Author: Neil Clarke Page 1 of 188

Today’s dive into the 2021 submission data for Clarkesworld Magazine looks at the volume of submissions from each author in 2021. Returning authors are authors that had submitted at least one story in 2020 or earlier.

The pool of regularly submitting authors is probably smaller than most people expected. An overwhelming majority of authors only submitted a single story in 2021 and nearly 70% of those people were submitting a story to us for the first time. Just under 2000 authors submitted more than one work in all of 2021 and of those half only submitted two. The ratio between US and non-US submissions remains consistent throughout the data. No one submitted more than 40 stories last year (which is the most anyone has done in the last three years). If a number is missing, no one submitted that number of times.

Returning authors represented 38% of all authors and 48% of all submissions. This is in line with previous years. (A surge in first time authors in 2020 led to the returning rate to fall to 36%. That’s the only time it’s gone that low, though actual number of returning authors was consistent.)

Why does this happen? I don’t have that data, but I can make some educated guesses. I know a lot of writers just drop out of the field. Imposter syndrome plus rejection can be a powerful one-two punch. Some discover that it isn’t their passion or that doing it for money ruins it for them. There’s also the possibility that our short rejection times are intimidating to some. And then there’s the occasional spikes in submissions we receive when we’re (unfortunately) featured on a “write for money” website. I imagine that most of those don’t stick around when they realize it isn’t as easy as stringing some words together (or in some cases, cut & pasting). There’s also socio-economic factors that play in for some. Just not enough time to devote to something that won’t help pay the bills.

On a much lesser scale, you have the impact of solicitation of more established authors, loss of writing time when novels enter the picture, and the common desire to be published more broadly (an author may start submitting work to other markets instead of yours in pursuit of that goal). I can’t stress just how small a percentage of the entire pool this is. It’s only impactful if “name” authors are your priority and we choose to treat them like everyone else. We value new authors just as highly. Both are an important part of the short fiction ecosystem.

Anyhow, what we’re seeing is probably some combination of the above and more. (Like the people who complain about not getting feedback.)

Some positives you won’t find in the graph (since it’s focused on submissions, not acceptances):

• In 2021, we accepted 8 works submitted by authors on their first try (with us).
• A bit more than half of all works accepted were by authors we had never published before.

and one piece of data I’d like to highlight:

• The lifetime average for all authors we accepted works by in 2021 was 7.5 rejections before their first sale to us. This represents a range of 1-62 Clarkesworld submissions before that first sale. (So don’t give up after the 8th!)

All the data I’ve been digging through (combined with 15 years of the submissions themselves) has had me thinking about the role of persistence, imposter syndrome, and self-rejection in submissions. Over the years, I’ve started coming around to thinking that in addition to skill, both persistence and (some reasonable level) of imposter syndrome are necessary to get a career off the ground. Imposter syndrome is to be fought when it’s the impetus behind self-rejection, but if we’re listening, it’s also the voice that reminds us we have more to learn. Persistence comes into play making us act on it. Learn more, improve your craft, and keep submitting work. Persistence only becomes troublesome when it veers into stubborness. That’s where you starting making the same mistakes over and over and expect a different result. (This is very common among the angry writers I hear from periodically. There’s typically a lack growth happening in their work from submission to submission.) The only good self-rejection is when it stops you from doing this. (Side note: An observable trajectory of improvement is a unifying thread behind every author we’ve worked with. I can see it in the submissions.)

As much as it would probably swamp us with more submissions, I’d love to see a little more of the right kind of persistence in this data, even if it only means one story every year or two. You decide what pace is healthy or practical. Just keep submitting them here, there, or wherever.

Today’s dive into Clarkesworld Magazine submissions data starts with updated versions of some graphs I shared last year. Country data is determined by originating IP address, which can obviously lead to some errors. For example, an American author living in Canada will be listed under Canada and a Chinese author living in China, but using a VPN located in Germany would be listed under Germany. Country names are provided by a third party database we use to process this data.

The results for both of these graphs were more-or-less expected. In 2020, we saw some significant increases in stories from outside the US. Like most data spikes we’ve seen over the years, there’s a momentary decline that lands somewhere between the previous two values. Naturally, we’d like it to keep moving upwards, but understand that this will take time.

At the end of last year, India was within 15 submissions of passing Australia for the #4 slot. We knew it would be a close race, but expected India (which has showed an annual growth trend) to pass them this year. The margin is still very close, 17 submissions in fact.

As the volume of stories from the US is such a significant percentage of those received, removing them allows a better view of what’s happening with the rest of the world:

I dislike having to group 120+ countries into “other” the numbers for many of them are so small that they become practically invisible on the graph. Graphing them together also allows me to demonstrate their collective importance, despite their individual size.

This year, I dug a bit deeper to give you a bit more detail into “other” by showing the top 15 countries by submission.

This is Mexico and Pakistan’s first time in the top 15.

“Other” for 2021 includes the following countries: Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, Antigua and Barbuda, Argentina, Armenia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Barbados, Belarus, Belgium, Bermuda, Bolivia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brunei Darussalam, Bulgaria, Burkina Faso, Cabo Verde, Cambodia, Cameroon, Chile, China, Colombia, Congo, Costa Rica, Croatia, Cyprus, Czechia, Denmark, Djibouti, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, Estonia, Eswatini, Ethiopia, Finland, France, Georgia, Ghana, Greece, Guadeloupe, Guatemala, Hong Kong, Hungary, Iceland, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jamaica, Japan, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Korea (Republic of), Kuwait, Latvia, Lebanon, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Maldives, Malta, Mauritania, Mauritius, Montenegro, Morocco, Myanmar, Nepal, North Macedonia, Norway, Oman, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Romania, Russian Federation, Rwanda, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Serbia, Sierra Leone, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, Somalia, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Tanzania, Thailand, Togo, Trinidad and Tobago, Tunisia, Turkey, Uganda, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, Venezuela, Viet Nam, Yemen, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.

I’ve created similar graphs for 2020, 2019, and 2018 so you can see how to top 15 have been changing over recent years.

And finally, for the latest installment in why acceptance rates are useless data:

As previously mentioned, our acceptance rate falls around 0.55%. In 2021, it was 0.52% for submissions from the US and 22.22% for submissions from Trinidad. The bad math take on this would be that we greatly favor Trinidad. (For those keeping score: bath math suggests that you submit novella length science fiction from Trinidad for optimal chances at success. Let’s blow you mind and mention that one of the stories we accepted from Trinidad was a science fiction novella.) Meanwhile, back in reality, the truth is that one or two people can dramatically change the results when the sample size is small, like with novellas or stories from Trinidad. Quality and quantity don’t have a stable relationship with one another. There is no secret formula to success.

The next series charts focus on wordcount for submissions from 2019, 2020, and 2021 at Clarkesworld Magazine. (We raised our upper wordcount limit on submissions to 22,000 at the start of 2019.) For the purposes of these graphs, wordcount is rounded to the nearest thousand.

The average wordcount for submissions during this window was approximately 4,800, but the most popular length was 2,000 or 3,000 words.  Prior to increasing our upper limit, the average length was a steady 4,600. There are clearly more short stories in circulation than novelettes (stories between 7,500-17,499 words) or novellas (stories over 17,500 words).

Please note that this graph starts at 75%. The volume of short stories is considerably larger than novelettes and novellas.

Now let’s look at what we accepted in those years:

Going by this you might think we prefer short stories (works under 7500 words), but it’s not a coincidence that, even with annual variation, it nearly mirrors portions of the shape of the submissions graph. We simply have a lot more to choose from.

And this provides me with another way to demonstrate the pointlessness of acceptance rates:

This chart, using a different perspective on the same data, makes it look like we actually favor novellas.

The only reason it looks like a smart move to be writing on the longer end of our wordcount range is that we receive fewer submissions at those lengths. A single acceptance carries considerably more weight than one for an equally strong (or even stronger) story at a shorter, more popular, length. While we would love to see more novelette and novella submissions, it shouldn’t be with the expectation that your odds of publication will be any higher by doing so. In fact, we expect that an increase in submissions at that length would simply flatten that graph.

The following is a representation of submissions to Clarkesworld Magazine broken down by genre since 2017.

Authors: Don’t read too much into this. Acceptance rates are fundamentally misleading. They suppose that all stories are equal in quality and we all know that isn’t true. We also know that the perception of quality is variable and usually evolving. You might even think that a particular genre is favored, but that doesn’t mean your odds are better if you write in that genre. The things that might keep us from accepting a dark fantasy story will also keep us from accepting a similar science fiction story. For example, being predictable or formulaic transcends genre. (No one ever thinks they are doing that, but it happens all the time. Editors read a lot and have emotional distance from your work, so we’re more likely to spot it.)

The outer ring is all submissions.
The middle ring is second round submissions.
The inner ring is acceptances.
All accepted stories came from open submission. We don’t solicit stories.

We stopped considering horror submissions in 2018. After dropping horror, our overall acceptance rate climbed to roughly 0.55%. Over the last five years, the percentage of submissions reaching the second round has dropped significantly and the conversion from second round to acceptance has grown from 8% to nearly 35%. These changes are the likely result of our work with the slush team and how we recruit, monitor, and provide feedback to them.

Standalone images for years 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021