My recent spate of success has been preoccupying me as much as my long stint of failure did before that. It’s hampering my writing, but it seems like everything hampers my writing (housework, cats, eating, sleeping). On the upside, perhaps, I started a draft of a new story yesterday that may, in part, be feeding off of my preoccupation. We’ll see if I ever finish that story.
Since I can’t get my mind off of it, I decided I would update my post about measuring failure, only thirteen months old. It was an eventful thirteen months.
I’ll follow the same order of statistics as last time, so we’ll start with a look at how many days I have to wait between acceptances.
Astute observers will notice a slight downward trend. Even more astute observers will notice I dropped the extra series for the adjusted days between acceptances, which left out the first (outlier) data point. The two series were converging (as they must over time), and the difference was no longer large enough to be of interest. Anyway, on average, I now have to wait around 43 days between acceptances. You might also notice, the actual time I’ve had to wait between acceptances hasn’t been that high in a while.
We move on to average rejections per acceptance.
Oo, that’s messy. Let me help a little. The bar chart is the rejections preceding every acceptance. The … oh, orange, or whatever color that is, line is the average rejections per acceptance. Again, you will notice a downward trend. The average is the lowest it has ever been. The … magenta? and licorice (Apple Numbers insists that’s the name of that color, not black) lines are close to the same thing. They are the acceptance rate. As last time, the magenta line is the direct inverse of the average rejections per acceptance line. The licorice line, though, is my annual acceptance rate. It’s naturally going to be more jagged because the averaging effect has less to work with to smooth the curve before the whole thing hits a hard reset at the beginning of each new year. You can clearly see the beginning of the year 2021, because it is the first time licorice diverges from magenta. Do you know what else you can clearly see? The beginning of 2023. It’s that massive jump upward out of nowhere. If you want to, just to be sure, you can count back nine acceptances (that’s how many I currently have in 2023) to see exactly where it started. It’s the jump.
Now, what am I getting paid for all of this?
All of those tall bars! Such a contrast to last year when I had exactly one tall bar that was a fluke (token $10 payment for a 100-word story from a now-defunct market that accepted 75% of submissions). Beyond the really tall bars (including my most recent sale, which I’m still not allowed to talk about, but which set a new personal record for payment per word), notice the midsize bars in the most recent quarter of the graph or so. Semipro sales are coming in with more regularity. The average is not spectacular, but it is trending upward and is the highest it has ever been at 1.41¢/word. I’m a little less worried about that because I market aggressively to the reprint market, and reprints tend not to pay well. I figure it’s more money for little additional effort, so I’m happy for every reprint, even if it depresses this average.
Finally, the least important graph: acceptances per calendar month.
Ideally, my acceptances would be spread evenly across the year. There’s no real advantage or disadvantage to that or any other distribution, but I see two things about an even distribution that I like:
- An even distribution shields me from slumps, both statistical and emotional. I like a steady stream of fairly predictable success and failure. That’s just who I am.
- The closer I get to an even distribution, the more it feels like I’m arriving as a professional author. Averages have taken over. Outliers are smoothed. I’m established.
This is certainly a more even distribution than it was last year, but December and March still dominate. We’ll see what next year looks like.
Do you see now more clearly why I’ve been feeling much better about my career recently? Now, if only I could actually get the time to write and complete stories, then get them out to the market. Maybe I could build on this success.
(To all of those aspiring authors out there reading my blog: please note I’m four years into this, and the level of success I’m glowing about is still so far below the poverty line as to be laughable. This is not success. This is only success by comparison to the devastating 3.5 years before that.)
- Days since I quit my job: 1,453
- Submissions: 1,428
- Rejections: 1,273
- Withdrawals: 57
- Acceptances: 30
Self-defeatist Navel-gazing 