Out of curiosity, I crunched some numbers the other day regarding the slush stories I’ve passed along to Shawna since I started working with RoF. I started back in May of ‘05, and stories ranged back to late February of that year (there was some backlog when I joined the team). To date, Shawna has bought stories submitted to us as recently as May of 2009.* Of these stories, she’s accepted roughly 20% of the slush I’ve passed along. That’s fairly big body of work I’m using to come up with this number, so I guess this % is fairly accurate. Of course, this % goes down significantly if you take all the slush stories I’ve pulled that have seen publication against all the slush submissions I’ve ever dealt with. I’m not about to figure out that number. But after my first year with the magazine, I actually posted some statistics on this sort of thing and related tidbits. You can see that here. This particular statistic I’m providing isn’t exactly new, which you can see if you follow the link. But the information is drawn from a much bigger body of work. But interestingly enough, the % remains about the same all these years later.
So, yeah. If I pluck you from the slush, based on almost five years of work with the magazine**, my math dictates that your odds of being accepted shoot up to roughly a 1 in 5. Make of that what you will.
*If you’re wondering why the last stories Shawna has made purchases for go all the way back to May ‘09, it’s because of how long we we were closed to submissions (until the middle of October ‘09) after Warren bought the magazine. We did a couple of buying runs to clear out the backlog for those stories stuck in limbo from the magazine’s closure, but there hasn’t been a buying run since. But the next buying run should be for stories submitted as recently as the middle of November ‘09, so we’ll be back on track after this happens.
ETA: **The five years number is somewhat muddled in regards to this statistic. I mentioned May of ‘09 above, which would put me right around four years at that time. But like I said, we’ve done two buying runs since then to clear out the backlog. And there was a slush survivor or two mixed in those buying runs. Just providing another data point for those interested in this sort of thing.
