Does anyone know the average number of times a new author has to submit before acceptance?
I can't find any authoritative citation for this. As an example, I know that the average entrepreneur has to be involved in 12 new businesses before he has a successful enterprise. That is the national average for new business owners. If anyone knows the average number of times that a new author submits a story before his first publication, either nationally in the US or regionally, I would be appreciative. Please provide where you learned this information too, if you can.
Edit: I am NOT asking how many it's likely I will have to submit, I am looking for an average for authors in general. I know that the government keeps statistics like this, that is where I got the citing above for my entrepreneur statistic, but I can't find this data.
Obviously I am asking so I have a target to hit in mind. I have always figured when looking at these statistics that this might be the one time in my life that I'm super unlucky and I may need to do 3x the average to succeed: As an entrepreneur I expect to have to start 36 businesses before any of them make me rich. I am in the teens. I would like a national average as I begin so I know what kind of expectation is reasonable for an average person. I can also look at that number and hope that this could be my Cinderella story, I used to for businesses, and hope to get lucky in about half that number (It obviously didn't happen). I always hope for the best and plan for the worst.
With that in mind, since people asked about my case specifically in the comments:
During the synopsis writing and initial few chapters, I will be submitting short stories to show prior publication. I will be submitting finished, edited manuscripts. I will be submitting them as incomplete, with as many chapers finished as I have finished at the time of submission. Eventually the submssions will be a complete first book with chapters from a second. I have the material and I hope the will for 6-9 books. I plan on releasing in triliogies, 2 or 3 total, depending on what the synopsis I am working on ultimately calls for.
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It’s hard to give a useful answer to this question, because the vast majority of work submitted for publication is really, really awful. One editor has a “rough breakdown of manuscript characteristics, from most to least obvious rejections” here (scroll down to the numbered list). If you can write a story that is engaging to any reader who is not a close relative or otherwise concerned about hurting your feelings, then you are not guaranteed a sale, but you are already ahead of the curve, so to speak.
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I'm afraid I've never seen any statistics on this. As the comments have noted, this is a very difficult estimate to make - there are many different definitions of "getting published" (does self-publishing count? e-Publishing? Vanity? Short stories? Posthumously?), and it's practically impossible to track the many, many writers who never got past the rejection stage.
What is more readily available is finding individual accounts of specific writers' paths to publication. These are more anecdotal than statistical, and tend towards the extreme edges:
- Jacob M. Appel's short stories netted him 11,000 rejections before he got published.
- Mette Ivie Harrison wrote 20 novels that never got published.
- J.K. Rowling famously got 12 rejections for Harry Potter before selling it to Bloomsbury.
- Elsewhen in England, Terry Pratchett published a short story commercially at age 15.
Though, again, these are mere anecdotes, they do imply (at the very least) an extremely wide variation in this particular datum.
Somewhat more available is the other direction: what percentage of incoming manuscripts does an agent or a publisher accept? You'll find varying accounts; two that I found most easily are:
- An NYC literary agency winds up representing about 1 manuscript in 4000.
- In 2006, literary agent Miss Snark would read one full for every 100 manuscripts; doing the math from her description, I think that comes out (by generous estimation) to representing approximately 1 author per 1200 queries.
Hypothetically, you might guesstimate how many venues there are for novels, say that each one accepts, say, 1 in 2000, and get some approximation.
But what you might really want to take to heart is the rest of Miss Snark's post:
There is no reliable way to measure the acceptance ratio at a publisher because there is no reliable measure of what's pitched. Do you count manuscripts received? Do you count each version? Do you count pitches that fell so flat the editor said "ix-nay on the rap-cay".
[...]
Sufficient unto the day is this: we ARE looking for good work. Write really really well and you won't need to worry about who else is there cause you'll rise to the top of the heap. The fact that there is a lot of other stuff out there is no indication of the quality of that work. Most of it is dreck.
Take from that what you will.
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