If I had a nickel for every rejection I’ve gotten, I’d have…$50 (and fifteen cents)

Well, it finally happened. I got my one thousandth rejection! And then I got three more. And now I have 1,003. And I’m too lazy to temporarily delete the last three, so all of the below will be the numbers for 1,003 rejections.

I started submitting on Dec. 20th, 2003 (meaning I’ve gotten approximately 2 rejections a week for nine years). These rejections arise from submitting 142 stories to 255 publications (and contests).  However, the vast majority of those publications only saw 1-4 submissions from me. Actually, over half my rejections are accounted for by just 20 publications (as shown by the table below).

As you can see, just four publications have given me a fifth of my total rejections. Eleven publications are responsible for 40% of my rejections.  Out of these top twenty publications, I’ve only sold stories to five of them. For many of these publications, I’m probably amongst their top 20 or 30 most prolific submitters.

Although I submit to both literary and SF publications, only 87 of these rejections are from literary journals. The rest are all from SF magazines.

My pace of submission has increased significantly over time. My first 500 rejections took me 6.5 years to accumulate. Receiving the last 500 took only 3 years. And that’s not even counting rejections from novel agents, publishers, and nonfiction publications (all of which are types of submissions that I only began sending out in the last two years). And, as you can see, my pace of rejection is still only increasing (I attribute this to my increasing numbers of submissions to lit-mags, which allows me to have an extra 20-30 submissions out at a time).

• 300 – August 8, 2008 (401 days to next milestone)
• 400 – September 13, 2009 (282 days to next milestone)
• 500 – June 22, 2010 (268 days to next milestone)
• 600 – March 17, 2011 (208 days to next milestone)
• 700 – October 11, 2011 (185 days to next milestone)
• 800 – April 17, 2012 (197 days to next milestone)
• 900 – October 31, 2012 (173 days to current milestone)

I have to say, I am proud of the record of determination and tenacity that this represents. But…I have to say, I once polled authors on how many rejections they’d gotten in their lives and I learned that it doesn’t usually take 1,003 rejections to get to where I am today. I’m not quite sure why it’s taken me so many more stories and so many more submissions to get my double-handful of publications. Furthermore, it’s not like it’s smooth sailing for me. I don’t see any slowdown in the pace of rejection. In 5-6 months, I fully expect to be posting about my 1,100th rejection. And I’m not sure how happy I am about that. I kind of feel like, at this point in my writing life, I should be past getting 25 rejections for every acceptance, but that’s where I’ve been for roughly the last 2.5 years.

The obvious answer is that I should be writing less and putting more time and care into my work. But I’m honestly not really sure whether I do put less time into each story than other writers. Earlier in my career, I didn’t do much revising, but nowadays I spend quite a lot of time on my stories. My short stories are usually the result of 12-25 hours of labor and a number of redrafts. I’m not sure how much harder I could be working on them. I think that my increased prolificity is just because I work longer hours than most writers. For instance, many writers say that they work two hours a day, but I know that their estimates are soft. They’re not counting the days when they did nothing. Or the days when they intended to work two hours but only worked an hour. They’re not counting the month of vacation they took. I count all those things. Even inclusive of everything, I work about 100 minutes a day. Which is not where I want to be, but it’s pretty good.

But, at the same time, I feel like I’m not getting quite the results that I want. I don’t know. In everything, there’s always a tension between refining your method and trying something new. And right now, I really don’t see any obvious improvements to make in my method other than engaging in more and more redrafts. I really think at this point, the answer is to just keep writing stories. I am still learning things, and I do think that the stories I’m writing nowadays are better than the ones I wrote at this time last year. Oh well, we’ll see.

I’ve stopped expecting to be that person who gets suddenly discovered and has this meteoric rise. Maybe I didn’t work my cards right for that. Maybe if I’d held off on submitting for ten years…maybe if I’d relentlessly honed one story until it was perfect…maybe if I’d gone about things a bit differently…I don’t know.

I all the time hear people say that they’re not willing to do something because it somehow doesn’t fit into their psychology. For instance, people say they’re not willing to network or to use social media because they’re too shy / anxious / awkward / introverted. And, I always think, “Well, yeah, that’s definitely a choice that you can make…but it’s going to hurt you. It’d be way better to just gather your courage and do what you know you have to do.”

So I am suspicious of myself when I say that I don’t feel psychologically equipped to take that laid-back, aristocratic way of doing things–submitting only one story every three months and trusting that it’ll get picked up, because people won’t have acclimatized themselves to the essence of you-ness. But that’s just not what comes naturally to me. I think it’s hard to find a method that allows you to produce work that you’re happy with. And mine has brought me a lot of success and has allowed me to springboard past a lot of rough patches that would’ve brought down other people.

The main argument against my method is that it seems to involve a lot more work per unit of success than many other methods do. But if that’s how it is, then that’s how it is.

Yep, just got it half an hour ago, from West Branch (it looks like at least a few literary magazines will reject you in less than a month). Not sure if I have too much commentary on this one. I actually got three rejections today*, so that makes 901 rejections from 190 markets on 136 stories. Since getting my eight hundredth rejection, I’ve sold four stories, so that’s not bad. As you can see from looking at the dates of my previous milestones, I’ve finally reached an inflection point in terms of rejection milestones.

• 300 – August 8, 2008 (401 days to next milestone)
• 400 – September 13, 2009 (282 days to next milestone)
• 500 – June 22, 2010 (268 days to next milestone)
• 600 – March 17, 2011 (208 days to next milestone)
• 700 – October 11, 2011 (185 days to next milestone)
• 800 – April 17, 2012 (197 days to current milestone)

For the first time in my submissions career, it’s taken longer to get to the current hundred than it took me to get the previous hundred. My submissions volume has remained fairly constant over this time (if anything, it’s increased), but my stories do seem to be getting held longer for consideration nowadays. But, in any case, it still amounted to one short story rejection every two days.

I think it’s no secret that I’m proud of these numbers. There’s no way to control whether stuff gets accepted or not, but these numbers tell me that I’m still upholding my part of the bargain. After almost nine years (I sent out my first submission on or around December 20th, 2003), I’m still assiduous in my submissions: I still revise stories and send them out; I still keep submitting them even after they get rejected; and I still don’t let rejection bother me too much.

However, I will say, to all the aspiring writers out there, that my rejection count is alot higher than most peoples’. I think this is because I submitted the first story I ever wrote and I’ve rarely written a story that I did not submit. Basically, over the years I’ve been the source of a substantial amount of the really bad stuff in the slush. If you’ve already been writing seriously for a few years, then it’s likely that you’ll start above that. It seems to me like it’s more typical for writers who’ve reached my career-stage to have something more like 100-300 total rejections.

*Actually, it was two rejections and one story that I’ve been meaning to write off as a non-response, since it’s been well over a year since I sent it out.

• 300 – August 8, 2008 (401 days to next milestone)
• 400 – September 13, 2009 (282 days to next milestone)
• 500 – June 22, 2010 (268 days to next milestone)
• 600 – March 17, 2011 (208 days to next milestone)
• 700 – October 11, 2011 (185 days to current milestone)

In the comments to one of these posts, someone wrote in praise of my tenacity, and I wrote back saying that tenacity was all well and good, but sooner or later one has to take the hint. I wrote that if I wasn’t seeing much success by the time of my eight hundredth rejection, I might consider quitting. Luckily, my success has come fast enough (for now), to forestall weariness. In terms of sales, this last century has been the best one yet. I’ve sold  six stories, all at pro rates, to Daily SF, Clarkesworld, Apex, IGMS, Redstone, and a theme anthology whose editor will hopefully get back to me soon on whether it’s okay to announce the sale to y’all. That is some pretty good selling right there, and it includes two markets–Apex and IGMS–which had rejected me 21 and 22 times (respectively) before finally accepting something of mine.

I’ve just hit 500 rejections. I see that I hit 400 on September 13, 2009, which was…like 9 months ago? Making this maybe a rejection every other day since then…

At least this century, unlike the last one, included a sale or two.

In other news, I am in Berlin. It is great. Now I know what it would have been like to study abroad.

And I currently stand at 305, which is not too bad for 5 years of submissions (though I could have done better probably). But now I have to spend a few hours shoveling more submissions out the door. Submitting work is a huge pain. Sometimes I am tempted to submit to places where I know the response times are long, just so I won’t have to think about the story for a few months.