Writing Report! Writing Report!
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My 2020 submitting and writing stats
[I am imagining the title being sung to the tunes of The Octonaut’s “Creature Report!” but if you have somehow not been watching this television show for children, I guess that won’t make sense.]
It’s that time of year again when I look back at my writing hits and misses for the year. I’ve been doing these roundups the past few years, and you can find last year’s report here. I think that if you accomplished any tiny goal in 2020 then you should count that as a huge win because it has definitely been a year.
Despite it being such a strange year, I did achieve one of my super long-term goals this year of signing a book contract. Did not exactly have writing said book during a global pandemic on my vision board, but I’ll take what I can get.
Because of the global pandemic and the fact that I shifted to focus on the book mid-year, I haven’t done as much freelancing or reading as I thought I might, but that’s okay. I still got some writing in and actually finished some things!
Here are pitching/submitting stats for 2020:
- Number of pitches/submissions sent: 49
- Number of rejections: 25
- Number of non-responses (which is really just another type of rejection): 13
- Number of acceptances: 11
- Acceptance rate: 22%
As I’ve said in the past, the acceptance rate is a little arbitrary because I could be submitting to reach pubs or more-likely-to-publish-me pubs, and I typically do a mix of both. Last year it looks like I was at 24%, but it’s a variable number.
A few other fun facts:
- Most rejections from a single pub: 8 (McSweeney’s for the win). With 2 acceptances there this year that put my acceptance rate at 25%, last year I had 4 acceptances and 7 rejections there, so my acceptance rate was better, but I have been up and down with them over the years, which I talked about here.
- Runners up: New York Times with 5 rejections and New Yorker Shouts with 3 rejections.
- Most rejections for a single piece before an acceptance this year: 6
