Now and then, on Facebook, I'll see a post along the lines of "why are all the rejections arriving at the same time??". I went into my submission records to see if there are certain months when magazines are more likely to respond. (As far as I can tell, no one else has done this sort of study, but of course I could be wrong.)
Short version of my results: April truly is the cruelest month, and December is the quietest.
I have submission records going back to 2001. Here's the breakdown of responses, by month, over that period:
January 64
February 63
March 43
April 76
May 62
June 64
July 48
August 44
September 60
October 55
November 66
December 39
I didn't include magazines that responded within a day or a week of receiving the submission, since those magazines are operating in a very different way than most -- statistics for them would only show my submission habits and not their response habits. (If you'd like to find these quick-acting journals, try this list from Authors Publish or this one from Trish Hopkinson.
For anyone who's counting, that's 684 submissions over 17 years, about 40 per year.
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