I asked myself when I looked back over my numbers from 2024 so far. When I compared them to my records from past years, and thought about how my approach to writing and submitting has evolved over the last decade or so, there were a few trends and patterns that jumped out: 

1. I’ve been sending more submissions.

I went through a pretty serious publication slump a couple of years ago. I didn’t get a single acceptance between September 2019 and November 2022—just over 3 years, the longest span I’ve had without a publication since I started sending work out in 2010.

The main reason for this slump: I wasn’t sending out much work. I had just finished a novel and was querying agents, which meant I hadn’t been writing any new short stories (or editing the ones I already had). In fact, looking at the stats from 2019-2022 tells a pretty clear narrative:

• 2019 – 47 submissions sent: 3 accepted, 1 withdraw, 43 rejections (6.5% acceptance rate)
• 2020 – 10 submissions sent (no acceptances)
• 2021 – 10 submissions sent (no acceptances)
• 2022 – 42 submissions sent: 2 accepted, 2 withdraw, 38 rejections (5% acceptance rate)

…the obvious conclusion here: when I send out submissions regularly, I get more work accepted. That’s something I always knew conceptually but seeing it laid out in measurable statistics really makes it hit home. 

2. I’ve been sending in smaller batches, more frequently.

In the past, when I submitted work, I’d make a day of it. I’d sit down in the morning with my coffee and research some markets that are open, then spend the afternoon sending all of the stories I currently had available to 5-10 places each. Once I was done, I wouldn’t think about submitting again until I’d gotten responses from most of those markets. Looking back through my tracker, this meant I’d go 4-6 months between sending submissions, so I’d only be actively working on submissions 2-3 days a year.

In hindsight, this approach had some disadvantages, namely:

• It encouraged me to take more of the shotgun approach. I’d start out with a few journals in mind, but inevitably when I was sending that many submissions at once, some of them would just be places I saw were open on Duotrope that seemed like maybe an okay place for my work. Often, I didn’t investigate them too deeply or delve into their back issues because I was going for quantity, trying to knock out as many submissions as I could at once.
• I limited myself to journals that happened to be open on those select days. A lot of excellent journals have very limited submission windows, and I would occasionally catch these—but only by accident. Often, I’d end up submitting mostly to places with long submission windows or that were open year-round. And, in a similar vein, I automatically eliminated journals that didn’t accept simultaneous submissions. Granted, that still left me lots of places to submit to, but it meant I was ruling out markets that might have been a great fit for the story.

For the past couple of years, I’ve been aiming to send out work no less often than once a month, trying to keep all of my available stories out for consideration with at least 3 markets at any given time—unless they’re out with a place that doesn’t do sim subs, which I’ve also been making more of a point to work in, especially for speculative submissions. Sometimes I’ll still have one day in a given month that I do the bulk of this work, sending out half a dozen or more submissions in quick succession, but I also keep my eye out for markets on an ongoing basis, and might have days I just send a single story to one or two targeted places that have caught my attention rather than sending out a whole slew. 

This change has happened in tandem with another important shift, namely…

3. I do more research on markets before submitting than I used to.

When I first started submitting, my goal was just to get stories published. Period. I was ecstatic to get any acceptance, and I didn’t think about markets much beyond whether I thought they’d say yes or no to my piece. 

Once I got a few publications to my name, though, I started to refine what I wanted out of a good home for my piece, beyond just that the editors would say yes. For one thing, having a few of those early markets fold made me realize the importance of a publisher with staying power—and one that puts effort into the editing and design process.

Rising standards means doing a bit more research on markets before I submit to them. To be fair, part of this research has come naturally from just being a submitter for more than a decade. There are some journals I’ve now been reading for years, and have a pretty good idea of their aesthetic, so I don’t need to do intensive research into these markets when I submit to them. This frees up more time to dig into the ones I’m less familiar with when I’m sitting down to send out work. 

There’s another benefit to this too, though, because as I’m investigating whether a journal or anthology could be a good home, I’m also learning more about their tastes and preferences. I’ll usually read a few stories from a back issue, check out their recent blog or social media posts, look into their editors and some of the other writers they’ve published—basically, all that stuff that journals tell you to do before submitting to them and, shocker, it does make a difference.

Because I’m being more selective in the markets I send work to, I’ve found the stories I’ve finished recently aren’t racking up as many rejections before getting accepted. I’ve had 6 stories that were rejected 15 or more times before getting accepted. All of those were stories I started submitting before 2015 (though some weren’t accepted until very recently). 

Granted, many of the stories I’ve finished in the last couple of years haven’t been published yet—could be they’ll end up with dozens of rejections by the time everything is said and done. But of the ones that have gotten published:

• 1 was accepted during its first submission round and recorded no rejections
• None accrued more than 10 rejections before being accepted
• 3 were rejected 5 or fewer times before acceptance

I suppose there could be other factors at play here. I do think I’ve also developed a better sense of when a story is actually ready to send out, and am arguably a better writer overall than I was 10 years ago (or, at least, that’s the hope). But I don’t think it’s coincidence that I’m getting more pieces accepted from markets I’ve actually taken the time to investigate than ones I sent to on a whim.

How I cope with rejections

I started off this post saying it feels like my best year as a writer so far—and, at the same time, I’ve already gotten 50 rejections, roughly halfway through it. I’ve never gotten more than 100 rejections in a year before but, if I keep this pace up, I just might before 2024 is over. In fact, I’m thinking about making it a goal—which is the first way I’ve found to make rejections hurt less. 

I’ve tried this approach in the past. In fact, for a few years running it would be part of my New Year’s Resolutions. I even had a whiteboard where I’d keep track of all of my rejections (and acceptances, natch) for the year. Setting a rejection goal helps those “no”s to feel like they’re still making productive steps forward. That’s what I’ve found is the best way for me to move on from rejections, and to prevent them from stealing my motivation.

Another way to make rejections productive is to try and learn something from them. When I go to Duotrope to record a rejection, I’ll take a second to compare my response time to the average for the market. If it’s not immediately obvious whether it’s a form rejection, I’ll look it up on the Rejection Wiki. When I’ve confirmed a higher-tier or personalized rejection, I’ll record that info on my spreadsheet, both so I can make a point of submitting to those markets again in the future, and so I can see what kind of stories got the best response from places I’ve submitted to more than once.

This kind of “Rejectomancy” isn’t always going to be productive. I know from being an editor that a long delay in response doesn’t always mean we were really thinking hard about a piece. Sometimes we just get slammed by submissions, and submissions can still get buried even when journals use a submission manager. But you can often gain at least a small insight into how close your story came to a “yes”, and that can be useful info. When I get a lot of fast rejections, for instance, I know that probably means I need to do another round of edits before I send that story out again. If I get a few personal rejections in a row, that’s a sign the story is strong but just needs to land at the right market—it’s a no that can be energizing, telling you that you’re on the right track.

Why you shouldn’t give up: A case study

To wrap up the article, I wanted to circle back to one of those stories I mentioned that got a whole lot of rejections before getting accepted. One of my acceptances this year was for a story called “Kismet”—a story I originally wrote and started submitting in 2011. 

Now, I didn’t have it out for consideration that entire 13 years between when I started and when it was accepted. I graphed out my submissions of “Kismet” and, as you can see, there were quite a few gaps in there:

 

…the reason I kept taking those breaks, especially toward the end, was that the story racked up 50 rejections over the course of those 13 years. It also went through a number of revisions, some fairly major. Characters were added and removed, storylines altered, themes woven in—the version that’s about to be published isn’t completely unrecognizable from the original draft, but it’s a much improved version of it. By the time it reached this final form, I was confident it was a strong story, or at least the strongest version of it I was capable of writing—but I was also starting to lose faith in its ability to ever be published.

I put “Kismet” on the shelf temporarily multiple times because I’d lost faith, not necessarily in the story, but in my ability to find a good home for it. Just before I sent it out the last time, when it reached that milestone of 50 rejections, I was ready to put it on the shelf for good. But, as often happens, I saw one more call that seemed like a good fit, and none of the other stories I had finished felt like they were right for the market, and so I sent it out—one last time. 

And that one was the time it got accepted. Which, in a sense, is one of those obvious things like “It’s always the last place you look” because of course it is—you wouldn’t keep looking after you find something, any more than you keep submitting a story that’s been accepted.

But the big takeaway I want to give here is: the rejections almost made me give up, and if I had the story never would have found a home. If you need to step back and pause submissions while you revise the story or rethink your approach, that’s one thing, but don’t let rejections demoralize you into giving up on the story entirely.

 

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