If you want to publish at the pro level in short speculative fiction, you might think that all you need to focus on is writing a few high quality stories. In this article, I’ll argue that you’d better pay just as much attention to the quantity of stories you have in inventory (finished and available to sell). The stark reality is: the slushpile system is a numbers game. If you don’t have enought stories in inventory, it’s a game that’s difficult to win.

Executive summary: You need to reach at least twenty stories in inventory to play the slushpile game effectively. The rest of this article tells you how I came to that conclusion.

Quality and Quantity are not Mutually Exclusive

This may sound horrible. But it’s art! Art cannot be rushed! Well, yes and no. With practice you can output both quality and quantity. Famous painters are often incredibly productive (Michelangelo, Picaso), and many famous authors are too (ask the Bard). Robert Silverberg wrote a quarter million words worth of stories per month in his pulp days (and sold every word). And that was on a manual typewriter. The fact is, if you take three years to write every 3,000 word short story you attempt, you’re not likely to have an impressive career.

Now, there are always exceptions. Ted Chiang wrote only a handful of stories early in his career and almost all of them were nominated or won major awards like the Hugo and Nebula. But a career like that is incredibly rare.

Slush Stats and Assumptions

Here’s the reality for almost everyone besides Ted Chiang: Unless you’re an established author who can write their own ticket (pardon the pun), the slush pile system is purely a numbers game. If you don’t have the numbers (lots of stories to sell) you lose the game. And the number of stories you need is: (drum roll) at least twenty in inventory at all times.

Let’s make a few reasonable assumptions then do some math to illustrate the point. In this analysis, I’m assuming you are interested in Pro level publications only. Not semipro or token markets. You’re trying to become a professional level author who makes a bunch of pro level sales per year.

Assumption 1: You are writing speculative fiction at least at an “average pro level” whatever that is. (You will know this if you’re getting bumps/second looks from time to time, personal replies from time to time, and replies like “this almost made it, please send more stories”.) If you’re not writing at that level, then the numbers below get far worse. In that case, you should still be writing a lot of stories to hone your craft to get to a higher level (and using workshops and other means to actively improve).

Assumption 2: A typical pro level spec fic market has a slushpile acceptance rate of 4 percent. Some are under half a percent (F&SF, Asimov’s), some are as high as ten percent (Nature Futures). But if you sift through the submission grinder four percent is a pretty good average. And the grinder stats include mostly serious authors who are by and large writing at a pro level (or at least semipro).

Assumption 3: The typical amount of time a story is tied up on a pro level slushpile is 1.5 months. Again, some markets will reject in just a day or two, some will sit on a story for half a year (or more). Some reject quickly but accept slowly. Even in a fast reject market, if you get “bumped” to a higher level before rejection, you might spend three months waiting in the “second look” pile. It seems to work out to about 1.5 months on average.

What does all this mean? Well, the four percent acceptance rate means you’ll need to submit 25 times to get one acceptance.

Let that sink in. Yes, you’ll receive about 24 rejections for every one sale, as an average. Get used to it.

Examples Based on Assumptions

What do these figures tell you? Let’s look at how long, on average, you would have to wait to make a sale depending on how many stories you have circulating in slushpiles.

Let’s say you have one single story. You’re proud of it, so before writing another you’re going to try to sell this one. Assuming it’s at an “average pro level” and given the other assumptions above, it will take an expected value of 37.5 months to sell that story. Over three years! The calculation is simple: you will on average have to send it out 25 times, and it will sit in each slushpile 1.5 months, so 25 times 1.5 = 37.5 months.

If you have two stories in circulation, that waiting time cuts in half to about an eighteen to nineteen month wait for your first pro sale, on average.

You can see where this is leading. With twenty stories in circulation, you only have to wait a tad under two months between sales. You’ll get about six pro level sales in a year. And that’s a pretty solid start to a career.

Wait, Is This Really True?

In my case these admittedly crude rules of thumb are working out about as projected. I started this year with just a handful of stories in slushpiles, typically six to eight but let’s call it seven on average. It took me until April to make a pro sale. The math above would have predicted that with 7 stories it would take 5.3 months, a bit more than the actual four months. But hey, that’s in the ballpark.

I have since then written a lot more stories and am averaging about 15 in slushpiles at any given time. I worked up to that number slowly over the summer. Let’s say I had an average of 12 stories in slushpiles after April. It’s now September as I write this, so it’s been about 4.5 months, or three “slush round periods”. The math would say I should have made 1.4 more sales since April, then. (Computation: 3 slush pile periods times 12 stories = 36 slush-stories and four percent of those should hit paydirt, 4 percent times 36 = 1.44).

And, I did have one sale (DSF) and I have one other story in final round at a market that has about a 50-50 chance! So these rules of thumbs are working out pretty accurately for me.

As far as the 24 rejections for every acceptance statistic, it’s dead-on for me. I have a fancy spreadsheet that shows me this kind of data and as of the day I am writing this blog post I have received 51 rejections and 2 pro level acceptances. So my actual stat is 25.5 rejections per acceptance right at this moment.

Dude, Why Not Circulate 200 Stories!

If it works like this then you should just write five stories a day! Get 200 stories in inventory! You’ll be selling 5 stories a month in no time!

Unfortunately there are scaling issues. It’s not likely you could write that many and maintain pro quality (you’re probably not as productive as Robert Silverberg). And there are only so many markets. Some of them don’t like taking more than one story from a given author per year, or have other limitations. Many markets have limited reading periods and you have to wait for them to open up for submissions. Not every story is suitable for every market. Far from it! The market is like a jigsaw puzzle with missing pieces. Each story you write is only going to fit in a limited number of places.

Right now, I’ve got 35 stories I feel are strong enough to submit to markets, but the lack of suitable markets is limiting me to occupying about 15 Pro level slushpiles at a time. In many cases I’m waiting for one sub to be rejected/accepted before sending another to a particular market that it’s well suited for. Or, I’m waiting for a market to open up their reading period, or employing other tactical considerations when deciding to hold off submitting. There are many variables, and some writers call this “slushpile tetris” since it’s like trying to fill Tetris game blocks into available holes.

There probably aren’t more than twenty to twenty-five pro markets in speculative fiction that are open at any given time. So you would likely max out this strategy at around twenty to twenty-five stories. (But that would require you to have far more than 25 stories due to market/genre combinations).

Note that some markets allow you to send multiple stories to them at once, but the majority of Pro markets do not allow multiple (or simultaneous) submissions. It gets rather complicated to track. Some tools are available, like the Submission Grinder, but I just use a fancy spreadsheet, being a tech guy.

So After Writing Twenty Stories I Can Rest, Right?

Sorry, but no!

There are other reasons to keep writing new stories even after hitting twenty stories in your inventory. You keep gaining knowledge and experience by writing and refining your craft. You keep expanding your inventory so when that new antho launches that wants a story about a Vampire falling in love with a Cyborg you’ve got something to send out. And unfortunately, not all stories are going to end up selling to a pro market. At some point you run out of suitable pro venues and then must turn to the better semipro markets, and at some later point the trunk may be the ultimate fate of any given story.

Of course, we’d all like to be better than just an “average pro writer” (fess up: we all dream of winning that Nebula or Hugo or Stoker) so continuing to practice and expand your craft will hopefully tilt those rules of thumb more in your favor. If you get your acceptance rate up above four percent, the numbers game becomes even easier to win.

Because of specialized markets like themed anthos, it’s also important to be able to write a story on demand, with only a few weeks (or less) notice. By working on your productivity, you can get into a mindset where you can literally force yourself to write a cool story on any topic and hit those kinds of deadlines.

And you should experiment with many different styles: dreamy and poetic, elevated highbrow literary, gut busting humor, etc. And many different topics: SF, fantasy, magical realism, horror, slipstream. In this way, you’ll have stories that are suitable for many different markets, opening up your horizons, and keeping things fresh and interesting. Only by having a high productivity will you leave yourself enough room to experiment like this.

Maybe the best reason to keep writing even if you’ve saturated the slush system is: you wouldn’t be doing all this if you didn’t love to write!

Don’t Forget the Quality

Obviously, the goal is not merely to pump out schlock. The goal is to produce both quality and quantity. It’s not easy. But it gets easier with practice. You don’t learn to run a marathon by doing a 50 meter sprint once a week. You have to exercise your writing muscles by writing, and writing as much as you possibly can.

But by all means keep yourself honest on quality by workshopping your stories to get feedback, paying attention to editorial comments in all those rejections you’ll be getting, and continuing to study your craft by reading and analyzing big-name pro stories.

I would never send out a story I didn’t think was finished and up to snuff, and that includes comprehensive workshopping and often soul-searching and painful edits, even on flash pieces (especially on flash!) Some stories don’t go out for months (a handful even years), a few never go out at all.

So don’t get to twenty stories in inventory by rushing stories out. Get there by being focused and making more time to write, and by studying your craft so you make fewer mistakes in early drafts. Just having the goal of getting to twenty completed stories is a great first step.

Conclusion

Set the goal at a minimum of 20 stories, then get their step by step. If you’re currently writing one story per month, try to write two this month. If you’ve never written a flash story, try that. It’s a great way to hone a narrative down to just what’s essential, and there are many pro markets that are flash-only so you’re missing out on a huge segment by not having a bunch of these little gems in your inventory.

Remove obstacles to your writing so you can expand the number of hours per week you can write. Don’t say: I have no good ideas right now so I can’t write. Go out and find a writing prompt (tons are out there) and force yourself to write. Cut out an extra binge-watch episode one night and start a story instead, or finish one that’s been languishing on your hard drive. Make room for writing and you’ll write more stories, finish more stories, and improve your craft more quickly.

So the goal is to get to at least twenty stories of the best quality you can muster, and get them all out working for you. Set that as your goal. Whether it takes you three months or three years to get there, don’t be satisfied until you get at least to that point.

Keep writing, keep expanding your inventory, keep gaining experience, and keep the slushpiles out there crammed with your work. A pro slushpile that doesn’t contain your work is a lost opportunity!

This is a numbers game you can win.