May the Odds Be in Your Favor

[rynling]

During the past month I saw a call for submissions for a super-niche genre fiction zine. The zine’s account has two dozen followers on Twitter, and the submissions post has three dozen notes on Tumblr.

Since it’s a digital zine that didn’t seem to have a lot of interest, I figured that it was probably a reasonable use of my time to custom-craft a piece of writing according to the zine’s super-niche specifications. I put a solid month of work into the story and felt confident when I submitted it.

I received a rejection email yesterday evening. What the head editor wrote is that, although he and the other two editors genuinely loved my submission, it fit into three distinct thematic categories that already had other finalists. Apparently they only accepted 15 stories… out of more than 350 submissions.

Again, the zine’s Twitter account has 25 followers, and its submissions post only has 35 notes on Tumblr. This is a small zine that isn’t listed on Duotrope. And, I can’t emphasize this strongly enough, the call for submissions was highly specific and super niche. How did they get more than 350 submissions?

Is this just the level of competition people are up against these days? Did I perhaps pick the absolute worst time to start a career as a writer?

Comments

[runicmagitek]

w a t

I made like, ten different faces while reading this. None of them good. Because what the fuck.

Also?

> Did I perhaps pick the absolute worst time to start a career as a writer?

Same :/

[rynling]

It wasn't such a bad rejection, all things considered. The editor was really sweet and kind and apologetic about it.

Still, it's becoming increasingly difficult to separate "what I want to write" from "what I think will be successful." It's even more difficult when virtually nothing is successful. I would tell myself to git gud, but there's not much you can do when confronted with that level of competition. I feel like writing has become a numbers game at this point.

This is one of the many reasons why AO3 always gets money from me at every fundraiser. I don't think people appreciate how revolutionary it is that AO3 is a visually attractive and well-maintained platform where just anyone can put their stories out there with zero gatekeeping whatsoever.

[runicmagitek]

> Everything you said.

Same. 100% :( especially the whole "what I want to write" vs "what I think will be successful" bit. A couple of times a year I'm always like "hmmmm maybe I'll take a stab at original stuff again" but then remember all the hoops I'd probably have to jump through along with mutilating whatever I wrote. Yeah, not this year. Back to my silly fics about my faves smoochin'.

ALSO.

> AO3 is a visually attractive and well-maintained platform

So my mom has a graduate degree in library science and when I visited her before the pandemic, she asked me what I was doing on my laptop (posting fics, like ya do) and I showed her AO3 and she was fucking blown away by how slick everything was. I think she spent two hours dicking around on the site from her tablet and going, "Where was this search function when I worked in a library" and "this is so easy!" and "ooooo I found The Porn!"

....if you ever wonder where I get it from, there ya go.