400+ Gentle Readers

[truepenny]

Um.

Wow.

Hi, y'all.

If you would like to introduce yourself (please notice, no obligation), the comments to this post would be a fine place to do so.

And I should make my ObDisclaimers: I keep my own reading list viciously pruned because otherwise I. Cannot. Cope. With. LJ. So I don't add people reciprically. I also don't reply to comments unless I actually have something to say. I do, however, read every comment I get (assuming of course that LJ is not fubar and eating them).

---

And now, some statistics--because suddenly I was curious and I figured some of y'all might be as well.

The sale I just made was my eighteenth short-form sale (not counting either "A Gift of Wings" which was written to order or "The Watcher in the Corners" which was donated to the Katrina relief chapbook matociquala is putting together) since I started submitting short fiction seriously in 2000.

That's easy math: an average of 3 sales a year.

Of course, I didn't sell anything the first two years, so it's really 18 sales in 4 years, which is not so easy math: an average of 4.5 sales a year.

Now, against those 18 sales, how many rejections? (I'm counting only those stories--and single poem--which have been sold or which I continue to believe can be sold. In other words the trunked stories do not get a vote.)

"Amante Dorée": 8 rejections and counting
"Ashes, Ashes": 9 rejections and counting
"Blue Lace Agate": none yet
"The Bone Key": (in various versions) 10 rejections, 1 withdrawal, and counting
"Bringing Helena Back": 7 rejections before sale
"The Clockwork Pianist": none yet
"Coyote Gets His Own Back": 2 rejections and counting
"Draco campestris": 1 rejection and counting
"Drowning Palmer": 5 rejections before sale
"Elegy for a Demon Lover": 7 rejections before sale
"Fiddleback Ferns": none yet
"The Green Glass Paperweight": 4 rejections before sale
"The Half-Sister": 2 rejections, 1 withdrawal before sale
"The Inheritance of Barnabas Wilcox": 4 rejections before sale
"Katabasis: Seraphic Trains": 5 rejections before sale
"A Light in Troy": 4 rejections and counting
"Letter from a Teddy Bear on Veterans' Day": 11 rejections, 1 withdrawal, and counting
"Listening to Bone": none yet
"National Geographic On Assignment: Mermaids of the Old West": 6 rejections before sale
"A Night in Electric Squidland": 1 rejection before sale
"Night Train: Heading West": 4 rejections before sale
"No Man's Land": 3 rejections and counting
"Queen of Swords": 5 rejections before sale
"The Séance at Chisholm End": 5 rejections before sale
"Sidhe Tigers": hit a home run first time out
"Straw": ditto
"Sundered": 14 rejections and counting
"Three Letters from the Queen of Elfland": 2 rejections before sale
"Under the Beansidhe's Pillow": 6 rejections, 1 withdrawal, and counting
"The Venebretti Necklace": 3 rejections before sale
"Wait for Me": 4 rejections before sale
"The Wall of Clouds": 1 rejection before sale
"Why Do You Linger?": 8 rejections, 2 withdrawals, and counting
"The World Without Sleep": 1 rejection and counting

Total: 142 rejections, 6 withdrawals, and a couple of dead markets. In those same 6 years. Which is an average of about 24 rejections a year, or 2 a month. (Remember back up when I was still talking about sales? 3 a year? 1 in 8, baby. One in eight go mad.)

And of course, real life doesn't conform to the average, so some months you hear nothing, acres and acres of nothing, until you start wondering if the entire publishing industry has gone belly up and no one has bothered to tell you. And some months you get four rejections in a week.

My batting average, calculating from 18 sales in 142 times at bat: .127--as a batter, I'm a pretty good pitcher. (And I can't help the baseball metaphors creeping in when I do stats. It just happens.) As a pro writer, otoh, .127 is doing pretty well; matociquala told me once that the average was 1 in 10, or .100. So, the thing is, this is normal. This is how selling short fiction works.

You beat your head against the wall until the wall falls down.

Comments

[savageseraph.livejournal.com]

Hi. I’m Barbara, and I friended your blog not long after I read Melusine. It was one of the surprises of the summer, a novel that really impressed me with how it went beyond the expected and typical in fantasy. I teach college-level English (in that adjunct way), and my current research interests are fan fiction and online culture and graphic fiction (which seem a long way from my MA focus on Renaissance literature). Paradise Lost to erotica and comics. I’m sure Milton wouldn’t approve. ^_^

Congratulations on your Crawford nomination! If you happen to attend the International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts in Ft. Lauderdale, you’ll see me there. I’ve been presenting there for the last six years. It’s a lot of fun, and certainly has nicer weather than we have on the Great Lakes in March.

[woodrunner.livejournal.com]

I'm from Northeastern Ontario and the usual aspiring writer-type, though I'm less aspiring to write (because writing is what I do for fun) and more aspiring to get something completed in a condition suitable to sale. And while I don't have any illusions about the number of rejections involved before an actual sale is made, I was more under the impression that selling short fiction (or any sort of fiction) involved pinning as many rejection slips on the wall until the wall crumbled from the weight.

When I'm not darting about in my super-heroic costume saving poor folk from dastardly villains, I putter about as a mild-mannered scientist. I'm an analytical chemist by both profession and training, have been for 10 years, and my biggest pet peeve (at least today) is walking into the store for a magazine for leisure reading, and finding only COSMO or some such on the racks, with no Popular Science or Scientific American in sight. What tops that is asking the (male) clerk where those magazines are, and getting a blurted "Why would YOU want those magazines?" in response.

I enjoy reading what you put in your journal for the world to read, and never expected to be added back - still don't, in fact. I just like reading.

[mmarques.livejournal.com]

I friended you ages ago after following links to you and/or seeing comments in matociquala's LJ. I've been friending up-and-coming writers, to learn more about the industry, and enjoy reading of their travails, while I complete revisions on Mysterious Paris and prepare to start querying. I briefly interrupted work on my novel to complete a short story, "Blonde Bimbos on the Moon," and having been sending it out. Your stats are a good reminder.

Fiction-writing is currently a part-time affair for me, while I work days as a technical writer.

[lizziebelle.livejournal.com]

Howdy! I've seen you on several other friends' flists and found your lj interesting, so I added it to my reading list. I love reading what other writers have to say about the craft. :)

[storyjunkie.livejournal.com]

Hi. I found you through reading coffeeandink, who doesn't know me either. I think I added you out of sheer admiration for one of your thoughtful essays on fantasy and science fiction as genres, and not wanting to risk missing another.

And then I find that you're fun to read as well.

[mamculuna.livejournal.com]

I'm a big fan of your writing--both LJ and Melusine. I'm a voracious reader of everything, especially fantasy of a certain kind. The well-done kind, that would be. Like most of LJ, I guess, I'm an aspiring writer, and posts like the one above are wonderful. I thought I'd hate rejections but seeing that good writers like you also get them is extremely comforting.

In other life, I'm a retired community college English teacher/administrator with PhD in linguistics that gone largely unused except for a very few articles, a while back. Glad to seem the door close on the academy. More time for: yoga and Buddhism, cats, garden, beach, travel, and writing. More time to fume about stupid politicans, more time for reading.

[katharine-b.livejournal.com]

I think I may have replied to one of your lurker-invitations in the past, but I can't remember, so I'll do it again. I've been reading your LJ since you were working on your dissertation; I was considering English Ph.D. programs at the time, and writing my first novel, and wasn't at all sure how to negotiate the fiction/academia balance. I've since written my second novel (I'm doing a paper edit right now), which will be my thesis for an M.A. in fiction, and applied to the Ph.D. program here to work on eighteenth-century British literature. I'd say I was seduced by Samuel Johnson, if that didn't produce such an unfortunate mental image. (I'm not sure "seduced by Eliza Haywood" is much better, either. Heh.)

Anyway, the main reason I've responded this time is to tell you that I've just read Mélusine and really enjoyed it. I followed the link to the review you posted the other day, and wanted to second that reviewer's opinion that the directness of Mildmay's voice works marvelously well. The book is great and absorbing, and I admire the hell out of your world-building. Thank you for writing it!

Thanks for posting these stats, too. It's always good to see how the numbers work out.

[mroctober.livejournal.com]

"The Clockwork Pianist": none yet



I'm hoping this will change soon; still waiting from Mirrorstone. ::sighs::

Intro

[jodi-davis.livejournal.com]

Hey there - I'm a writer (gosh - thanks for posting your rejections - I've done 3 in one day - oh joy!) I found you through Jack Byrne's web site (he's reading a manuscript of mine - SF) on the same day a friend sent me a link to your site.

So I read it all on one night - man! I think you were pretty low key about getting your book published - unless you were just faking nonchalance online.

My library only has one copy of Melusine and apparently it does gangbuster business, but I'm #1 on the waitlist now!

JD

[floatingtide.livejournal.com]

Hiya,

I'm a writer who's working on turning pro. That stat breakdown is exactly the reason I read your blog. I hope to be where you are in a couple of years and would like to know what it's like.

I found you through matociquala -- drawn by some brillant comment, I'm sure, though I don't really remember.

[dhole.livejournal.com]

Hi.

I'm a grad student in archaeology, and a friend of papersky. I read, I write, I waste too much time playing video games.

[celisnebula.livejournal.com]

*Waves Hello*

I've actually had you friended for awhile now. After seeing you around on the various flists of other fellow writers, and poking around on your journal every now and again, I figured it was easier just to add you so I didn't have to hunt up interesting older entries. Don't expect to be added back cause my journal is well, dorky to say the least.

[adelev.livejournal.com]

Hi. My name is Adele and I am quite new to LJ. I read Melusine when it first came out, so learning you were on LJ was kind of like hobnobbing with a celebrity for me - very cool (if you'll excuse the uncool groupiness of saying that)!

I know you have two sequels to Melusine coming out, so I am surprised that you have such an extensive list of submitted short works. I guess I thought writing novels would take all your time. Do you think you will always work on short stories as well as novels?

As for me, I submitted a short story to one magazine years ago. It was rejected and I have never done that since. Not because of the rejection. I just am not really a writer. I am a reader. And a computer programmer.

Anyway, I loved Melusine and I am enjoying your LJ. Thanks for the invitation to introduce myself.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Since I find that short story ideas and novel ideas are not cross-compatible--that is, turning a short story idea into a novel doesn't work out very well (as for example the two versions of "Flowers for Algernon," one of which is brilliant and one of which is not so much) and likewise for the vice versa--I suspect, yes, I will always write both.

Hi Sarah

[cammykitty.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the stats. We've met before & talked about Hairsticks at WisCon and WFC. You'd probably think hey she looks familiar if my photo looked more like me than my dog. I'm an aspiring writer. Gee, would you have guessed? At present, I'm revising a YA fantasy novel and writing short stories, & looking forward to seeing you at the next WisCon. You'll be there, right?

Question - how long did it take you to get away from having to keep a day job? How did you go about that? I know several successful writers don't write full time, & I'm sure putting the need for $ on your writing has to take the fun out of it some of the time. - feel free not to answer me if I'm asking something too personal.

Thanks!
Katie

Re: Hi Sarah

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Yes, I will be at Wiscon.

And, um, the reason I don't have a day job is because I'm married and my spouse is a Hero of the Revolution.

It is also true that I am currently looking for a part-time job.

Re: Hi Sarah

[cammykitty.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the info, & thank god for Heroes. Kelly McCullough's answer is "I married well," and then he giggles. I kind of like that coming from a guy. I keep thinking of Graham Joyce's story about how he'd been working really hard at his full time job, realized he'd burned out and he hadn't done anything to further his writing which he believed was so important to him. So he sat down with his lawyer wife and said "I'm going to quit my day job." Instead of saying, yes dear, that will be fine, I make enough for both of us, she said "I hate my job too." So they both quit and found a shack on a Greek Island where they could live for cheap while he sold his first novel.

Ahhh, I can smell the sea breeze & I'm eating feta cheese and olives right now. Okay, imaginary ones. But I'm with you. I do all right writing with a full time job. I managed to edit 30K in one month on my WIP so it can be done and not worrying about $ much is nice. But I'm thinking a part time job with health benefits would be just the thing. And sometimes it seems like the writing process takes it's time in days, rather than hours, so having full time to devote to it is nice, but maybe doesn't speed things up as much as one might think. Good luck on your search! You'll knock em dead at the interview. Hard part is finding an interesting place that needs you.

[sarekofvulcan.livejournal.com]

I'm sure I've commented here before, but just in case: I'm Garrett, and I strolled in by way of your Dorothy Sayers analyses.

[ivyblossom.livejournal.com]

I'm Ivy. (Not my real name.) I am a librarian. I like to write, but don't anticipate being very successful at it. The anticipation of non-success does not stop me from writing, however. Fortunately I like my day job. I love to hear about the process though, which is what brings me here.

[veejane.livejournal.com]

I am sorry. As a designated baseball nerd, I feel the need to correct your math. Since ye canna strike out twice on the same pitch (Bugs Bunny notwithstanding), in fact you have 18 sold stories and 16 submitted stories (according to your list) that did not sell.

Which is 34 stories. So 18 of 34 sold is a whopping .529 average! (I am counting 10 rejections and then a sale as, like, fouling off ten pitches.)

The moral of this story is, fouling off pitches is a great way to eventually get a hit. Which happens also to be true of baseball.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Hee. Thank you!

I like your math much better than my math.

[autumnstar1.livejournal.com]

Hi there, my name is Tina, I live in Southern California, I’m a reader, a writer and an amateur model (artist reference photos mostly).

I stumbled across this journal via your webpage…and I came across that trying to find any sample chapters or other goodies for Melusine when it first came out. I finally tracked down a copy at my local library just a month ago and after reading it I decided to buy my own copy.

Since then I’ve been trying to find out where you’ve published Sidhe Tigers and Three Letters from the Queen of Elfland amongst other short pieces. Any hints on where they can be found? ‘Cause I’d love to read them.

Hmmm. Other than that I read your journal because you have interesting things to say. Plus I adore you for explaining the Melusine calendar. I’d love to find out more about how you go about the bones of your writing (your amazing character creation, plotting, and worldbuilding).

Okay, since I don’t want to resort to babbling like a fan-girl, I’ll stop now. Suffice to say I think you’re a remarkable writer.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

"Sidhe Tigers" and "Three Letters from the Queen of Elfland" were both published in Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, nos. 13 and 11 respeectively. Both issues are available (http://www.lcrw.net/lcrw/shopping3.htm#zines) from Small Beer Press. "Three Letters from the Queen of Elfland" will also be reprinted in So Fey: Queer Faery Fictions (http://www.haworthpress.com/store/product.asp?sid=6TCA75PKLVLC8GB0947RF94G2WR3CXUD&sku=5642&AuthType=4).

I also try to keep the ordering information (http://www.sarahmonette.com/ordering.html) on my website up to date; likewise my bibliography (http://www.sarahmonette.com/writing.html).

[autumnstar1.livejournal.com]

I have no idea how I missed that. Ah well, I only feel slightly silly for not having noticed the ordering information and such.

I look forward to reading more of your work. Thank you for taking the time to respond to my comment, even when I could have actually found that information had I been paying closer attention. :blush:

As always...

[thefrozennorth.livejournal.com]

I do enjoy reading your LJ. Plus, it helps me to keep up with your new novels.

[elvesforeyes.livejournal.com]

If you would like to introduce yourself (please notice, no obligation), the comments to this post would be a fine place to do so.

Heylo. The name's Paul. Your journal is always interesting to read, and often it inspires me to write a little each day. I'm eagerly waiting for the paperback release of Mélusine.