Profile
Recently I've had several conversations with various people in which I've tried to find a way to express my sense of how much visibility various publications have in various online communities. I have a general feeling that SH is very high-profile in the communities we interact with; for example, I think everyone on the Rumor Mill knows who we are (though I'm not even entirely sure of that). But it's hard for me to get a sense of how known we are outside of those circles.
So I was intrigued just now to notice one item that I think is somewhat relevant: the Submitting to the Black Hole submissions-tracking page lists, for each sf market, minimum reported response time, maximum reported response time, average response time, and number of data points. SH certainly doesn't have the lowest average response time, though it's quite respectable on that front. But what I just noticed is that there are only two markets on that page that have a higher number of data points than we do: Asimov's and F&SF.
In other words, if you rank all markets (print, online, magazine, anthology, etc) by number of submissions that have been reported on that page, we rank third.
That doesn't say anything about overall submission volume, of course; we don't get nearly as many submissions as the big print prozines. Nor does it say anything about our visibility in the world at large; what little evidence I've seen suggests that there's a big overlap between Rumor Mill denizens and people who report response times on the Black Hole page, so really, this may just be a restatement of my original impression that we're well-known on the Rumor Mill. But I still think it's pretty cool.
What, me obsessive?