In emulation of the inimitable Christopher Green, I thought I’d post some stats on how I did toward my writing goals in 2009.
I sent out 27 submissions this year. Pretty modest compared to Mr. Green’s 75, but a personal best for me. (In previous years I sent out no more than 20 subs.) The increase is mostly because I kept my New Year’s resolution to keep my completed stories in circulation. The rejections came in and I sent them back out – amazing how that helps to keep things rolling along!
I sold five stories – three new stories and two reprints. Given that in 2007 and 2008, I sold, um, one story per year, this is definitely a record for me. My acceptance rate was about 18% if you count the reprints, or 12% if you only count the new ones. Either way, that’s ridiculously high for me considering my rate has been 0-5% up until now. I think this is mostly because I had a streak of good luck, with several stories hitting the right markets at the right time. I doubt I’ll be able to keep up that kind of streak in 2010. But, hey, very cool that I met my secret goal of selling five stories this year, even if I had to cheat a bit by counting reprints.
Of the stories I sold this year, on average they were rejected by 5.3 markets before they found a home. There’s a widely quoted stat out there that the average story is rejected something like 20 times before it sells. If that’s true (and it seems about right), 5.3 seems pretty good. Either way, like Chris said, the clear lesson is not to be demoralized by a rejection or two.
In terms of actual writing, my goal was to finish five stories and I finished three. I have a fourth one that’s close to done and another that I finished a draft of this year, so I was sort of close on this one. I had also hoped to finish the first half of my novel, and finished maybe a quarter of it. All in all I’m not going quite as fast as I’d like, but I’m definitely doing slow but steady productivity, which I feel pretty good about considering what a hectic year it was and that my day job demands way more than 40 hours a week.
Just to finish the rundown of how I did on my New Year’s resolutions:
- Reading on subway: I kept this one, mostly, and did a lot more reading this year than last year. My unwritten goal was to read three books per month, and I came pretty close to that – it looks like I’ll be at about 34 books at the end of the year.
- Blog posting: My goal was 100 blog posts, and it looks like I’ll hit 54 or so. Very hard to do any blogging when things get intense at work, and then so often when I do have free time I think I should be writing fiction instead of blogging. I may just have to accept that I’m not going to be a super-active blogger any time soon.
- Swimming: Totally flunked this one. Really do need to get back to it, though – hopefully in 2010…
So all in all, of seven 2009 goals, I largely hit three, made decent progress on a couple others, and totally missed two. Not too bad all in all…
More 2009 wrap-up and 2010 goals soon to come!
Bread & Magic 