WRITING: Statistics

Oh, I suppose I could figure it out, and I do love working with numbers, but I just don’t have the time to play with this though I am certainly intrigued…

In catching up with the four literary journals to which I subscribe, I have noticed that many of the authors included have quite a list of credits to their names, having been published in many of the other lit journals, or sometimes, by the same one.  While I am sure that the answer lies in the cover letter being read first, and of course, often the author is of such high caliber that it shows in the writing regardless of the previous publishing credits, but it does boggle my mind that of the thousands of submissions that the lit journals claim to receive, what are the odds that an author will not only get published once, but, two, three, a half dozen or more times?  Isn’t that sort of like lightening striking twice?  I mean, often there are under ten stories in an issue, and some publish only two or three times a year.  Boy, that’s luck, isn’t it?  Or, you’d have to be really, really outstanding, I would think.

Hmmm.