It’s time for the annual year-in-review / award eligibility post. Let’s start with the award-eligible list for the convenience of those preparing their Hugo or Nebula ballot or, I dunno, Best Midwestern Author Who Used to Play Football Award?
In 2021, I had published:
One Novel – My First! Galactic Hellcats! Three women from very different backgrounds form a found family / space motorcycle gang and rescue a prince. The reviews are so heartwarming. “A rip-roaring space heist”, “Cathartically healing”, “You made me stay up all night to finish it you beast!”
Oh look buying links where did those come from? Mac’s Backs | Space Cowboy Books | Indiebound
One Novella – My First! “The Unlikely Heroines of Callisto Station” in Analog in August. – An engineer with bipolar disorder struggling through a depressive episode has to team up with the irascible facilities manager to save their space station from space pirates.
Seven Stories came out this year:
“Three Little Arcologies” in Little Blue Marble September 2021 – Once Upon A Time there were three houses that dreamed of sustainability, and a Big Bad Development Corporation out to get them. Also a love song to homes I’ve admired in the Cleveland area.
“Room to Live” in Analog, September 2021 – Process Friction is the answer when a call center worker deals with a problematic roommate, helping the homeless, and a possible robot uprising.
“Loving the Falls” in Cast of Wonders August 25, 2021 – A resurrected teen contemplates her relationship with her parents after her death and return.
“The Plus One” in the May/June 2021 Fantasy & Science Fiction — US Marshal Blaine investigates a preventable death in what might be the first case of homelessness on Mars.
“Second Hand Destinies” in the March 2021 Analog – St. Vitus was a ship pretending to be a basilica pretending to be a station. Tatiana was a small, tentacled thing curled inside a corpse, pretending to be Tatiana.
“Things From Our Kitchen Junk Drawer That Could Save This Spaceship” in Daily Science Fiction 2/23/2021 – a dark tale of disaster and remembering family – this one has several upvotes on the Nebula reading list! I love performing it because audiences always wince at the last line.
“Watch Your Step” In Departure Mirror – a Kaiju deals with body image.
Poems
I had 4 poems come out this year:
“Princess Cat Robot”, “Over the Moon” and “Skynet Demurs” in Utopia Science Fiction February, 2021.
“Window is Born” in Terse, May 21, 2021
Now, the year in Rejectomancy and statistics! 😀 My favorite part.
I made 62 submissions of short fiction this year, for 4 acceptances. Roughly a 6% acceptance rate, which is down from a record high of 14.5% last year.
While in general I sell more when I submit more, this year was bad both for amount submitted and for amount sold. And it is my lowest submission year since 2013, when I had my first pro sale.
BOO
Well, let’s be real, I was dealing with getting custody of my niece and evicting my older sister and I also had a novel come out and did a lot of promotion events for that, and also, y’know, pandemic? There’s lots of reasons to take a mulligan on this year. Thank goodness for last year’s epic sales or I’d have had nothing come out!
Now the picture is different in Poetry – I keep track of poetry separately, and I only have data going back to 2014, not 2013. Last year was actually pretty bad for me in poetry – probably because I was so clearly focused on fiction submissions. This year, while my submissions are modestly up, my acceptance rate has been … NOICE. I made 55 poetry submissions for 9 sales.
I’ve almost certainly spent too long on this, but I’m glad I did because I was beating myself up a lot about not having sold more stories this year. At least now I can see that while my acceptance rate on fiction is down, it’s still higher than it was in 2017, and if I throw a trendline on the graph, it’s still going up.
And I do know how to improve my sales figures – submit more. Here is the acceptance rate graphed against submission count to show the general correlation between the two:
(Wondering now if there is a lag affect – like, the real correlation is with last year’s submissions? hrmmmm)
There is some evidence that response times from magazines were in general slow this year, but most of that is anecdotal from fellow writers, and we like to complain.
So I took all my recorded submissions and averaged the “days out” before response for every year, and found that actually this year was pretty speedy in comparison to other years — though this could also be JUST ME, as in, I have been becoming better-known as a writer and a better writer, so perhaps over time people are responding to me quicker.
Also I might have chosen faster markets more recently, as a newbie in 2013 I might not have started my standard operating procedure of submitting to markets with quick turn-arounds first. So there’s that, too. (Oh and also this chart is just fiction subs, like I said, I keep track of poetry separately.)
But the conclusion is: NO, I cannot blame my low submission numbers this year on slow magazine responses. It’s really just me not doing as much submitting.
Well, I think I have a really easy top choice for a New Year’s Resolution!
Bonus graph: length of sold stories against how many rejections they got before selling. In general, pieces below 3500 words seem to sell quicker? But I also write more of them.
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