What if you could mathematically figure out the amount of time it will take you to get accepted? To succeed? For those following on Twitter, you know that I just found some interesting math from the folks at Gud Magazine, math that may provide answers:

Responses

Acceptances: 1.7% (154.7 day(s) avg. per acceptance)
Rejections: 98.3% (25.4 day(s) avg. per rejection) | 35.2% personal, 64.8% form

Now granted, this simply shows the stats for one magazine, but I find the numbers compelling based on my own personal stats which stretch across several industries and seven years of submissions — both data pools line up fairly well. Based on their stats, they take six times as long to respond to an acceptance as they do a rejection. Why?

If something stinks, they know right away. That’s why 64.8% of those rejections got a form letter. The other 35.2% of rejected writers get something like the “you write well, but this didn’t work for us right now — please submit again” or the “we rejected this because we’re full / out of season / an esemplastic spacewestern romance zine” or whatever. Personal responses take longer, but not as long as accepted manuscripts: acceptance takes an average of 6.16 times as long. Six of “no thanks” to reach “we’re buying your story.”

Why?

Deliberation. If an editor starts to consider sharing your piece with their readership, he must be sure of its quality. This takes checking, re-checking your work as it passes through various filters, often involving an intern or an assistant editor or even a wife. That plus finding the appropriate fit in upcoming themes or the overall flow of current content can take time. (So thanks, editors, for being so patient while remaining overworked and underpaid).

Let’s keep tracking with this math, building assumptions off of our assumption like a great round of Jenga. Let’s simplify the equation into our titular form:

a = 6r

…where a = the time it takes to get accepted and r = the time it takes for rejection. In my personal experience, this not only fits the amount of time an editor needs to accept a piece measured against the amount of time required to reject a piece. This equation also fits the overall concepts of acceptance and rejection. For every piece I submit that gets accepted, I can count roughly six rejected pieces — at least right now in this threshold where I’m still building up my portfolio.

If we take that and include the time factor — time required to dream, plan, write, edit, rewrite, submit a story or article — then we could probably estimate the amount of time for a given work to succeed.

• Want to publish a story? Spend time equivalent to six rejected stories first.
• Want to publish a novel? Spend time equivalent to six rejected novels first.
• Want to make the NYT bestseller list? Spend time equivalent to six near-misses.

I’m not saying you need to have six rejected novels to publish the seventh. Rothfuss and Rowling and Tolkien all published their first — but their first took easily as long as a normal person would take to write six. Same with short stories — King spent six novels worth of time on short stories and a bad novel before Carrie hit it big.

I believe this equation also applies to any endeavor from the lightbulb to photography to great service. Not just success, but greatness. Gladwell says 10,000 hours of practice — that’s roughly 6 years of 40-hour weeks. I think a New York Times Bestseller of literary quality could easily take 41 weeks of hard work. That times six would get you 10,000 hours. Thus the Beatles working 8 hours a day for years in Hamburg before the American tour.

You want to know how long until you break out? Until you get recognized for your work?

Here’s roughly what it takes:

a = 6r