Luck plays a lot of a role in many vaguely similar things. I regularly submit fiction and poetry for publication (with acceptance rates of 2% for fiction and 1.5% for poetry) and so much depends on things well out of my control (which is part of why I’m sanguine about those acceptance rates—given the venues I‘m submitting to, they’re not unreasonable numbers and more recent years’ stats are better than that).¹ In many cases the editors like what they read, but don’t have a place for it in the current issue or sometimes they’re just having a bad day.

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1. For those who care about the full messy details I have charts and graphs at https://www.dahosek.com/2024-in-reejctions-and-acceptances/