Sunday, I woke to an acceptance email for one of my oldest stories. It’s been on submission since 2018. It went out 32 times. THIRTY-TWO! Let’s look a little closer at those stats.
First Submission Date: 4/21/2018.
Total Submissions: 32
Form Rejections: 24
Personal Rejections: 4
Withdrawals/Never Responded: 3
Acceptances: 1
Final Submission Date: 7/21/2022.
That’s over FOUR YEARS of submitting. Of sending out this story over and over and over, often waiting months between responses, only to hear time and again some iteration of “this one’s not for us.” And as the months turned to years, the doubt crept in:
Maybe this story needs trunked. What if I run out of markets to send it to? Maybe it’s bad timing? It got good responses early on, but has been form rejected more and more lately so maybe editors’ tastes are changing? Maybe I should give up?
I told myself I’d get to some arbitrary number of submissions and then trunk it. I’d put it away forever and move on. That number was 50 submissions. So, still plenty of chances to get it sold. But, it turns out, I only needed 32 chances. 32 chances across four years of waiting and hoping.
This is what I mean when I say writing is a marathon. Not just the act of creation itself, but the publishing side too. At every step of the process, we wait. We submit and then we wait for a response. If we get accepted, then we wait for edits. We do the edits, send it back, then we wait for the contract. It comes, weeks later, and then we wait for payment and publication.
All while we’re bursting at the seams with excitement. You just want to scream about it to everyone, but you even have to wait to do that!
If you don’t know by now, I am NOT a patient person. But I’m learning. Because writing and publishing is a marathon. You keep going, you keep believing even when most people would give up. And even if you stop believing, you STILL. KEEP. GOING.
There’s a certain stubbornness that’s necessary to be a writer. Luckily I’ve got that in spades.
So if you’re writing and submitting and w a i t i n g what feels like forever… keep going! Don’t give up. Don’t give in. You’re running a marathon, remember?
You can’t stop now.
BZ
