Acceptances and Rejections for March '21

Continuing from previous months, here's the rundown of my successes and failures for March.

Short Fiction

This month, I made 17 submissions and received 14 rejections and 3 acceptances with 12 outstanding. That's a decent change, especially since it includes a paying market that I hadn't cracked yet. But at best, that takes the edge off the below...

I have been rejected a total of 897 times since beginning submissions on February 13th, 2017. My overall acceptance rate is 3.6%.

Query Letters

Since November 21st, 2020, I have submitted a total of 120 query letters. Of these, there have been 55 rejections, 0 requests, 43 no-responses, and 22 outstanding.

Look, I don't know what I can say about this that I haven't already screamed about in the podcast.

Or on Twitter. Or on a couple agent profiles on QueryTracker. Maybe some other places as well - it's hard to remember.

I remain absolutely gobsmacked that I have zero requests. The one change here is that a lot of these agents are using some kind of form...except I contacted about half of them via email, and even with my typical dismal request rate, I would have expected to get a request by now.

I had planned to stop after the most recent iteration of The Fabulist, and it's clear that I should have done that. The gates are well and truly shut now; all I'm left with is a little bolt-hole through which to watch the narcissists at these agencies continue to sell their lies to optimistic would-be authors, building up their hopes to dangerous levels in order to receive that delicious adulation that all industry insiders crave.

Several entire agencies have told me to get lost, others have already shut me out three or four times which is a pretty good sign. One of them said that if I'm a good boy, I can query a different agent at the same agency in six months - mind you, without telling me what they didn't like. How nice of them.

Oh, and then there was the wretched little sociopath I mentioned in the podcast who really wanted me to feel bad for her because it was so hard to reject me.

I have started sending out the short stories on their own. Four are out now, and one has been rejected once. As to the agents...even if I wanted to send out more queries, I've just about run out of people to contact. We shall see how this goes.

Thank you, and expect to receive your next update at the end of April.