This is the challenge

[Marc Joan]

For those who submit to magazines, the Grinder is a useful (and free) site to get insights on response times, rejection percentages, etc, per market. The site has recently been revamped in a minor way, mainly to do with data presentation. The result shows how challenging it can be to get published in the top-tier magazines. Look at the data for Clarkesworld, below. Purple lines = pending; green lines = accepted (look hard); and the red ones -- well, I think you know what they are...



And I suspect the odds are even worse for novel submissions to publishers....

 

[Marc Joan]

Btw, the site seems to be mainly applicable to SF / F / horror magazines -- the data for lit fic magazines is patchy (eg only 4 entries for The Gettysburg Review, when of course they get hundreds), so probably shouldn't be given too much weight...

 

[Chase Gamwell]

An agent I follow on twitter posted submission statistics from 2015 earlier this year. I did some math and the acceptance rate for a submission based on the numbers provided was 0.27% - that's only 9 offers of representation out of 3500 queries (with about 40 full requests that year)!

 

[Marc Joan]

Worse than I feared....

 

[Robinne Weiss]

An agent I follow on twitter posted submission statistics from 2015 earlier this year. I did some math and the acceptance rate for a submission based on the numbers provided was 0.27% - that's only 9 offers of representation out of 3500 queries (with about 40 full requests that year)!

I'm not listening, I'm not listening, I'm not listening... *sigh* I knew it was that bad, but put in stark numbers like that...yikes!

 

[Chase Gamwell]

I'm not listening, I'm not listening, I'm not listening... *sigh* I knew it was that bad, but put in stark numbers like that...yikes!

Tell me about it. I have one full with an agent now and it hurts knowing that there is a greater than 99% chance that the agent will come back and tell me it's a pass. Not to mention the space opera I just finished and the cyberpunk thriller I'm almost 20K words into. It's definitely daunting...

 

[Robinne Weiss]

Yeah, I'm nearing the 50th rejection on my latest YA fantasy--there's still a partial out, but hope is fading fast.

 

[Alistair Roberts]

Better than I expected.... ! Given only about 0.05% of submissions actually get published. However, 100% of self-published books get published.