Hello again,
We are halfway through the year (yikes) so I thought it might be good to share with you a little update on how my own submissions are doing.
For those who weren’t around for my annual review of submissions which I sent out in January, the idea is that I look back on successes and failures, and go through any lessons I’ve learned as a result.
I like doing this firstly because it helps me think through how things have been going, and take more of an overview of the metrics - how many acceptances have I had? which stories have been rejected the most? How much money have I spent or made?
The other reason is that I think it’s important to be honest about how many failed attempts there are behind those shiny acceptances, when it’s usually only the latter than we talk about on social media.
The numbers
First off, a note on dates.
While I may be sending this in June, this post is not about the first six months of 2022. That’s because most places take months to respond, if they do at all. Therefore we have to have a bit of breathing room to get a more accurate picture.
Because of when I started seriously submitting, the arbitrary date that marks the start of my ‘writing year’ is 15 May. The period I will talk about today therefore spans from 15 May 2021 to 15 November 2021.
In that time, I sent 23 submissions.
Of those, three were accepted. That gives me an acceptance rate of 13%.
That is higher than my hit rate of 8.77% for the year before. However, there is every possibility that the second half of the year will drag this down with fewer acceptances.
As ever, we can only learn so much from the overall acceptance rate, so we have to look at other things.
For example, from the 20 that were rejected, most were standard rejections but one came back with an encouraging note. Whenever this happens, I highlight the submission as orange, rather than red, in my spreadsheet. It’s a reminder both to keep sending that particular story out elsewhere, and to submit again to the same journal.
There is no standout ‘most-rejected’ piece from this period, with a handful of stories each holding three or four refusals apiece. I think this reflects an effort on my part to vary what I’m sending out, but I do wonder if I should be working my submissions a bit harder.
The good news is that my most-rejected piece of last year, ‘The Quiet Dead’, finally found a home with LampLight Magazine. This was after I had sent it out to a total of 13 places in the course of about a year and a half.
Money matters
In these six months, I spent just under £46 on submission fees and competition entries. I also made my first professional sale (to LampLight), earning the equivalent of £97.43. This means, for the first half of the year, I’m operating at a profit! Yay!
I have certainly tried to be more discerning with how I spend my money on competition entries and reading fees, and just having a cursory look at my spreadsheet for the full year, I think it’s likely I will manage to (just about) stay in the black for this year thanks to both that attitude and that sale.
This more scrupulous approach felt like the right way to protect myself from feeling too hard-done-by.
As I wrote last month, the whole economy of literary submissions relies on a certain amount of hope, and if you aren’t getting anywhere then its’s easy to start feeling like nobody values anything about your work beyond the £10 you’ve paid to enter it into a competition.
However, these numbers do give me something else to think about, which is whether holding on to money is holding me back from pursuing enough opportunities.
It’s a hard fact that very few major competitions are free. This month, Costa announced that it was shutting down its book awards after 50 years. Though they didn’t even bother to mention their Short Story Award in the update, I’ve got to assume that it, too, is ending.
That’s one less big, fee-free opportunity for emerging writers. It leaves only a handful such as the Alpine Fellowship Prize, the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, and the annual Writers & Artist’s Contest.
I am still figuring out how much I want to pursue competitions in my submissions strategy. I think there is a problem with hyperfocusing on them, especially to the exclusion of the potential opportunities and community that come with being published in literary magazines.
But competition wins do just earn you a certain amount of kudos and attention, not to mention that many of them have really good prizes these days. I would love to hear from you about what you think is a reasonable number of contests to enter each year.
What to do with the near-misses?
In my annual submissions review, I broke down my thoughts on what made for a successful submission. I won’t do that today because I think I need a bigger sample size to come away with anything interesting.
What I will talk about though is those submissions that are nearly successful.
As I mentioned above, I highlight in orange those submissions that get an encouraging note from the editor even as they’re being rejected. While I only got one of these during the period I’m talking about, I have four stories which have had some kind of encouraging feedback. Now, I’m wondering what to do with them.
One story in particular has had this more than once. It’s a sort of dystopian story set in an abandoned London Underground, loosely inspired by The Tempest. So my mission for the next few months is to try and figure out what it is I need to do to get it over the line.
The thing is, because so few places offer detailed feedback on submissions, I don’t know exactly what I need to do. It could be that the story is fine and just needs to be sent to a few more places, or there could be a big issue with it that needs fixing.
Because I don’t know, I’m reluctant to edit this story too heavily. What if I take out the thing that worked well for the people who liked it? What if that was something different for each person?
So I’ve come up with a plan of action, both for this story and my other near-misses.
Send it out more: It’s not like I’m going to blast this piece anywhere and everywhere. But I am going to make more effort to find opportunities it would work for (if anyone knows of any dystopian Shakespeare reinterpretations contests… send them my way).
Get some feedback: I generally do this anyway, but at this point I’ve definitely been looking at the story too long and need to get some fresh eyes of trusted readers on it.
Write something else: Ultimately I don’t want to get too hung up on this one particular piece, when I have a list of publications that said it wasn’t right for them at that moment but they liked my writing. It would be foolish not to take them up on the encouragement to submit again.
I will report back with another post in a few months, and let you know how it’s going.
Final words
Looking back on this period, I am hit with two conflicting responses.
One is I feel I should be submitting more. Just 23 in six months doesn’t really feel like enough, especially when I look at how many different works this included: 10 individual stories, plus one compilation of my stories as a short story collection manuscript. Sending things to one place every three months on average isn’t where I want to be at!
On the other hand, I have written about how I’m being a bit more discerning with submissions. That, combined with anxieties around budget, means I do think long and hard about whether to submit something. I don’t necessarily want to change that, but I do want to make sure I’m not holding myself back by overthinking - or somethings just thinking for too long and missing the window.
Let me know in the comments or by replying to this email how your submissions year is going, and if there’s anything you want to change up about the way you’re approaching things.
And finally, here are a couple of links to my work, should you fancy reading any.
‘The Spitalfields Book Club’ on Litro Online (free to read)
‘The Quiet Dead’ in LampLight volume 10 issue 3
‘Desk Flowers’ in Popshot Quarterly issue 32
‘Scratching’ in Weird Horror issue 2
‘A Pain In The Head’ on Dear Damsels (free to read)
‘The Birdmen’ in Spellbinder issue 4
For your Shakespeare themed: https://monstrousbooks.com/submissions