Loose Change

Pondering percentages

As I have mentioned before, I am fascinated by numbers and percentages.  According to Duotrope, I have an Acceptance ratio for the past 12 months: 19.33 %  That is for all poems and stories, but I have been focusing on stories recently, and was curious how the numbers worked out there.  There are multiple different ways of thinking about this.  The first is the acceptance/(acceptance+rejection) method.  I have had 7 acceptances and 18 rejections, so by that method, my fiction percentage would be 28%.  It is higher than for poems because you only submit one story at a time, but you often submit 4-5 poems and they accept one or two of them, giving you multiple rejections even with your acceptance.

The second method is to think of the number of stories that have been submitted and either accepted or rejected (pending stories that have not gotten a rejection ever are left out of this).  Then, the percentage is accepted/(accepted+rejected) but multiple rejections don't matter.  With this, I have 7 stories that have been accepted and 7 that have been rejected at least once, for a total of 50%.

A third method is to think of the acceptances and rejections again, but to discard rejections for a story later accepted.  Then, the percentage is acceptances/(acceptances+(rejections of non-accepted stories).  I have 7 acceptances and 15 rejections for stories that have never been accepted, for a total of 32%.

Do you think about acceptance percentages (or am I the only geek here)?  If so, what method do you use to calculate the percentage?

One last note.  If I look at poetry, but look at every time a market accepted one or more versus everytime all the poems were accepted, I'd get a different percentage.  I have had 16 acceptances and 61 rejections, for a 21% acceptance rate, but if you go by whether a market accepted anything, I have 7 markets that accepted something and 20 that accepted nothing, for a 25% acceptance rate.  Both of which are higher than Duotrope because they take into account Withdrawn and Lost items in some fashion.


Current status: 61 items in 70 submissions.  No new markets attempted.