Lit Mag Acceptance Rates: How Low Can You (Realistically) Go?
Part 2 of the 'Swimming lessons in the Slushpile' Series with Benjamin Davis
Welcome to lesson #2 of Swimming lessons in the Slushpile with Benjamin Davis. Learn more about this workshop and find upcoming lessons here. This week, we’re demystifying those tiny little percentages on your subs tracker: acceptance rates.
What Do Acceptance Rates Even Mean Anyway?
To understand acceptance rates, you need to understand how submission tracking works.
Basically, there are several platforms (Chill Subs, Submission Grinder, and another I’m conveniently forgetting) where people log when and where they’ve submitted, and when they get an answer (and what that answer is).
Those answers can be:
Accepted
Rejected
Withdrawn
Not responded
Oh shit I forgot to update my tracker
Based on those responses, these platforms generate stats around acceptance rates and response times. Since the folks using these platforms tend to be more “into it” than casual submitters, the acceptance rates skew higher than reality. We see this on our platform because we also let editors report their acceptance rates, and they’re lower 100% of the time.
If you want to figure out what these stats are, you can check under “Stats” on Chill Subs, or on The Submissions Grinder, or... hmm, gosh, what is that third place? It’ll come to me.
Anyway, here’s how it shakes out on Chill Subs:
