Thank you for reading this blog. Your support and correspondence over the year (and beyond!) means a lot to me. This blog has grown a lot since I started it over a year ago, with many, many works added to it. I hope to continue to add more content over the next year to make it an even better experience for you, the reader.

Even after being fortunate enough to have published about 60 works (thank you, dear editors and journals!), I still feel like a new writer at times, and often wonder how other writers go about writing and submitting their works for publications.  Enter Trish Hopkinson’s New Year post about her blog and submission totals for the year. Reading her stats, I am in awe of her blog stats (it is an awesome blog, check it out here, if you haven’t already!) and of her submission stats too, so I decided to look at my own.

Using Duotrope, I looked up my stats for 2016. I write mostly poetry, though, I also write and publish fiction and nonfiction occasionally.

In 2016, I submitted 197 works for publication. These are Duotrope stats.

187 were poetry –this does not include my Alaska Women Speak submissions, of which I had 9 poems published. Duotrope does not list them, so they are not included in the raw numbers.

7 nonfiction – This number leaves out 1 AWS submission as well that was published.

3 fiction – This number, again, leaves out 1 AWS submission that was published.

Overall, I had a 14% acceptance ratio, without the AWS submissions counted. Poetry acceptance was 13.1, fiction was 100% (OK, believe it or not, I just got lucky here for this year, for one of these pieces was rejected in 2015, which doesn’t count this year). Nonfiction acceptance was 16.7%.

In 2017, I plan to submit to more tougher markets (yeah, I know, isn’t it hard enough to get published without MORE rejection!), so my acceptance rate will probably decrease quite a bit next year.

38 works were accepted for publication in 2016, with 3 to be published in 2017.

Not bad, definitely, but as a writer I always strive for more challenges.

Next up are goals for 2017, which I have not articulated yet.

Writers out there, how was 2016 for you?  Please post and share!

J.L.