It's really too soon for another editing report, but it occurred to me, while looking through today's batch of submissions, that the vast majority (maybe 75%?) of the submissions are from people who indicate they've sold fiction somewhere else before.  Occasionally I'll get a story from someone who has been published in one of the bigger venues, but almost all the other publishing credits are from the small press.

What I find interesting about this is I'd written an article some time ago about the slush pile ("Perseverance, Publishing and the Urge to Write") where I suggested that a significant portion of stories in the slush pile are written by authors who submit one work, are rejected, and then give up.  I encouraged writers to persevere, which I still think is the best advice I can give, but my slush pile leads me to believe that a much of the slush pile is from previously published folks who are still working at writing and sending stuff out.

I wonder if my slush pile is odd.  Perhaps it is because the way someone could find out about the anthology would be through channels only folks who already have some knowledge about publishing would be paying attention to, like Ralan.com or the mystery/horror writers' bulletin boards.  Realms of Fantasy, Analog or Asimov's, however, are highly visible and a first time author might send a story their way, not realizing there were other markets.  Besides, they might be following the good advice most experienced writers give, which is to submit from the top down.

Hmmm.  I don't have a conclusion to make from this observation, but it is interesting to me that there's this roiling of submissions in the slush piles of writers who have already sold work and are continuing to market their wares.  There's a significant subculture of writers who have sold work only to tiny markets, many of them (but not all!) trying to make a movement up.

 Oh, I've received around 50 more manuscripts since I posted fifteen days ago.

I think it would be fun to find out how many times writers were rejected before their first manuscript sold.  For me, I started submitting work in the early 80s, although it wasn't very many pieces in those first years (maybe just a handful of submissions a year?--I'll have to look it up), but I didn't make my first sale of any kind until 1987 or so, which was a poem to Star*Line, the official magazine of the Science Fiction Poetry Association.  So, my number of rejections before my first sale was, I'd guess, 30.  I didn't sell my first story until 1990, but I'd started submitting heavily in 1988, so I'll bet I'd been bounced 150 times by then.

How many rejects did you have before you sold your first piece?