Improve Your Chances of Getting Published
When I first started submitting stories for publication, I figured I wouldn’t be considered for any of the more popular and competitive magazines. I set out to find possibilities that I thought I might actually have a chance at being accepted at.
First I read a ton of stories in journals, on websites and many that were self published. I decided on an extremely rough estimate of where I fell in terms of the strength of my stories. I figured it wasn’t entirely impossible that I was at the midpoint with about half of the stories submitted to journals that considered submissions from new writers better than what I wrote and 50 percent weaker than my stories.
I then looked at acceptance stats, to find journals that accepted 50 percent of the stories submitted. I thought that a 50 percent rejection rate was pretty high and I’d have a decent shot at acceptance at all those journals. Looking back at how naive I was makes me laugh.
The stats were clearly much more formidable than I anticipated. Not unusual, I found numbers such as the Number of submissions per year being 3000 with acceptance rates at .01 percent. In other words, out of 3000 submissions a year, a whopping 30 were accepted? I soon found that submissions for journals that were considered good choices for unpublished and emerging writers to submit to had anywhere from…
