Four Years In: The Annual Review

I should have posted yesterday but had things to do and places to be, as the saying goes. And with the inferno sweeping Australia at this time one is allowed to be a bit distracted! So, here is the four-year-and-one-day milestone, and it’s time to look back on performance in this quest of mine to make a mark in the short story world.

Overall: After 1461 days, I now have a total of 1549 submissions, 92 placements (16.83:1 submission/acceptance ratio), 90 stories on submission at this time (my record is now 99), thus 1365 rejections (14.83:1 rejection/acceptance ratio). These ratios have squeezed out only slightly from last year’s figures, reflecting a slight down-turn in the activity of the market, which, in the long-term, has been less an impediment that I had feared it might.

In calendar year 2019, I made 432 submissions (well up on last year), receiving 25 placements, one less than the previous year (17.28:1 submissions/placements, longer odds than in 2018.) This is an acceptance rate of just 5.78%, down from 2018’s 7.36%, which was itself down from 2017’s 8.16%). If there is a metric for the downturn in the market I felt I was seeing, this may be it.

Average time between acceptances in Year Four was 14.6 days, appreciably the same as last year (26 acceptances).

I have not encountered a professional placement in the last twelve months, which is bad news in terms of income; that said, I managed to make slightly more in the last financial year than in the previous one, which suggests I’m hitting higher on the market scale more often, despite not actually being in the pro category in the twelve months between July 2018 and June 2019.

Productivity is well up, 42 stories this year (very much better than the 20 in 2018, yet still well behind the 62 in 2017), totalling 214, 998 words, up a long way from last period’s 130, 695 (but, as expected, still well below the 247, 782 words I clocked in 2017). I have over 210 stories registered at Submission Grinder, and 230+ in my personal list.

With the reorganisation of staff at my university I found myself without courses to teach in 2019, and this freed up time for intensive writing and marketing. The apparent market slump that seemed to set in around September 2018 (at least read as a marked slow-down in terms of placements) caused me to work that much harder, writing as much as possible and maintaining the highest possible submission rate. At one point I drove submission in play to 99, though to be fair there were several on multiple or simultaneous submission among them, plus some old subs effectively dead or in limbo, and a truer figure would have been in the 80s.

High points this year gone by include my second placement with Andromeda Spaceways, third with NewMyths, fourth with Aurealis and sixth with Lovecraftiana. I picked up the Editor’s Choice Award at Alien Dimensions with Sky Tears, and branched into mystery: I have begun to write Sherlock Holmes stories, a most active subgenre, plus original cases with an occult twist set in the Holmesian era, the Inspector Trevelyan Mysteries. One of each has placed so far.

Had I maintained the rate of placement seen in 2017-18 I would have been well above 100 placements at this time. As it is, I expect to see that milestone around March. With such a tally amongst one’s credentials, I would hope a literary agent would be suitably impressed, and the plan for the not too distant future is to begin work on a novel. I’ll keep up the short story activity too, it’s natural as breathing at this point, but the longer format offers new opportunities, both creatively and in market terms.

I hope to have equally interesting stats one year from now!

Cheers, Mike Adamson