Submission Protocol: The Unsolicited Rewrite

Here’s a scenario for you. You receive a very encouraging personal rejection from a publisher, where the editor says something like, “Hey, good story. We’re going to pass, but we think you might consider improving the story by changing X and revising Y.” If you’re new to the submission grind, you might think if you addressed X and Y and sent the story back to the publisher, you’d have a good chance of an acceptance. Unfortunately, that’s called an unsolicited rewrite, and the majority of publ...