Prolificity

Filed under: Strange Horizons
7 Comments

While I'm (sort of) on the subject of that old journal entry about author gender and prolificness, perhaps an update is in order.

At the time, I mentioned that only one of the sixteen most prolific submitters to SH was female. That's changed: currently, six of the sixteen authors who've sent us 25 or more stories are female. (I think in both cases I picked the number 16 because there was a tie for 15th.)

I'm not gonna even attempt to speculate on causes at this point. But I thought it was an interesting change.

7 Responses to “Prolificity”

  1. Lisa Mantchev

    Oh geez. I’m pretty sure one of those women is me. I should go back and count up how many submissions it took to reach a sale, but that might be really depressing! *G*

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  2. SarahP

    Hmmm, that reminds me. Must send something to SH…

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  3. David Moles

    It’s probably time for me to come clean and admit that “Agatha C. Doyle”, “Mina S. Burroughs”, “Erika Blair”, “Mary B.R. Hubbard” and “Joan Michelle Harrison” aren’t real people, they’re just some of the names I use to submit my juvenilia and trunk stories. (The other names are male, but I’m not going to tell you what they are.)

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  4. David Moles

    P.S. I think the other one of the top six might be an A.I.

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  5. Jenn Reese

    Crap. I have a long way to go to reach 25 submissions. (Step 1, write a ton of new stories…)

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  6. Beth Bernobich

    Even if I count the rewrite requests as two submissions each, I’m still only halfway to the 25-sub mark.

    Hey, what if I submitted novel chapters! *g*

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  7. Jed

    I should have mentioned that quantity of submissions still doesn’t seem to have much correlation (positive or negative) with whether we publish someone. We’ve published stories by about half of our most prolific submitters; but we’ve also published a fair number of authors who’ve only ever sent us one story. And, of course, there are plenty of stories that we like but that we end up (for various reasons) not publishing.

    (But hey, if having a goal of a certain number of stories will make you more likely to write more, then go for it.)

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