The Outlier Year (#SFWApro)

2007 was a great year for me sales wise.
After selling Where Angels Fear to Lunch to Realms of Fantasy in 2000, I sold three stories over the next three years. Those were very far from the only stories I was submitting, so the mass of rejections (37 in 2006 alone for the six to 12 I had circulating)) was pretty dispiriting.
Then in 2007, I had six stories published: Dark Satanic Mills in Tales of the Talisman; Everybody’s Doing It in Allegory; Learning Curve in Byzarium; You Are What You Eat (Talisman again), Homicidal Maniacs Running With Scissors in Resident Aliens; and Others Must Fail in Semaphore.
None of them paid much, some nothing, but it felt very, very encouraging. Hopefully I’d be able to grow from there and either sell more frequently, or to better paying markets, or both.
In 2008, I had one story published. In 2009 I had three, but to substantially better-paying markets (though one, an anthology, never paid off as the publisher folded right after it came out). In 2010 I had 10 stories out in my Applied Science series.
Since then I’ve had six published. In decent markets (check out the What I’ve Written page for details), a couple for good money, but if I use 2007 as a baseline, I’ve had a very flat trajectory rather than rising. And that’s despite submitting a lot more often. If I look at the 21st century as a whole, 2007 is quite an anomaly. An outlier.That’s annoying because I’m pretty sure my writing has improved. So I went back and looked at the stories to see if I could spot some distinctive factor that would explain it (and which I could then exploit).
•Almost all my stories in 2007 were set in contemporary times rather than historical or secondary worlds.
•All of them were shorter than 5,000 words.
A-ha! Probably most of my recent work has run longer than that, and a lot of it historical. Is that the answer?
Maybe not. Number of the Least and Happiest Place on Earth are both short, and both of them are contemporary and neither of them’s sold yet. And He Built a Crooked Cat is 1950s-set, but it’s under the 5,000 level, and also unsold. (Fiddler’s Black fits too, but it’s too soon to judge its sales success). And all of Applied Science is set in the 1950s, and it sold. And several short contemporary stories from around the 2007 era (Grass is Always Greener, for instance) haven’t sold.
It may be that I’m simply shooting for bigger markets now, so I get a lot of rejections before I find the small markets more willing to take me. Though I get rejected by magazines that aren’t big names or paying to rates, so maybe that’s not it either.
Possibly 2007 really was just a fluke.
If someone snaps up Fiddler’s Black, perhaps I’ll try putting more focus on contemporary stories. Short is harder—some stories simply don’t fit in 5,000 words. I’ve tried cutting stories to that length. Sometimes you get a good, lean story. Sometimes you get a poorer story.
Wish me luck.