If you're submitting fiction or poetry to literary magazines, you need to be prepared to submit each piece a (surprisingly?) high number of times before you should consider reworking or retiring it, particularly if you only submit to top-tier publications (acceptance rate ≤1%). I think 20 submissions is probably the sweet spot.

Consider a simplified example.

Let's say you submit to magazines with a 1% acceptance rate. Out of an audience of 10,000 writers, a random 2000 submit manuscripts, including yourself.

The editors have various biases (taste, fatigue, etc), meaning they cannot perfectly select the top 1% of submissions. Instead, they randomly select from the top 10%, meaning they select 20 of the top 200 submissions.

If you are not selected, what is the probability your manuscript is in the top 1%?

Before submission, if you assume no priors about the quality of your submission, we should assume a 1% probability we’re in the top 1%. By Byes law, after 1 rejection we should only lower that probability to 0.91%. In other words, we could say we're still 91% sure our work is in the top 1% of possible works.

After 10 submissions, this drops to 0.37% (still pretty high!). After 20, we’re down to 0.13%. At 30, we’re down to 0.04%.

20 submissions feels like a good inflection point to me. 13% confidence is probably an underestimate, given extenuating factors like normativity of taste. Beyond this, unless you really believe in your writing, the opportunity cost alone isn't worth the effort.