It took me a little longer than I’d intended (illness and other family matters intervened for a few weeks, holding up the process), but I’ve just completed the first round of slush reading for Apocalypse Hope. Here’s some interesting facts from my submissions pool:
213 submissions in total. 212 by email, 1 by snail mail (guidelines stated email submissions only)
Total word count (e-subs only) approximately 903,641.
GENDER of authors
86 female (40.38%)
122 male (57.28%)
5 unknown (2.34%)
COUNTRY of origin
78 Australia (36.62%)
2 Austria (0.94%)
1 Bulgaria (0.47%)
9 Canada (4.22%)
1 China (0.47%)
1 Denmark (0.47%)
2 Greece (0.94%)
1 India (0.47%)
1 Ireland (0.47%)
1 Malaysia (0.47%)
1 Singapore (0.47%)
1 Sweden (0.47%)
1 Thailand (0.47%)
1 The Netherlands (0.47%)
9 UK (4.22%)
103 USA (48.36%)
ACCEPT/REJECT/HOLD
1 submission withdrawn as it was accepted elsewhere (guidelines stated no simultaneous submissions) (0.47%)
2 held with rewrite requests (0.94%) (both female)
4 accepted on first round reading (1.88%) (all Australian; 2 male, 2 female)
36 held for second round reading (16.9%) (11 Australian, 17 US, 2 Canada, 1 Denmark, 1 Ireland, 1 Singapore, 1 Sweden, 1 Thailand, 1 UK; 14 female, 22 male)
170 rejected (79.81%)
OTHER STATS
13 stories were rejected for not meeting the guidelines (6.1%) – these included reprints without query and stories outside the word count without query.
6 authors queried for outside word count (2.82%) – of these, one was accepted in first round, and one was held for second reading.
3 stories were submitted in formats unable to be read by the editor (1.41%)
ETA: I had quite a lot of queries to submit reprints. Most of these I decided not to consider, as they were published very recently. I had eight reprint submissions I looked at (some not queried – these were not read. I also had one that was not queried, and the author did not even advise me it was a reprint. It was pure chance I googled the story before replying to the author, and discovered the story provenance). Of these, two are on hold for second round.
I also forgot to mention I had one poem submitted (after query) – it too is on hold.
A reminder that my area is editing, not mathematics 🙂
FableCroft 