This is the challenge

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Marc Joan

Marc Joan

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Aug 26, 2014
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...

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And I suspect the odds are even worse for novel submissions to publishers....
 
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...
 
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)!
 
Chase Gamwell said:
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)!
Click to expand...
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!
 
Robinne Weiss said:
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!
Click to expand...

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