FAQ Friday #4: How many stories have you written?

As it turns out, fewer than I'd thought...

Nov 15, 2024

Happy Friday, all!

Let’s dive straight into this week’s FAQ: How many stories have you written?

Now, I’ll be honest: I’ve amended this question slightly. The actual asked-all-the-time version of this question is ‘How many books have you written?’ I seem to be asked this at EVERY school visit I do.

I’m never entirely sure whether the asker of this question wants to know how many books I’ve had published, or how many stories I’ve written – so I tend to enlighten them on both.

Normally at this point I’m stood in front of a very large projector screen, so I refer my audience to the first slide of my presentation, which, at the moment, is this:

I rarely make them count the number of covers, because quick mental arithmetic is typically not the average four-to-seven-year-old’s forte, and it’s quite likely my assembly has already overrun, because I can’t bear not to show them photos and videos of my cat:

(Which reminds me: I should probably do the Q&A session on books and author life before I show them Hokey, else all their questions – WHICH ARE MEANT TO BE ABOUT BOOKS AND AUTHOR LIFE, GUYS! – concern her, instead e.g. How old is she? Did she run face-first into a wall? Why does she sit on your head? Does she really finish off your sentences?)

Instead, I tell them my current number of published books, then quickly add how many extra I have under contract (a further 6), because obviously I want to seem more impressive.

And then I give them a rough estimate of how many stories I’ve written.

“Hundreds!” I claim, proudly – reminding them that the vast majority of stories never get turned into books.

Sometimes they gasp.

Sometimes they applaud.

Sometimes they bow down before me – though, normally, they’re already sitting on the floor, so this happens less often than you might expect (and I’d like).

And sometimes they question that number.

And they’re right to.

Because it turns out that my claim is not only bold, but an outright lie.

(An unintentional one, I must add.)

I haven’t written hundreds of stories: I’ve written 110.

That’s completed first drafts – at the very least – by the way: I’ve many half-written manuscripts on my laptop for half-baked ideas that I couldn’t get to work, and gave up on.

Given that my author journey started in May 2013, I’m genuinely a bit disappointed by that number. I don’t if I should be. I don’t know what, relatively, a poor, average or good total is for that timeframe: there’s no available benchmark.

But a rough average of 10 texts a year is lower than I’d thought, and hoped, probably because I know that writing only 10 texts a year gives one little chance of making a decent living from books alone (or, more accurately, book advances alone), given that most – perhaps all – of those stories will never be published.

This post is public, and I’d love you to share it.

I once asked a very experienced editor at a meeting what proportion of the manuscripts they receive they’d typically acquire, and her answer was ‘about 10%’.

I suppose a publisher’s acquisition rate and an author’s acquisition rate are not exactly the same thing: a publisher might acquire roughly 10% of the manuscripts they receive, but they might acquire 50% submitted by a particular author, for instance. And every author’s hit-rate is bound to be different.

But I’ve always kept that 10% figure in mind when trying to manage my expectations. In other words, if one in every ten stories that I submit gets acquired, I’m doing OK – except that financially, of course – with that hit-rate and an average-sized advance – I really wouldn’t be.

(I’ll come on to advances in another post.)

Anyway, I’ve made an effort to remind myself that for eight of the eleven-ish years I’ve been trying to make this my career, I was working another job, and that I wrote 68 of those 110 texts in the last five years – including a 50,000-word middle-grade novel that took me four months, during which time I wrote nothing else. And, at the very least, it shows a level of persistence, determination, consistency and resilience, of which, admittedly, I’m proud.

Now, although my strength is words rather than numbers, I do love a statistic (a symptom, I suspect, of being a cricket-lover – as is the novel, funnily enough). So, naturally curious to find out my acquisition hit-rate, I looked at my figures to do exactly that. Here they are, in case you’re also curious:

110 – completed stories.

22 – stories not seen by publishers.

88 – stories seen by publishers in some way, i.e. through submissions, or direct contact.

28 – stories published/under contract.

So, from these figures, my hit-rate – (28 ÷ 88) x 100 – comes out as 31.8%. Surprisingly good.

But this figure is a little misleading, as 15 of the 28 stories published or under contract didn’t go on general submission. The contracts for these stories resulted from direct contact with publishers, normally because the stories form part of a series, or a publisher was looking to work with me again, so were sent the texts exclusively, or I gave an editor first-look at a brand-new story I happened to take with me to a meeting.

(If you’d like more details on my submissions, check out my Submissions on Show series.)

Recalculating using stories that did go out on general submission – (13 ÷ 73) x 100 – gives what’s probably a fairer representation of my acquisitions hit-rate: 17.8%.

Better than that 10% benchmark… but 82% as a rejection rate is still a lot of rejection. And disappointment. And heartbreak.