2023 Clarkesworld Submissions Snapshot

Now that the year is over and I’ve had some time to sit with the data, I can share a snapshot of the 2023 submissions data and a few observations. For the sake of clarity, the data here represents stories that were submitted from January 1, 2023 through December 31, 2023. It does not include the submissions that we identified as plagiarism or generated by LLMs (also loosely called “AI” submissions).

We received a total of 13,207 submissions in 2023. This includes the 1,124 Spanish language submissions that were part of a one-month Spanish Language Project (SLP). We were closed to submissions from February 20, 2023 through March 12, 2023 due to a surge (hundreds in a month) of “AI”-generated submissions. During that period, we made updates to our software in an attempt to better manage this new form of unwanted works. The changes made helped us avoid the need to close submissions again, despite continued surges. (This is a band aid, not a cure. Higher volumes could necessitate future closures.)

Combined, the number of submissions received was our second-highest year ever. (2020 and its wild pandemic submission patterns holds the record by just a few dozen.) If we consider just the English language submissions, it was down, but only because we were closed for a few weeks. Assuming the weekly submissions volume would have held during that time, we would have had roughly the same volume as we did in 2022 and, with SLP submissions, our best overall year ever.

7,898 (59.8%) of the submissions were from authors that had never submitted to Clarkesworld before. Courtesy of the SLP, that percentage is considerably higher than normal. In case it isn’t clear, I consider this to be a good thing. Opening the door for authors that had been unable to submit in the past was a major point of that project.

We received submissions from 154 different countries, smashing our previous record by 12. US-based authors accounted for 7780 (58.9%) of all works, a new record for lowest levels from there. However, if we remove the SLP, it increases to 64.1%, which is the highest percentage we’ve seen in several years. I’ve tried to dig into the reasons for this change have have identified two likely causes, both of which are tied to the generated submissions crisis:

The press coverage concerning our situation with “AI” submissions was global and effectively spread the word that we had closed submissions, but the news of our reopening did not receive similar attention. American authors were far more likely to hear that we were once again accepting submissions.With the amount of time we had to spend on the “AI” and Amazon subscription problems, we did not put as much effort into promoting our openness to international submissions. As I’ve noted in past years, many foreign authors have difficulty believing that US-based publications are open to submissions from them. (History certainly makes it look that way.) Making public statements about your willingness to do so is an important part of undoing the damage and it must be maintained. The decrease in the time we spent doing that in 2023 almost certainly had an impact.

While the percentage is disappointing (please don’t take this as not wanting more US-based authors, we want everyone, but one group needs more encouragement than the other), it is recoverable and was offset by the SLP. If anything, that’s a reason for doing more language-based projects in the future. It was clearly more effective than anything we’ve done in the past.

Short stories (works under 7,500 words) represented 85.9% of all submissions, followed by novelettes (works between 7,500 and 17,500 words) at 12.7% and novellas (17,500+, our cap is 22,000) at 1.4%. Acceptances followed a similar trend with 82.9%, 14.8%, and 2.3% respectively.

Science fiction took the lead across all categories. The following is our submission funnel (by genre) for 2023. The outer ring is all submissions. The middle ring includes stories that were passed onto the second round of evaluation. The inner ring is acceptances.

I discourage people from using this data to determine what they should and should not send to us. The data reflects our opinions on the individual works submitted to us at that specific time, and does not represent a general opinion on the length or genre of works submitted to us. If we were no longer interested in considering a specific type of work, it would either be present in our hard-sell list or missing from our list of accepted genres. (This already happened with horror.) We will not waste your (or our) time by leaving a category open if we have no intention of considering it for publication.

Genres have trends and right now, some of those trends are working for or against stories in our submissions review process. Works across all categories are still reaching the second round, indicating (to me) that it is still important that we continue to encourage and consider works in those genres.