Some other miscellaneous slush pile nuggets: There wasn’t anything unusual when compared to other years. Overall, men were more likely to write science fiction, women were more likely to write fantasy and horror was extremely male-dominated. I’m not going to get into the “what is real SF?” fight. Note: Genre identification was done by the author at the time of submission.
While it would be nice if our male regulars were more active, overall I can’t complain about the quality of the stories we are receiving.Ģ2 Science Fiction stories (of 3619 submitted)ĥ Science Fiction + Fantasy stories (of 698 submitted)ģ Fantasy + Horror stories (of 893 submitted)Ġ Science Fiction + Horror stories (of 457 submitted) One thing I noticed was that about half of our female contributors had sold stories to us before and most of the male authors were new to Clarkesworld. This data suggests that women were better at sending us the type of stories we were looking for this year. You have to keep in mind that slush pile data is quantitative, so it doesn’t cleanly map to a qualitative process like selecting stories for publication.
We’ve always been off the norm for science fiction magazines, but last time the balance shifted like this, we took some flack.
Historically, it stands up to prior years as follows: In our seventh year, we published thirty-six stories-some were purchased outside this window or solicited directly from an author-and 68% of those were written by women. On average, authors received a response from us in less than three days.ĭespite the slush pile favoring men 71% to 29%, 65% of the purchased stories were written by women. In year seven, we received 9241 stories and of those, we purchased thirty-two, an acceptance rate of 0.35%. This is commonly referred to as the slush pile. Unlike our early days, the majority of the stories we publish are unsolicited and submitted to us via an online form. Unless otherwise specified, all of the information below is based on data collected between October 2012 and September 2013. Since then, I’ve received numerous requests to reprise the research as an annual “year in review.” As we’ve just finished up our seventh year of publication, I thought this would be a good time to look back at that year. In June 2012, I wrote an editorial for the data junkies and people who wanted to get a snapshot of the data we have about Clarkesworld.
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