One of the neat backend features of Submittable is that it shows stats and graphs about the submissions we’ve gotten. I always like looking at these as an editor, and it occurred to me that they might be just as interesting for folks who are interested in the journal.
To date, After Happy Hour has gotten more than 14,000 submissions since the journal launched in late 2014, and you can see from this graph how our submission volume has shifted over time:
For anyone who’s curious, the most submissions we’ve gotten in a single day is 56. That was on August 1st of this year, and most of those were in our free categories. Basically, almost 1/6 of our free subs for August were filled within 24 hours of opening. They don’t typically come in at quite that clip, but we do regularly hit our 300 free sub limit before the end of the month, so it’s good to submit early in the months we’re open.
For this most recent submission period, we got a total of 850 submissions, which broke down like so:
One thing to know about these stats: these figures are based on the number of submissions, so a packet of poetry, artwork, or flash prose only counts as one. Basically, it means we accepted roughly 2.5% of the submitters who sent work our way.
In genre terms, we get the most fiction submissions, with poetry a fairly close second. That “other” down there includes visuals, comics, and suites, all of which we’d love to get more of. Same goes for creative non-fiction—we never get as much of it as we do fiction and poetry.
Submittable’s stats aren’t completely accurate when it comes to genre breakdown because the Expedited and Feedback categories are multi-genre (and we accepted work from both during our last submission period). But it gives you a good rough estimate of the journal’s acceptance ratios in each category:
| Fiction (0.77% acceptance) | Poetry (3.06% acceptance) | Creative non-Fiction (1.54% acceptance) | Visuals (29.41% acceptance) |
 |  |  |  |
As far as what to take away from this—it’s certainly not meant to discourage any fiction writers who are thinking of sending us a story! Some writers put more stock in acceptance percentages than others. I wrote a blog post on acceptance ratios if you want to hear my full thoughts on them, but the short version is: while publishing is to some extent a numbers game, it’s not like we have quotas to meet for each type of submission. We accept the work that excites us, and that’s true no matter how many submissions we get in a given category. I imagine this is the case for most journals and presses out there: the best way to beat the odds is to send strong work that makes the editors think “I need to share this with our readers.”
Mostly, I’m sharing this because I find it interesting, and hopefully someone else out there does, too! I’ll be posting some wish lists and hard sells for our upcoming contest issue around when it opens on 11/15 if you want some more insights that can boost your chances of getting work published in our pages.
thehourafterhappyhour.wordpress.com 