I’m still getting rejections, hooray!
Rejection is a signal to a creative writer that they have been doing the work to get their words out into the world. Chris Faunce posted an article that showed twelve months of submissions to poetry publications, which prompted this response, an update to what I wrote on the subject before. In this article, the time span I cover matches the first year that writing was my main occupation after I retired last September from my job in tech.
Caveats
Chris and I have a few differences in what we are aiming to do with our writing, however.
- Chris has been targeting more selective literary poetry magazines. I submit maybe a quarter of the time to literary publications, the rest to genre and avant-garde publications and contests.
- His article reports what he accomplished the first full year of concentrating on being published, based on five years or so of his writing. I started writing poems in the mid 1990s, and started submitting to journals consistently starting in 2020, while I was still employed.
- He concentrates on longer poems than many of my pieces. I started with Japanese forms such as haiku, senryu, and renga and still put out a significant number of poems just a few lines long.
- I started shopping around two manuscripts of my poetry, a chapbook and a full-length one. I am not going to include these submissions here because it’s fundamentally a different process than ordinary submission calls, with a much longer lead time.
- Over the last few months I started spending time on some creative prose work in addition to the poetry I am writing. Chris has had a decent number of non-fiction Medium articles for some time now.
The numbers
Still, I think we can learn something looking at a analysis of submissions similar to what he posted. I obtained the submission statistics from Duotrope and can show you a graph like his, along with a few other variations.
The time period is from November 2023 to October 2024. The total number of submissions was about two hundred, to eighty-nine distinct markets. Besides print and online journals there were anthologies and contests included. I am grouping cases where I just didn’t hear back from the editor about my submission long after I could see they should have published accepted work.
In November 2023 I had received just eight rejections, the least in a month, and the greatest number came in August with sixteen. I did receive acceptances every month, often but not always mixed with rejections by the same editor. You can make out a pattern where the number peaked at the beginning of the year and the end of summer. I think the peak in August is mainly because the significant number of submissions the last couple months where the editor hasn’t yet communicated a decision.
I decided to plot the cumulative distributions for rejections and acceptances to give a feel for how things grew over time.
The curves show how it took about nine months to reach a hundred journal rejections on my way to 145, as of the time of writing (November 22, 2024). Overall, over thirty five percent of my submissions have received acceptances, which I’m told is high for the markets I’ve targeted.
Here is a partial list of the journals which have said no to submissions more than once during this time:
1. Five Fleas — 12 rejections
2. Star*Line — 11
3. Dreams and Nightmares — 9
4. Failed Haiku — 5
5. Heliosparrow Poetry Journal — 4
To me there’s no shame involved. The first two on the list did reject part of every submissions I sent them, but also accepted pieces each time, so I feel good about counting them as wins. All the others have given me a decent number of acceptances over the last twelve months as well.
I wanted to see how things looked when I count rejections and acceptances of individual pieces, instead of batched submissions, which is the way I analyzed results in my older article. You can see how this turned out in the next two graphs.
I sent out over nine hundred individual pieces over this time period. In the first graph there is a big rejection spike in April because of a big submission of previously printed micropoems to the editor of this year’s Dwarf Stars Anthology. Out of the 45 I sent in, four were accepted as reprints (but didn’t win any awards). Besides that, you can see that the shape of the rejections mostly follows the earlier graph. You can see that the rejection bars really stick out compared to the acceptances compared to the graph for journal submissions.
My acceptance rate is around one out of every six poems sent out getting picked up by an editor. This rate is not very different from what I reported in my earlier article. The curves showing cumulative acceptances for journal submissions and for poems look to like straight lines, as though the outcome is extremely predictable. Reader, I can tell you that it does not feel this way while it’s happening.
More work to do
In a few months I think the “pending” statuses will have been mostly resolved, giving me a better picture of how 2024 went. In fact, while I was writing this up I received another response from an editor with an acceptance and a rejection. When everything settles down I can make up a fresh set of graphs which I don’t expect will tell a very different story.
Around that time, I would like to dig down into the markets in more detail. There are a few editors I have built a relationship with, who have accepted multiple sets of poems from me, and a lot of others for whom I only have a sketchy idea of what they really want. The more I can learn about how the business works the happier I’ll be.
If you liked this article, please let me know. Do you think I got any of the interpretation wrong? I have a Ko-fi account you can toss a little money my way, with my thanks. I have some ideas about articles describing my idiosyncratic writing workflow which I think might be helpful or interesting to writers in similar situations.