How Many Rejections Are Normal for Writers?
Quick answer: How many rejections are normal for writers? Dozens per story and hundreds per career. The real numbers behind famous authors, and how to keep score sanely.
Dozens per story and hundreds across a writing life are entirely normal. Working short fiction writers commonly collect fifty to two hundred rejections a year while selling steadily, and individual stories often see ten to thirty declines before finding a home. Famous benchmarks abound: Stephen King's Carrie was rejected thirty times, and F. Scott Fitzgerald papered his wall with 122 rejection slips in a single year before his first novel sold.
The numbers matter because writers privately assume their own count is evidence of failure. It is evidence of participation. In a system where top magazines decline more than ninety-nine per cent of submissions, rejection volume mostly measures how often you show up.
The arithmetic that produces the pile
Work backwards from acceptance rates. A professional magazine taking half a per cent of a thousand monthly submissions must send out 995 rejections a month; that is the machine operating correctly, not harshly. If your stories are good enough to sell once in every twenty attempts, an excellent hit rate by market standards, then a productive year of a hundred submissions yields five sales and ninety-five rejections. The successful version of this career generates more rejection than the failed version, because the failed version stopped submitting.
Story-level numbers follow the same logic. A strong story rejected by ten markets has simply not yet met its editor: taste, timing and inventory needs differ desk by desk, and slush lore is full of pieces declined a dozen times before landing at a better market than any that said no. The habit that converts this arithmetic into sales is mechanical persistence, keeping every finished story on submission somewhere until it places or you retire it on purpose.
The famous tallies, and what they hide
The greatest hits: King spiked rejections on a nail as a teenager until the nail could not hold them; Carrie took thirty declines. Fitzgerald's 122 slips in 1919 preceded a career-making yes. Kathryn Stockett's The Help was declined by sixty agents. Ursula K. Le Guin collected rejections for years, and kept a famous one from an editor calling her novel unreadable; it later won awards. Jack London reportedly amassed hundreds of slips before the sales began. Every writer's shelf of trophies sits on a landfill of noes.
But read the stories underneath the numbers. None of these writers merely endured; they kept writing new work the whole time, so their hundredth submission was better than their tenth. Rejection counts are survivorship statistics: the persistence only paid because the craft was compounding underneath it. The lesson is not tolerate pain. It is keep producing while the queue does its slow work.
Keeping score without keeping wounds
Reframe the unit of success. You cannot control acceptances, but you can control submissions, so count those: writers who set targets like a hundred rejections a year, a practice popularised by an essay that went round the writing world some years ago, report submitting more boldly and hurting less per no, because each rejection becomes progress toward a number rather than a verdict. A spreadsheet turns heartbreak into logistics: story, market, date out, result, next destination.
Watch trend, not incident. Over a year, are forms turning into warm forms, warm forms into personal notes, longlists appearing where silence used to be? That staircase is the real score. Feedback-bearing venues sharpen the picture: a contest that returns judge scores, as Writory's monthly Short Story Contest does for every entrant, lets you watch the numbers move even while the answer is still not yet. What you must not track is worth as a writer; no spreadsheet column exists for that, which is the point.
When the count is telling you something
Volume is normal, but patterns deserve reading. Thirty rejections spread across wildly unsuitable markets means a targeting problem: read the magazines before submitting. The same story declined twenty times while your others place suggests that story, not your career, needs the drawer or the rewrite. Rejections arriving with the same specific complaint from independent readers is convergence, and convergence is the one form of rejection data worth revising on.
And two false alarms to ignore. A fast rejection is not a contemptuous one; efficient markets decline quickly. A pile of rejections in your first two years is not a prognosis; it is the tuition everyone pays, and the writers you admire paid it in full. The only genuinely bad number in this whole subject is zero submissions. Every other number is the sound of the apprenticeship working.
What poets can take from this
- Count submissions, the number you control, and let acceptances take care of themselves.
- Keep every finished story on submission somewhere until it places or you retire it deliberately.
- Revise only on convergence, when independent readers name the same flaw.
- Watch the yearly trend, forms to warm forms to personal notes, not any single response.
- A rejection means route the story onward today, nothing more.
Try it yourself
Write a scene in which a character receives their hundredth rejection for anything, a job, a grant, a story, and does the next submission anyway, in real time, without the scene telling us how they feel. Let the actions carry it.
Questions
How many times should I submit a story before giving up on it?
Many writers set a floor of fifteen to twenty suitable markets before shelving a piece, and stories regularly sell deep into that list. Retire a story when you no longer believe in it or your newer work has outgrown it, not at some round number of noes.
Do successful authors still get rejected?
Constantly. Established writers get declined by magazines, anthologies, grant panels and prize juries; the pool above you rejects just as the one below did. What changes with success is the ratio and the sting, not the existence of no.
Is it normal to get rejected with no feedback at all?
Completely. Form rejections without comment are the industry default at every level, driven by volume rather than disdain. Feedback is the exception, which is why writers seek it separately from workshops, critique partners and scored contests.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the August contest and have your own poem read and scored.