Tom Petty said it best. The waiting is the hardest part.

I’ve currently got four stories pending at various markets with a bunch more ready to go. I’m finding that it’s easier to keep moving if I have a number of irons in the fire simultaneously, so to speak. Writing and editing short shorts (around 1K) is a lot easier than working on the longer ones, but the longer ones obviously are more ambitious. I’m seriously reworking “Black Jack Davy,” a Clarion submission story and one that’s got favorable rejections to the few places I originally sent it. Post-Clarion, I realized that it was a mess mostly due to the skipping timeline and general wordiness. So I’m trimming and getting it ready to do the rounds at the pro markets and might give it a shot at the Writers of the Future (WOTF) contest.

I wondered if I got into Scifiction.com by next week (which I probably won’t) whether it will get back to me in time for the next WOTF contest deadline, ending May 31. The answer: probably not, at least according to the Black Hole Listing site, where writers report market response/rejection times.

I copied today’s results (4-5-05) into Excel and pasted the results below. SFWA Pro markets are listed first, sorted by average response time followed by other high-quality markets I’m most familiar with. Columns are the market, average response time in days, minimum (i.e. fastest) response time, maximum (i.e. slowest) response time, and data points (i.e. submissions to the Black Hole.)

So what does this mean? I dunno. Most of the averages are consistent with my experience, although Cicada averages 100 days; mine was 160. Believe me, you’re counting those minutes over two months of wondering what’s taking so long, especially if you think the story is good.

Suppose I have a story I think has real merit and deserves to be in only one of the “biggest” pro sci-fi/fantasy markets. For the sake of argument, let’s say I send it to F&SF, Strange Horizons, Analog, Scifi.com, Asimov’s, and Realms of Fantasy and because of their lack of vision, they all reject it. If all of these magazines hit their average response times, it’ll take 10-11 months for the story to make this circuit. And that’s assuming the story is sent out the very next day after receiving the rejection.

Furthermore, I get the feeling that stories that do sell get even longer response times. This certainly seems to be the case for Realms of Fantasy, where stories plucked from the slush pile take 6-8 months until the author is notified the story has been accepted. There’s nothing saying after 6 months the editor can’t say, “Close, but nah.” That makes the wait potentially even longer across the board for good stories.

Still, what’s the alternative? The lesson I’ve learned is quality over quantity. When I first started sending stuff out (just over a year-and-a-half, but it seems like an eternity ago) I had the exact opposite mentality; Send lots of pretty good stories and eventually something will stick. I found out that if you send out lots of pretty good stories you get lots of pretty good rejections.

The only way to sell a story is to really work it over patiently and make it as good as it can be. Good stories sell. Pretty good stories don’t. The trick is to get as many good stories in circulation to help ease the waiting game, so you’re never more than a month or so out from an expected response.

And then there’s the small matter of whether stories you think are good really are good, and that even good stories won’t work for all markets. That’s for another day.