Post History

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/5622
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/5622
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

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](http://pimpmynovel.blogspot.com/2010/02/11000-rejections-on-wall-11000_22.html) before he got published.
- Mette Ivie Harrison wrote [20 novels that never got published](http://www.intergalacticmedicineshow.com/cgi-bin/mag.cgi?do=columns&vol=mette_ivie_harrison&article=017).
- J.K. Rowling famously got [12 rejections for _Harry Potter_](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._K._Rowling#Harry_Potter) before selling it to Bloomsbury. 
- Elsewhen in England, Terry Pratchett published a short story commercially [at age 15](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Pratchett#Background).

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](http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3201014&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=21#post386834309).
- In 2006, literary agent Miss Snark would read [one full for every 100 manuscripts](http://misssnark.blogspot.com/2006/04/writing-well-is-not-comparison-its.html); 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.

Original score: 12