Niteblade

I know a fair number of writers are interested in submission statistics, so I thought I’d share some of ours in a short blog post.

I’ve got two strong sources of data. Duotrope’s Digest and Submishmash. Duotrope’s has listed Niteblade since we first opened, so their stats are based on a longer time frame than Submishmash’s. However, Duotrope’s information is not as complete because it is based on submitters self-reporting data. Since not all submitters use Duotrope’s Digest, nor necessarily accurately report their information, it’s nice that we can supplement that data with some from Submishmash.

Duotrope’s Digest shows an average response time of 22.8 days for an acceptance and 24 days for a rejection.
Those numbers are strongly influenced by historical data, our turn over time for submissions now that we’ve switched systems has greatly decreased. You can see this in action by looking at the rss feed for Niteblade on Duotrope’s Digest. You’ll see the 20 day response is an abberation now. Yay!

Duotrope’s Digest reports that our responses break down like this:
Acceptances: 9.38%
Rejections: 85.94%
Rewrite Requests: –*
Author Withdrawals: 4.69%

Submishmash, which only has stats from the beginning of December 2010, shows the following:
Acceptances: 5.05%
Rejections: 87.88%
Author Withdrawals: 7.07%
Interestingly, these rejection numbers are low because poets often send more than one poem as a single submission and we often pass on all of them. That means some of the rejections that are recorded singly actually represent as many as five pieces.

Nom nom, numbers to crunch!

*I included this because it illustrated the incompleteness of data from Duotrope’s Digest. I don’t often request re-writes, but it happens.