Time from Submission to First Publication Each Year

September is generally the beginning of submission season, given how many journals don't take submissions in the summer. Each year, after a few months of submitting materials to publications, I begin to become anxious. It feels as if I will not get any acceptances this year. I wanted to see how real that observation has been in the past, how long that anxiousness usually stays in place. Below is a chart showing when the first submission (after September 1) was accepted for each year:

The worst I've done since I started submitting in greater amounts, it appears, is December--my first year. Prior to 2008, I submitted only seven things at a time, which meant I usually submitted about twenty times per year (and had no acceptances between 2001 and 2007). In 2008, I increased that number to about forty things out at once, which meant I collected about 140 rejections (and a handful of acceptances) per year. Surprisingly, in that six-year span, acceptances came in September three times.

However, since 2013, publication has been very spotty (some new published works appeared in 2014, but they were accepted quite a bit of time before then; no new work has appeared this year). This is for several reasons. The year 2013-14 was not itself a good year for acceptances--I had an acceptance in November, but the publication went out of business before publishing the work it had accepted, so my first acceptance leading to actual publication after September 2013 wasn't until January of 2014. Further publications through 2013-14 proved slim (just one more acceptance), and publications/acceptances in 2014-15 were nonexistent.

The latter was mostly because I stopped submitting for fifteen months starting in April 2014 (which is usually when my submission period for a given year begins to wind down anyway), after my marriage, deciding to devote a year to just being with my new wife (which is one reason this blog has become irregular and infrequent in its postings). She's gone off to law school now, and I've managed to carve out a tiny bit of time to write and submit again, so I got back to the submission process this September, but with sending out just about twenty things at a time instead of forty to make the workload more manageable. This, however, will probably mean even fewer acceptances.

Alas, what I've written since 2013 has mostly been longer work or kids' stuff, so there aren't a lot of new stories and poems, which have made up the bulk of my acceptances, to share. Plenty of good pieces I've never managed to get published are still going out, at least as I see it, but perhaps there are reasons editors haven't liked these particular works. (Then again, some works have been rejected repeatedly and then found amazing homes, so it does seem something of a whim what gets accepted and what not.)

Distribution of Acceptances

Sometimes I begin to feel as if acceptance slips have not come to me in a long time. I was wondering, in this most recent spate of rejections, how accurate my current feeling is. It's been four months since an acceptance slip, and I've gotten over eighty rejections. In recent history, that's closing in on the higher sets in terms of the number of rejections--and give it another month or so, it'll also be up there in terms of time.

The top graph shows the space between acceptances by time (x axis) and by number of submission rejections between (y axis) from the time I first started submitting materials.

I ramped up my submissions significantly around 2008, so the following focuses on more recent years:

Interesting: acceptances do often seem to come in clumps. (Days after I created this chart in April, I received an acceptance, from probably the most prestigious publication I've ever had work accepted by. Since, then, though--two more months--back to rejections.)

Number of Answers to September Submissions

I generally review what I will send out for the coming year in August and then I start afresh with submissions come the first week of September. I was wondering how many of those early September submissions actually got answers of some sort and how many were simply ignored. I was surprised by several things when I went back to look at the data. One, despite what I feel, most journals have gotten back to me with an answer. Two, September was not always a month to start afresh (many years, I didn't even submit in September). So here are the raw numbers:

And here it is by percent:

My Author Name on Google

I thought it might be interesting to review how many pages are connected to my author name on Google during November 2011, since I had three online publications that month. Would the possible links to my name rise accordingly?

Back in 2008, right after my first online publication in seven years, I had about four pages of links to me (in other words thirty to forty links). By 2009, it was about seven pages. In 2010, it was around fourteen pages. And it's tended to over around that number since. Note how added publications actually seemed to drop the number of pages of links sometimes:

Rejections by September 13

As I write this on September 13 (though I obviously posted it much later), I have received three rejections slips since September 1, the start of the submission season. That's out of thirty-nine separate submissions. I wanted to look at how many rejections I've received by this time in previous years.

It's a bit unfair to compare anything before 2008 since before than I submitted only by snail mail and only about seven pieces at a time (whereas now I submit about forty pieces at a time, and many of those via the Web). From 1988, when I first started submitting writing to journals (much too early, for I wasn't any good then), to 2007, I only received a single rejection by September 13 seven times in those nineteen years.

The year 2008 is when I started submitting online and from a much wider selection of my writing. Here's how many rejections I've had by this time in each year:

I must have been quite bummed at this time in 2009, but as I recall, it ended up being a banner year in terms of acceptances.

Life Timeline

Some things don't go quite as one might desire. Actually, I never had much faith that I would win a Pulitzer, but it was nice to dream. However, I'm still waiting on the first book publication (many a writer ten or fifteen years younger than me has a published book now; I don't know that I ever had an age in mind, but certainly by age thirty), and on that wife (around thirty) and kids (around thirty-five). I'm forty-two now, quite a few years past those ideal ages. At least I've had steady jobs that I've mostly enjoyed, in what would have been my dream profession and in my dream location (I wanted to work as an editor at a publisher in the West or South, then later as I refined my desires, as an editor at a university press in a small university town--and that's what I do and where I live).

Chart Poem

Years ago I wrote an imagist nonsense poem that I have never attempted to get published--mostly because it's silly; in fact, because it's no good. I mean, where is the imagery? Is it even a poem?

But I figured, hey, this blog is the perfect place for it. So here it is, a "poem" with charts:

Number of Stories Accepted, Rejected, or Ignored per Year

I've felt like this past year has been one in which I haven't seen very many acceptances of stories for publication, and a review of statistics shows why. In 2009 and 2010, I had an unusual number of acceptances, it appears. The 2011 figures aren't completely in, since I generally give it one year before declaring a submission ignored, so those 26 ignores for 2011 may come down by some number by the end of 2012. Still, the chances of me seeing again the number of story publication acceptances I had for 2010 submissions is unlikely. (By contrast, I've seen quite a bit of poetry being accepted after a couple of years of total drought.) (Note, I didn't start logging whether a publication commented on a rejection until around 2000.)

Number of Submissions before Acceptance

I recently saw a blog documenting people's number of submissions before their first acceptance of a story by a publication. One guy had submitted a piece fifty-nine times before it had been accepted somewhere (and for pay). Some people put up some rather surprising numbers in terms of percentage accepted (in the realm of about 30 percent, whereas others were more in my realm of 2 percent).

Anyway, the blog made me wonder how many rejections each published piece had to go through before being accepted. I've broken it out by short stories and poetry. Let's look at poetry first:

Interestingly, if a poem is going to be accepted, it looks like it has the best chance of happening within the first three submissions. That said, as the number of times I submit a poem goes up, so too does the likelihood that an editor will note liking the poem but not accepting it.

Now let's look at stories:

Pretty much, the same rules hold up for stories as for poems, though stories appear to be much more difficult to have accepted, at least for me.

I Write Like

Having read how little analysis went into how this guy created this program (which can be found here), I don't think it can be taken too seriously. That said, I was curious to see how my own work would fare. So who do I write like? Well, if we're talking poetry, I write the most like James Joyce, as shown in the chart below:

The assorted others (each with one poem) were Margaret Atwood, Ray Bradbury, Raymond Chandler, Stephen King, Rudyard Kipling, H. P. Lovecraft, Chuck Palahniuk, Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, and Kurt Vonnegut. (I wasn't even aware some of the people wrote poetry!)


For stories, it's another matter. When I first found this site and pasted in single paragraphs, I kept coming up with Cory Doctorow, whose work I didn't know (but I plan to read, now that I know of him) and occasionally Dan Brown or David Foster Wallace (ironically, most often with letters).


Paste in full stories, however, and my writing most often resembles Chuck Palahniuk, especially my early published stuff. Later stuff trends more toward Cory Doctorow. Here's the breakdown:

As for this blog entry--apparently you're reading the work of H. P. Lovecraft.

Attempts to Get an Agent

So I have this novel I brought to a finish some time ago, and as of spring 2011, I've finally gotten around to sending it to a few literary agents. But until winter 2012, I never got beyond a form letter back. Finally, in February, an agent actually asked to see a bit more.

Really, when I think about it, I shouldn't be surprised. I have had to select people to hire at times in my life, and sometimes, you're pulling one person out of fifty--and there might be several who are qualified--and I'm sure it's like that for agents as well, only to a greater extreme.

So here it is, a pie chart showing the percentage of agents who sent me form rejections versus the percent who never even answered my query, and the lone agent who showed even some initial interest.

Percentage of Acceptances versus Number of Pieces Submitted

My friend Al has stopped submitting to journals because he finds it a waste of time, given that an acceptance comes to him so rarely--he says it's about 1 percent. So I decided to look at my own rates to see if they were comparable. I was thinking they were about 2 percent, at least in recent years.

So first, let's look at the percentages, with and without poetry (it used to be stories were harder for me to find publication for, whereas in the most recent year it has become just the opposite):
I had a long dry spell in the early 2000s. But I also didn't submit much until about 2008, when I decided no longer to limit myself to my best seven pieces--instead, I would send out the best forty pieces or so (I don't do simultaneous submissions). So the percentages have gone up, I suppose, because I'm doing more submitting, but they've also gone down from times when I actually did receive the rare acceptances. Overall, Al turns out to be correct, however: the general acceptance rate is one in one hundred.

Acceptances, Rejections, and Submissions by Publication Length

My flash "Biology" appears here now in the latest Emprise Review.

I've long thought that longer stories were harder to publish than shorter ones, but at least for me, that apparently is not true--it's only the second under-500-word story I've published. Now it is true that a shorter story can be written faster, and that may be why so many folks write the shorter pieces, but in terms of publication, not necessarily so. That may well be that at the shorter length one has more competition. That said, when it comes to publication, a print journal can publish substantially more short pieces than long ones, which would offset that. Maybe it's just that my longer work is simply better written that the publications tend not to skew any toward the shorter material.

Anyway, in an attempt to see whether my preconceptions were right, I decided to graph a few items. Here is a chart showing the breakdown of how many stories of each length have seen publication:
Clearly, the length that is working best for me in terms of publication is the 1,001-2,000 range. However, a quick look how many rejections I have gotten for each length of story also reveals that for the same length of stories that have gotten the most acceptances, I have also gotten close to the most rejections. The exception here is 5,001-7,500, which outpaces them all; 4,001-5,000 still manages third, however.
Perhaps, it's just that the stories that I've submitted mostly congregated in these same ranges. Let's see:
Indeed, I do have more stories in the 1,001-2,000 range than in any other, but note also the the 5,001-7,500 and 2,001-3,000 come in third here. In that case, 4,001-5,000 is working really well for me.

Let's look at it on a percentage basis. The black represents the percentage of submissions in each length that have actually been accepted. The gray represents the percent of stories of a given length that I've submitted that have eventually been accepted (that is, I may have sent out five stories in the 4,001-5,000 range a total of sixty times, amounting to a 4.5 percent acceptance rate, even while 60 percent [i.e., three] of the stories were eventually accepted).
Interestingly, pretty much across the board of all lengths, I have about 4 percent to 5 percent acceptance rate (really, not too bad considering). The exceptions are the freaky 501-1,000 range (but note also the comparatively few stories that actually have been submitted in that range, as denoted in the chart above) and anything over 5,000 words. Mind you, most of the stories over 5,000 words gravitate to the south end of that, but long length does seem a factor in percentage rejection.

Writing by Genre and Draft by Year

So August is typically a month I devote each year to rereading stories, poems, and other writing projects of mine to determine what will be submitted over the coming year and what I will rewrite over the coming year. Given that, I thought it might also be interesting to review how many first drafts I've written each year, which genres those pieces were in, and how many subsequent drafts I completed that year.

The following charts indicate by year stories, poems, and chapters of longer projects accordingly. The first chart shows items by genre, with first drafts versus later drafts split out on each bar. The second chart shows items by first draft versus later drafts with items split out by genre on each bar. Finally, the third chart breaks everything out. Poems are a bit of an odd creature here, since I don't keep track of drafts of those, so I can only note how many were written.

For the longer projects, which may or may not have chapters, I've designated five thousand words as an average chapter length (since some novels had no chapters and some have short ones) and divvied up the material accordingly. Screenplays count as three, according to the three-act structure of screenplays. Furthermore, because stories I've worked on, especially in recent years, have often been from wholly conceived cycles (that is, the pieces work together so that the material falls somewhere between a story and a novel), I've indicated these types of stories separately.



There was a drop-off in 2000. In 1999 was when I first had home-access to the Internet, and much of my time during the next few years was spent online, chatting with my new toy and trying to get dates. In part, I'd been so discouraged by lack of publication and lack of writer friends and so encouraged by online correspondence that for a while I did not make writing much of a priority. When I moved to my current home, however, that changed, because I was now back among a literary set and because I'd become discouraged in the dating arena much as I had been in the publication one.

Google Search Finds

Around June 21, I did a search for my writing name in quote marks to see what would show up and how often. (A search for my everyday name without quotes would be interesting to chart as well, though I'd have to limit the data to the first ten pages or so, since the names are so common as to give an huge number of returns. Something tells me the first folks on there would be Jon Davies the weatherman and Jon Davies the anthropologist. I think I show up somewhere down between number 10 and 30 on some social network, which rather surprises me, since there's not much reason to include me there.)

Anyway, here's how the breakdown appears:
Or to put it in another way (as a percentage):
My name is most connected to a story that appeared in Stymie magazine. I find that interesting because it's not an easy story to get to, but Stymie, a literary magazine on sports, apparently is well connected to various sporting sites, and so my name is now connected to sites wherein you can buy basketballs and jock straps, which is certainly what I think of when I think of me.

What I find most interesting is how some journals really do a great job of getting their name out in search results. Bull, for instance, which published "The Heart Is a Strong Instrument," tweets new stories, blogs about them, Facebooks them, and so on, so that the story isn't just being hit up at its site but at all these companion sites. "The Next Superstar," which appeared in Battered Suitcase, is also listed a lot because the folks at the Suitcase cross-publish the magazine not just in html on their site but in various e-book platforms like Smashwords and as a print-on-demand journal.

I don't tweet, and I don't really use Facebook effectively, so my own site lingers somewhat down in the pile comparatively (though it comes up on the first page, probably because so many of my author bios point to my main site). My reading blog, Short Story Reader, however, has gotten attention in numerous places and so shows up pretty high up on the number of links Google finds. There again, it's more the work of others drawing attention to it than my own work of tweeting or Facebooking about it.

Anyway, if I were to ever start an online literary journal, I think the charts above might be a useful tool with regard to how to publicize the material in the journal--namely, make it available in lots of platforms.

Parts of Speech, First Words, and the Books I Like

I received a copy of the fall 2010 edition of Southern Indiana Review Thursday. I'd been waiting for the spring issue to show up, thinking that was the one I was in. But apparently, I was in the fall issue--I simply hadn't been sent my contributor copy. So interested readers can check out purchasing a copy here. My contribution, a story, is called "Such Great Misery of Late."

I'd planned to blog on May expenses this week, but because this publication arrived, I figured I'd blog on something language oriented instead. Last week sometime, I was giving thought to how stories start--that is, what their first sentences, or even first words, are. I was wondering if there were any patterns among books that I like. So I did a survey. Each year, I pick out three books I read that year as my favorites, one nonfiction work, one collection of stories, and one novel. My list goes back about fifteen years. Those books become part of my personal library at home. Are there patterns among these favorite books? Do they differ between fiction and nonfiction? Here's what I found . . .

Of the forty-five books surveyed, "The" led six times, for the lead. Next up, at three each, were "It," "I," and "When." "My" and "This" both came in at two. Really, though, these word selections seemed to incidental to do much with--too many ones. So I figured I'd look at the words in another way--by parts of speech. The breakdown goes as follows:

Nonfiction works on my favorites list lead with the given parts of speech in the following distribution:



Fiction broke down somewhat similarly, though with a bit more variety:



So the total breaks down like this:



Note that verbs never lead as the first word in the book in any of my favorite texts, though two gerunds did show up (one in nonfiction, one in fiction). Pronouns (which are split between possessive adjectives and nouns in the charts above) were popular, forging 42 percent of the first words (with relative pronouns making up 21 percent of those, or 9 percent overall). Articles accounted for 16 percent, and proper nouns 13 percent.

I suppose for some of these works we could get into an argument over what the first word of the book is. Sometimes, there's a preface. Should I count that? An epigraph? A chapter title? I counted none of these. Basically, I went with the first word of the text proper.

Then I got curious as to how my own writing would stack up. So here's a chart with a breakdown of the parts of speech in my thirteen published stories. Among those stories, two each start with "The," "At," and "That." Parts of speech run as follows:



On my list, pronouns forge 38 percent of the first words, which isn't far from the percent among my favorite books. Articles accounted for 15 percent, again close, and proper nouns for 15 percent as well. I guess the one pattern I do see is that while my work mimics the percentages on the overall list, it mimics the fiction even more closely than it does the nonfiction, which tends to start with prepositions less frequently.

So what does all this indicate? I'm not sure. It could mean that my own writing generally mimics those works that I like; it could mean that works I like tend to conform to my own writing. Or it could just mean that among the English language in general, the parts of speech that lead off a sentence fall into a pattern close to what I've outlined in my favorite works and in my own work. I suspect it's probably the latter. But the only way to find out would be to do a much more exhaustive survey of works published in English. Anyone interested in taking up that survey? I know I'd be interested in reading it, but if you think I'm too lazy to conduct the survey myself, you're right. In fact, I just realized that I have fourteen published stories--that other story starts with a preposition. Alas, I'm not going back to redo the chart.

Acceptance, Rejection, and Time of Publication

I have a blog about my reading. I have a Web site about me--mostly my work--that is infrequently updated, infrequently visited, and not very personal. Perhaps, some people might be intrigued to read personal observations and things like that. After all, I sometimes visit random people's blogs for exactly that purpose, and some folks are interesting. So this blog is about me, the personal me. Sort of. (I don't expect it to be too regular, since I'm waylaid with other projects pretty much all the time.)

I love statistics. I've been known to keep track of myself this way. So I figured that occasionally, I'd share statistical insights with others.

Today, having received this week a copy of the latest Concho River Review, which features a story of mine, I decided to ruminate on publication data. (You can purchase a copy on CRR's Web site here; it features the work of a lot of folks more established than I am and includes some fantastic poetry, my favorite being one called "Numbers" by Mary Soon Lee.) I've been waiting on this magazine and one other to appear for a while and have become somewhat anxious about them, because I need a certain number of print publications to be able to enter a contest next month. Could it be that online publication has spoiled me with its immediacy?

So I look at the facts. Here is how long it has taken for publications of mine to appear after acceptance in the last three years.



As you can see, most publications occur within one month. However, there are a few that took many months. Only three of the publications are print journals, and of those, two of them are in the more than twelve months category, with one of them being in the three to four months category. Print publication obviously takes a bit longer.

Does the same hold up for time that one submits a piece to time it is accepted? Let's see:



Here one can see that, contrary to my expectations (and those of some writer friends), the longer a journal has a story does not equate with the more likely it is to be accepted. Generally, if the story is going to be accepted, it's going to happen sooner rather than later. The print journals here fall anywhere in the three to six months camp. Curiously, the more than twelve months acceptance: it was thirteen months, by an online journal. Usually, I assume the piece was lost or rejected after twelve months, so that acceptance was a welcome surprise.

Looking at this, I guess all those publications that have been holding on to something of mine for six months, I should expect rejection from, since that would seem to be more the norm. Or would it? What I'd really need is a chart showing the percentage breakdown of time spent versus rejection/acceptance, but I'll save that for another day.