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Since I don’t care how AI evaluates literature, I don’t care about what it thinks about lit mags, and the prize and anthology selections don’t seem to influence my submission habits much.

What I’m hoping Duotrope or Chill Subs can bring to the table is their database of submission reports. If an author subs a piece to market A, gets rejected, and only then subs market B, that’s a signal that they perceive A > B. Aggregate those—with ELO, say—and you can get a ranking.

Similarly, I’d be very curious if someone puts together a database where each row corresponds to a piece and has the following fields:

1. author

2. market where it first appeared

3. list of markets named in the bio

As mind-numbing as Brecht et al. report indexing the anthologies to be, this would surely require computer assistance and cover only markets that make their content available online for free, but my professional opinion is that it would be feasible. (I myself won’t, for various reasons.)

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(To clarify: a noisy signal. There are other reasons to submit that way, not least because market B wasn’t open.)

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I appreciate your point about submission tiers:

"If an author subs a piece to market A, gets rejected, and only then subs market B, that’s a signal that they perceive A > B."

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