How many times do you submit a story before it sells?  The flippant answer is as many times as it takes to sell it.  In reality, that’s not such a flippant answer—it’s the truth—it’s just not particularly helpful.

I know people who trunk stories after only a few rejections.  If I gave up that easy, I wouldn’t have many sales.  Neither would Nebula-nominated writer Vylar Kaftan, who averages over six submissions before selling a story.  Ms. Kaftan has written two interesting, must-read, guest posts at the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA) website.  One is a question answer about her submission habits and the other contains her submission history since about 2004.  If you’re an aspiring writer, or even and old pro, I recommend you check them out.

While I don’t have the same number of sales as Ms. Kaftan, here’s the number of times I submitted each of my nine published or forthcoming stories: 1, 1, 2, 3, 3, 4, 6, 9, 12.  That averages out to 4.5 submissions for each sale.  Digging a little deeper into the numbers, there’s no relationships between the number of times submitted and the order in which I wrote them.  However, a relationship does exist between the type of sale (pro vs. semi-pro) and the number of times submitted, but I expected that because I generally exhaust the pro  markets before moving to the semi-pro ones.

So the take home message is don’t trunk your stories too soon.  Writing is about rejection, which for me is an average of about four rejections before I make a sale.  On occasions, those rejections can be considerably higher, as many as eleven “no thank yous” (so far, but bound to go up).  No one ever said publishing was easy (and the odds seem to support that), so if you want to publish, grow a thick skin, write, and submit and submit and submit and submit…