You have to stick with your work till it sells. That’s my answer to the question, “How long will it take me to get published?” And it’s pretty much the same whether we’re talking about placing a story, landing an agent, or selling a novel.

Take a look at some data. Accomplished writer Vylar Kaftan has tracked the number of times she submitted her storiesbefore they finally were published in a pro or semi-pro market. Her max number of submissions for a single story was 19–it was finally placed with the 19th market. The thing is, as she’s noted, this was a story that received 6 Nebula recommendations: “there was nothing wrong with it. It just had to find the right home. Here endeth the lesson.” Another great takeaway from Vylar’s post follows:

If I scan the list looking for my “best” stories, using any of several measures, I can’t see a pattern. Possible measures include: the ones I liked best, the ones readers emailed me the most about, the ones my crit groups loved, the ones editors wrote personal rejections for. I really don’t think there’s any conclusions to be drawn there except that submission history and the story’s quality are only somewhat correlated at best.

I pretty much agree. Once you’ve done the very best writing that you can, getting the work published is a matter of persistence, patience, and a bit of saavy about where or to whom you send your work.

Maybe you think you’ve done everything you can, but then you get feedback or grow as a writer, and you can take your story or novel a bit farther. (For some writer resources, check out this page.) Vylar has another great post  that discusses the few reasons that she “trunks” a story as well as when she revises a story she’s circulating. Here’s my favorite part: 

If I find myself stressing about whether my stories are good enough, and shouldn’t I revise them more so they sell, and maybe if I revise them they will sell… you know what? 100% of the time, that indicates I should be writing new stories. Because you can’t really assess whether your older work is any good unless you’re writing new stuff. You’ll be too biased and want the older stuff to work so you don’t have to write anything new. If you only have one story circulating, there’s no way you’re going to make smart decisions about what to do with it. By generating new material, you give yourself the freedom to be honest about your older work.

All of this points to what Vylar calls The Rule: “Write new stories, polish them, and then circulate them until they sell. That’s how you get stories published.” Same goes, like I said, for getting longer work published. Maybe your agent manages the submissions, but you still need to keep writing new stuff to have any perspective.