Every year I do this post to publicly state how much I am submitting and how many of those submissions result in successfully publishing one of my works. Perhaps it will help any readers to gage themselves against what I have done each year. Perhaps many writers submit far more works than I do. Perhaps many submit far fewer. The idea of doing this began when I read a writer's blog (sorry, I cannot remember who) and they said they submit around 100 works per year. I decided I would see how many works I could submit each year. I found that I could submit between 35 and 50 works per year. I now try to work toward that 50 mark as much as possible. I have also found that the more works I submit each year the more of those works end up getting published, on average anyway.
So anyway, here are this year's numbers. I submitted a total of 8 books, although it was actually the same book submitted 8 times, which brings up another point. This is the total number of submissions, which means if the same book is submitted many times (8 in this case) it still counts as 8 submissions. The same holds true of short stories, poems, etc. I am working very hard to finish the follow-up to that first book, and I think I am getting close to deciding to self-publish that first book if I receive a few more rejections. Which brings up yet another point, some of these works I am still waiting to hear back on, including a few submissions of this novel.
I also had 29 short story submissions. Unfortunately, only one of those were successful this year, but again, a few of those submissions are still waiting on replies. That makes this year an anomaly in that I submitted more items than most other years, 48 total submissions, my second highest number of all time, but I had only one sale (again, so far). That success was "Beheaded" which appears in
Madame Gray's Poe-Pourri, pictured above, and
available on Amazon here. I also
blogged about that particular sale here.
I had 11 poetry submissions, without any sales, and no non-fiction submissions this year. Just for comparison, 29 short story submissions is tied for my second highest, and 11 poetry submissions is tied for fourth highest. Eight novel submissions comes in second highest.
The most submissions I ever made in a year was 2018 where I hit 53, and it got me the most published works in a year as well with five total. This year saw my second most total at 48 as noted earlier. Third was in 2019 when I reached 47 total submissions, followed by 2021 with 44 total submissions, fourth was 2010 with 42 total, and 2020 with 35 total.
My goal for the coming year may be a little lower as I would like to start working on my longer works once again, namely my follow-up novel, and that Frankenstein project and hopefully get them both sent out to potential publishers or even agents.
I keep track of these on an Excel spreadsheet, and only recently started keeping track of total submissions each year. I find it helps me compete with myself to keep getting my works out there. If you see fit, feel free to tell me how many submissions you made last year, and how that looks compared to your other years. If it makes you feel better, I've had a lot of years with only a handful of submissions and even a few years with goose eggs.🥚😊
