2013 Year in Review

If 2012 was a fantastic year for me on the short fiction front, 2013 was... a decent year. Frankly, I'm honestly tempted to classify it as a very good year solely on the basis of my sale of a story to Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Getting a story into one of the big print digest magazines has long been one of my personal goals, so that was a Big Deal. The "problem" (such as it is) is that when you leave that single sale aside, the year was only so-so. I didn't sell to any other notable new markets, I sold fewer stories than in 2012, etc.

Overall, I made a total of 299 non-reprint submissions in 2013. I received 275 responses, some of which were for submissions sent in 2012. (Conversely, some of my 2013 submissions did not receive responses during the calendar year.) For those submission responses:

• Six submissions received no reply.
• Three submissions were withdrawn.
• I had 16 acceptances. (I also had a paying reprint acceptance and four non-paying reprint acceptances.)
• And I had 249 rejections.

Of the 17 paying acceptances:

• Six were to pro-rate SFWA/MWA-qualifying markets. (Including the EQMM story here.)
• One was to a pro-rate market not on the SFWA list.
• Five were to semi-pro markets.
• Five were to markets which pay, but either have a per-word rate below semi-pro rates or which pay a flat rate which generally falls below semi-pro, including the reprint sale.

So, the good news is that the decrease in sales came from the semi-pro and token rate markets.

I sold 17 different stories in 2012:

• Five of those were flash length (1,000 words or fewer)
• Eight were between 1,001 and 3,000 words.
• Four were over 3,000 words.

• Eight were fantasy stories.
• Five were science fiction stories.
• Two were mystery stories.
• Two were horror stories.

The genre breakdowns were pretty similar to 2012. Probably the most notably item in the above is that the percentage of stories which I sold at flash length decreased significantly from 50% to a bit over 25%.

So, the net is fewer sales but a higher percentage to pro-rate markets and a higher percentage of greater than flash fiction length. I'll call it a good year, yes. But I hope to have an even better one in 2014.