While I’m not going to be posting the final Table of Contents for a number of weeks yet, because of a turn the anthology has taken along the way, I can share some stats about the submissions I received for the forthcoming One Small Step anthology.

Total submissions received during open reading period = 86

Submissions by gender = 1 unknown, 58 female (60 in reality as two stories had female co-authors), 27 male. An interesting swing from the Epilogue open call last year – could be reflective of any number of factors, including that Epilogue was open internationally and a large proportion of the US submissions were from men.

While the anthology was only open to Australian authors, I received seven unsolicited submissions from non-Australian writers, including works from the UK, US, Canada and Italy. These were rejected unread.

9 stories were accepted in the first round of reading.

11 were held for second round reading. Of these, two were subsequently accepted.

66 were rejected in first round (including non-Australian submissions), for a total of 75 rejections and 11 acceptances.

Total approximate word count of submissions read: 368,591