You use a spreadsheet to track all your play submissions, right?

Wait: you don't? Seriously? How *do* you keep track of them, then? Please don't tell me you just... send your work off and hope to hear back one day. Nobody would do that, right?

Okay: I'm guessing some of you actually *do* do that, and frankly, if that floats your boat, fine. Me, I couldn't possibly stand it. I'm a man of organization. I like information, and I like it nice and tidy. (Which is, of course, why it hurts twice as badly when a theater or contest simply doesn't respond to a submission. Their row in my spreadsheet never gets filled in!) So I keep track.

The side benefit of keeping track -- and using a spreadsheet to do it -- is that I have interesting data about my self-promotion efforts... data I can use to inform the submission choices I make.

The current spreadsheet I'm using goes back to October 1, 2008. Between then and now, I made a total of 132 submissions to a variety of contests, fellowships, and theaters. That's an average of about four a month. With those parameters in mind, here's some interesting data:

A full 55 of those 132 contests and theaters simply never replied at all to my submissions. (I'm assuming my work wasn't selected.) That's 42% -- an astonishing number, if you ask me. Can you believe the gall of simply never replying to a playwright who took the time to submit his or her work to you? The bright side: those are 55 places to which I'll be far less likely to submit any work from now on... and I've got the spreadsheet to help me keep track.

Another 43 of those folks just plain rejected me: a form letter, without any customization, printed (if I was lucky) on letterhead, or on a postcard if I wasn't lucky. That's a 33% failure rate.

Then there are the half-successes (or near-misses, if you're a glass half-empty kind of person -- I'm not). A small group of 15 theaters (or 11%) wrote very personal rejections that passed an admittedly unscientific sniff test intended to determine wither some human being associated with the company actually read and thought about my script. Another 9 (or 7%) advanced me to some second round of review before doing the same thing. I was happy to get every single one of those emails and letters.

And then, finally, there were 10 fantastic successes, or 8% of the total submissions I made. Go, me!

So, to summarize, the 132 submissions I made since October 1, 2008 can divided as follows:

• 55 of the theaters never got back to me at all (42%)
• 43 of the theaters rejected me with a form letter (33%)
• 15 of the theaters wrote very personalized rejections (11%)
• 9 of the theaters advanced my work to a second round before rejecting it (7%)
• 10 of the theaters selected my work (8%)

Disheartening? Not to me. There are 10,000 playwrights in the United States, which means the odds would suggest that out of 132 submissions, I shouldn't have won anything at all. To put it another way, I should have had to make 10,000 submissions before succeeding even once. So I'm feeling pretty good about 10 winners and 9 near-misses!

More importantly, I have the necessary data to make sure my track record gets better year after year. I can eliminate the contests and theaters that never reply; I can re-think theaters for which my work generated only a form letter. I have the power to submit fewer and fewer scripts ever year, but make them more targeted. Isn't that something we should all like to do? I believe it is.