Dealing with Rejection
Thankfully, now I have had nine acceptances of writing submissions, I am less concerned when I get a rejection email. The acceptance/rejection rate is running at 1:4 which I don’t think is too bad.
It did cause me to consider the reasons why stories are rejected, however. When I worked in PR and marketing, one of the things we used to say was to treat complaints as valuable feedback – however much they may upset you. I think you should look at rejections the same way (and yes, I realise this is easier said than done).
When I first started submitting stories I got more rejections, and at that time it was because the stories simply were not good enough. That didn’t mean they were bad, just had room for improvement. You shouldn’t expect a detailed critique, but you have to look again at what went wrong and use your beta readers to suggest improvements.
As you get better you will start to get acceptances, but that doesn’t mean everything works. Some stories will not find a market – they may be the story you wanted to write and they may be “good” stories, but that doesn’t mean they will find a ready buyer. If you have faith in them keep looking for the right market and don’t get too despondent when that takes a while. One of my stories – The Cat Factory – was written as a child’s fable about the Holocaust. That’s probably a difficult sell in itself, but one of the ways the villain tries to get people to buy his “perfect” cats rather than the ordinary ones is by using fake news to say the other cats spread disease and need to be rounded up in containment centres. In the present world climate any mention of disease and fake news move the story to a comment on current affairs. Not an issue when I wrote it several years ago, but certainly a reason for not publishing it now, and the feedback said as much.
The other issue to think about is whether the story fits the market you are selling to. I have an eclectic set of interests and my stories reflect that, but magazines and anthologies tend to have a narrower focus. Some stories have been rejected by one publisher but welcomed with open arms by another. Read their submission guidelines carefully and look at what they have published. You can always do what I’ve done sometimes and write a story specifically to fit a publisher’s theme. They are still stories I wanted to write, even though they didn’t occur to me until I saw the opportunity.
Remember, unless you have a track record, they will always be taking a chance on you. My covering letter is getting longer and longer as I get more acceptances but I now just include those in the same genre as the market I’m submitting to. If you are writing to a horror anthology, having sold to a light humour magazine may not be a good recommendation. Especially as humour is extremely personal and not always a good selling point.
The basic message is: keep writing, keep sending stuff off, keep revising if it comes back, send it off again to somewhere it is a better match.
