On the Clarion board we often discuss markets. A couple guys have stories at Realms of Fantasy and have been waiting over six months with no response — one just got a form rejection after almost nine months.

I’ve only submitted a couple stories to Realms, the last one over eighteen months ago. They’re not really on my radar right now because of the long response times and rumors of frequently misplaced submissions. Clarion grads were also supposed to be plucked from the general slush, but not any more, allegedly. And on top of it all, they only publish six issues a year meaning they buy fewer stories annually than the other “big” markets.

So this got me thinking. How many stories do these markets publish annually?

In an entirely unscientific way, I did some searching on the Internet and put together the below table. It’s not 100% accurate but I think it’s fairly close. Analog, Asimov’s and F&SF share the same format and, unsurprisingly, publish about the same amount of fiction per issue. I did a quick scan of the table of contents for about ten issues for each and since Analog and Asimov’s count their double issue as two, I did the same for F&SF. Strange Horizons and SCIFI.com publish a story a week for the year. I think it’s probably 51 stories a year as I think they take a week off, but what the heck, I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt. Writers of the Future is a quarterly contest with three winners per quarter. The others are some other high-quality markets thrown in for comparison.

“Stories” include flash fiction, short stories, novelettes, novellas, and any part of a serialization.

I also threw in the average wait times for a manuscript based on the reports at Critter’s Black Hole which, in my experience, tend to be pretty accurate. I didn’t include pay but all of them are around 3-6 cents/word.

Again, this is only for a rough idea. For what it’s worth.