After focusing intensely on submitting short stories in 2024, I have to admit, I fell off hard in 2025. However, I haven’t been completely dormant. I’ve been writing a little and submitting a little, so I figured it’s about time for an update.
The Joy of Simultaneous Submissions
I have two stories out on submission right now, and both have been rejected a few times, mostly by big pro markets.
I submit to these big markets first, simply because an acceptance will come with a bigger check and more prestige. It would be fun to have my name on a cover that has been graced with genre greats; the magazines that I read when I was young.
Am I confident that my stories are a high enough caliber for those markets? No, but judging the quality of fiction is such a personal, opinionated thing, and doubly so when you’re the one who wrote it. So why not? It’s worth a shot.
The big magazines and websites can afford to be picky and demanding. They often have months-long slush pile backlogs, and don’t allow multiple or simultaneous submissions. Once you’ve submitted, your story could be in limbo for a quarter, six months, sometimes even longer. All for that <1% chance at a big acceptance.
The stories I have out right now are past all that. They had their shot. Now I’m submitting to lower-paying and less well-known markets. There are three reasons why this is nice.
- There are a lot of them! Even in the face of limited reading windows, narrow topics/genres, and themed issues, most stories have at least a couple reasonable places to submit in a given month.
- They have smaller slush piles, and that often equates to higher acceptance rates and faster responses.
- Many of them accept simultaneous submissions, which means you can send a story to several places at once.
So even though I only have two stories I’m currently submitting, I’ve been able to make 11 submissions, which isn’t too bad.
Timing the Market
Another thing I’ve noticed is that there seem to be a lot of markets that open for submissions in the summer, and close at the end of July or August. There are reading windows all year round, but there are also these larger trends. December and January seem to be the worst times to submit, with so many people out on holiday in the US and Europe.
I still check the Duotrope themed submissions calendar and publishing news pages fairly frequently. Their “Fiction publishers that have recently opened to submissions” list is a great way to track reading windows without trying to keep tabs on all the markets in your genres. The theme deadlines list is easy to glance through to see if anything matches any of the stories that I’m currently shopping around.
Drafts and Critiques
I’m still very behind on my rough drafts and critiques. I wrote a couple stories this year, and I’m now sitting on four that are somewhere between “technically complete” and “needs a final polish.”
The downside of using Critters for critique is that I’m not very good at keeping up my three(ish) critiques per month, so when I have stories I want to submit, I tend to have to do a couple months of critiques to get caught back up. However, with my finished stories out on submission, I really have no excuse. Aside from revision being the toughest part of the job.
The rest of August is going to be busy. I have a family vacation planned for the end of the month, and the kids are back in school the week after.
I’ve set myself a lofty goal of trying to get all four stories edited before the end of the year. That works out to almost one story per month. Doesn’t sound too implausible…until you compare it to my track record for the year so far.
That’s all the news that’s fit to print. How is your summer writing going? Let me know in the comments.
Words Deferred 