Milestone: 20k!

Filed under: Strange Horizons
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The Strange Horizons fiction department received its 20,000th submission this evening.

Give or take. The official count overcounts some things and undercounts others; it includes most but not all solicited revisions, and some stories that got into the database before I noticed they were duplicates, and it's inconsistent about how it counts serials, and so on.

But there are now 20,000 stories in our database, dating back to late June of 2000.

And just barely under 8800 authors--again, that's not an exact count, but somewhere in that area.

It took nearly five years to reach 10,000, and just under another three years to reach 20,000.

2 Responses to “Milestone: 20k!”

  1. David Moles

    Have you graphed the curve? In another year and a half, should we expect 30,000, or 40,000?

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  2. Jed

    Hard to say, due to various factors. For example, in mid-2006, we switched to the online submission form instead of email subs; volume had more or less leveled off before that, but at that point it started rising again. And then in 2007 we were closed to subs for two months instead of one. And then volume in January 2008 was essentially the same as January 2007, but volume in February 2008 has been a whole lot higher than in February 2007. Also, volume can’t continue to grow indefinitely; we’re currently at somewhere (very roughly) around 80% of the volume Asimov’s gets, and I doubt we’ll ever get significantly more than they do.

    So I don’t think things have been consistent enough in the past to provide useful predictions about the future.

    That said, I have indeed graphed the data. 🙂 Going by the current trendline, I would guess that we’ll hit 30k in somewhere around 2-3 years.

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