My 2021 Writing Year Wrapped
It’s like Spotify wrapped, but with less music
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Time for the 2021 year-end writing wrap-up, which I have been doing for a few years now. You can find last year’s report here.
This year was a big year writing-wise for me because my first book came out. And because of the book, a lot of freelancing choices I made were in support of it and since I was trying to figure out how to help get the book into the world, I did not write as many freelance pieces as I may have liked. But I did get some done and here are the stats:
Freelancing report:
Here is a breakdown of some pitching stats for this year:
- Pitches/Submissions sent: 37
- Rejections (including some non-responses which I’m counting as rejections): 22
- Acceptances: 12
- Still out/waiting for responses: 3
So, it looks like my acceptance rate for the year is about 33% if I take out the ones I’m still waiting to hear back from, which is pretty good for me but as I’ve said before, it’s a little arbitrary because where I’m submitting matters as there are some places that are tougher than others to get into. I had set a goal to pitch 50 pieces which I did not meet! But turns out that working/parenting/pandemic/promoting a book took up a lot of my time. So it goes and I’m not too worried about failing to meet that one.
More fun facts:
- 22 submissions were short humor/satire pieces (I should note that some of these are submissions of the same piece since if I got a rejection from one place, I would often re-submit to another. (Also, since I find it interesting when others’ share the rejection info on these two sites, I can too: I got 3 rejections from New Yorker Shouts and 5 from McSweeney’s)
- 14 submissions were other nonfiction (essay, listicles etc.)
- Most rejections I’ve gotten on a single piece this year: 9. Still looking for a home for this piece (which is not humor but more of a servicey book-related piece). I still like the piece but may just set it aside for a while to see if I can re-work it later. As a side note, I once had an essay that got rejected over 30 times before it…
