Alex Shvartsman's Speculative Fiction

Submission Statistics

As of this evening I have read and responded to exactly 100 submissions (counting unsolicited stories only). I read 100 stories totaling 207,000 words (that’s about two novels worth) between June 4th and today. Please note that most of these submissions are from professional writers who were invited to submit, members of SFWA and members of Codex Writers — so the statistics are significantly skewed as compared to what may be expected from an upcoming open submissions call.

Here are some interesting numbers:

Of 100 stories read I bought four.  Seven more were strong enough to advance to round 3 (stories I’m highly likely to buy but not 100% sure yes, and will make final decisions at the end of the submission period). I sent a rewrite request for one more story. The remaining 88 were rejected.

Exactly 25 of the submitted stories were advanced to the second round and read by the full editorial board. The remaining 75 were rejected in the first round.

Almost every submission was responded to — with either a rejection or a bump up into the second round — within 24 hours.

A total of 40 submissions have been reported on Duotrope. However, 3 of the 4 acceptances (75%) were reported, as opposed to just 30 of 75 rejections (about 40%).

The most common reason for rejecting a story was its apparent lack of funny. I strongly encourage everyone who plans on submitting to the anthology to read the excerpts from the accepted stories on this blog as well as the sample stories linked at the bottom of the submission guidelines page. We want speculative humor, not just a lighthearted story with a couple of funny lines here and there.

Regarding Artwork

I received queries from several artists who expressed interest in becoming involved in the project. I honestly didn’t have a ready-made answer for them. Beyond cover art and layout (which had been commissioned already) I had no intention of including interior art. However, I can be persuaded otherwise. If you’re interested in producing interior artwork for the book (either original artwork or using your existing pieces), please feel free to query at the submissions address. I did not budget for this, so all I can offer interior artists at this time are copies of the book and publication credit. But, if you’re interested anyway, do e-mail me.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 21st, 2012 at 11:42 pm and is filed under Publishing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.