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

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.