By the Numbers: A True Horror Story
By Keech Ballard
I wrote my first short story in 1980, because I wanted to. I wrote my first poem in 1984, because I had to.
I submitted a story to a speculative fiction magazine for the first time on March 1, 2002. A personalized rejection on a small slip of paper came back to me on April Fool’s Day. “Close but no cigar,” is what it said. Thus encouraged, I snail mailed stories three more times in 2002, which elicited three form rejections. I quit submitting, even as I continued writing down through the years.
I started over more than a decade later, submitting four times in 2014, once in 2015, twice each in 2016 and 2018, and over fifty times in 2020. I finally got serious. The Internet is a marvellous tool, but the competition increases with every measure that facilitates the ease with which we submit our little pearls of wisdom to the editorial power elite.
I made my first sale to a Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association pro market on February 13, 2023. Twenty years after I began submitting. Forty years after I started writing. As the Sandman points out in one of his online courses, to be a successful writer, which is to say a PUBLISHED author, all you need is to 1) write every day (or as often as you can), 2) finish what you start (or as much as you can), and 3) SUBMIT.
Many people overlook the third requirement, which of necessity includes an almost overwhelming number of rejections. Even the King gets rejected occasionally. So I heard. Not sure I believe it.
For the rest of us common folk, reality tends to set in quickly.
By the numbers, my first speculative short story sale is number 418 in order of occurrence. That means I received 417 rejections, including 31 personalized responses, a handful of non-responses, and a blizzard of form rejections—long before ever I was “put on hold” and subsequently offered a real genuine professional publishing contract. With money attached. And to think I could have started submitting seriously forty years ago instead of three!
Word to the wise. The average acceptance rate for unsolicited manuscripts is one or two percent, at least in my field, speculative fiction writing. Typical acceptance rates for amateur and semi-pro venues may be a bit higher. Pro markets are always more competitive because of the money, honey. But rejection rates are often over 90%—even when no form of payment is expected. The lure of seeing one’s name in print, like the Force, is strong.
Poetry may be even harder to break into at the professional level. I’m still waiting for my first sale to a professional poetry market. I have had modest success with my poems in amateur and semi-pro markets, with total earnings of—well I guess I shouldn’t say, so as not to discourage anyone. Or encourage them either. Rejection rates are well above 99% in highly competitive poetry markets.
In addition to my 440 speculative fiction and 105 speculative poetry submissions, I have also made over 500 general submissions to a wider range of markets. I can report 22 separate items accepted, including nine fiction, nine poetry, two creative nonfiction, one nonfiction, and one drama piece. That’s a 2% acceptance rate overall, just par for the course.
The work of submitting never ends. Rejection slips are also never ending. Unless you are willing to play by the numbers, you may wind up crying in the wilderness for forty years like me.
May the non-believing non-submitter beware! The ghost in the machine is real.
AUTHOR BIO
Keech Ballard is a lone voice crying in the southwest desert of the human mind. He has published an outré amalgam of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry since the current crisis began. A few of these winsome welkins of wonder are available as podcasts. Keech’s work has appeared in Fantasy Magazine, Dark Moments, Illumen, and Bag of Bones, inter alia.
Angry Gable Press 