Latest SH fiction milestone

11 Comments

We recently received our 6000th submission. (Or else we will in the next couple days, depending on how you count. You'd think counting submissions would be more of an exact science than it turns out to be.)

Submission volume has been oddly low these past several months, after slowly and steadily increasing over the entire previous lifetime of the magazine; not sure what's up with that. Not ultra-low, just a bit lower than before; averaging a little under 200 subs a month, instead of a little over. Probably just natural variation; probably not even statistically significant.

Response time over the past six months has averaged 25 days, a bit higher than it usually is. I suppose that the slight increase in average response time might account for the slight decrease in overall volume. Too many variables.

Have you noticed that when I have work to do, I start obsessing over statistics? Time to get moving, Jed. Deadline impends.

11 Responses to “Latest SH fiction milestone”

  1. Jay Lake

    What are the levels of your high volume submitters?

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  2. Jed

    Hmm. I’m not quite sure what you mean, but if I’m understanding the question right: the ten people who’ve sent us the largest number of stories (ignoring the two who cheated by sending us multiple stories under different names at the same time, which did not go over well with us when we found out) have sent anywhere from 18 to 29 submissions. (I count a serial as a single story.)

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  3. Jay Lake

    Yes, you answered the question I meant to ask.

    For my own part, I know how many I’ve sent (serial submissions included), and I was curious how that calibrated. Thanks!

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  4. Jenn Reese

    Wowzers! I think I’ve only sent 3 or 4. I need to get with it!

    My guess on the drop is summer, though. More time to goof off, less time to write and submit. Or does your submission total stay pretty even throughout the year?

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  5. Jed

    Yeah, Jenn, send us more stories!

    Submission volume varies a fair bit over the course of a year, and there are so many variations due to specific things (like the January spikes following December closures) that it’s hard to make any useful generalizations. But I will note that July of 2002 was one of our highest-volume months ever. (But July of 2001 was lower than surrounding months.)

    Oh, and our highest-volume recent month was April, and volume’s been dropping a little each month since then. But probably not enough to be signficant.

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  6. celia

    Early April or late? Was it Polyphony rejects or just ‘good lord, if I’m going to claim to be a writer on my taxes, I should be sending something out?’

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  7. Tempest

    what, you mean I cannot sub to you under K. Tempest Bradford and then Tempest Bradford-Mieville and then Finley Larkin and then Glue Stick Girl and then Toiya K. Finley and then Charles Coleman Finlay all on the same day????? What is the publishing business coming to?

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  8. Celia

    I prefer sending them frightening juvenalia under your name, Tempest. Well, one of your names anyways.

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  9. Jed

    Celia: Now that I look, a lot of the April peak was due to Zombie Unicorn Day, so perhaps I shouldn’t put too much weight on that. 🙂 Though there was another spike at the end of April; was that when Polyphony rejects went out? I’ve lost track.

    Tempest: Sorry, I should’ve said “But if Tempest does it, that’s okay.” An exception for every rule. (That’s my campaign slogan.)

    Btw, because I have a huge amount of important stuff to do and not much time to do it in, I actually made a graph today (using Excel) of submission volume over time. It shows a pretty steady and fairly linear rise from when we started through 4/03, and a bit of a decline since then. But there’ve been declines before; I imagine this is only temporary.

    Also btw, I seem to have failed to note the passing of the third anniversary of our first submission, about a month back. That means we’ve averaged about five and a half submissions a day over the past three years. Which means I’ve read an average of maybe 10K words of slush a day (call it 30-40 manuscript pages) every day for the past three years. Which sounded like a lot to me ’til I realized that Gardner averages over 30 stories a day and looks at them all himself.

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  10. Jed

    Oh—and I think July of 2002 was when Penny Arcade linked to us, giving us a huge traffic spike on the heels of the smaller spike from the Hugo nomination. So that might explain why our submission volume was so high that month. Looking at the graph in terms of when various events happened, it almost looks like punctuated equilibrium (if you’ll pardon the phrase) rather than a steady increase—relatively steady through much of 2001 (with a drop in September, of course), spikes in January and in the wake of major traffic-increasing events.

    Okay, I’ll stop now.

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  11. M. Hogarth

    Aw, but it was just getting interesting! 🙂

    Seriously, as one of the biggest e-zines to survive three years and actually prosper and get attention, I find the statistics interesting (just like I enjoy watching the fund raising to see how it goes). SH is doing something right . . . I wish you could spread it around. 🙂

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