Writing Comps

Today I worked out that Writers' Forum publish about 3x12=36 short stories a year. That means that they probably reject thousands. I wonder how many stories they get each month. Let's say out of the 70,000 readers of the magazine 5 per cent enter each month. So what is 5 per cent of  70,000. Is it 3,500? That is an awful lot of losers. Because if you don't get accepted you assume that your story is not good enough to be printed. This is quite depressing. Even if only one per cent of the 70,000 readers enter that is 700! So instead of thinking that one’s story is a failure it only means the following. In the opinion of Writers’ Forum judges there are three stories out of 700 that are maybe better than yours.