Rejection, how a loser copes

Rejection is another of those words with which I take issue; I actually hate the word. It is an especially toxic word for a writer and will do great damage if you let yourself buy into the notion of rejection. A rejection is a very personal act and attacks a writer in the place where he most needs to be protected and reassured. Finally, and most importantly, it is completely inaccurate. And that’s the good news! You don’t have to deal with rejection; it simply doesn’t exist when trying to get published. The bad news is that virtually every writing teacher uses the term. It is my opinion that those teachers be dragged out of the classroom and beaten in the parking lot. It is a crime to teach someone that information and feedback is rejection. The writer wasn’t rejected, they were informed!

So, no rejection huh? That’s right. Nowhere does a publisher use the word reject or rejection. A publisher doesn’t want you to feel rejected. What most people are calling rejection is, in fact, valuable information. Most of the time a publisher or agent passes on work not because of the writing, but because of mistakes made in the submission process. That’s great news because those are easy to fix errors.

The notion of rejection blinds people to this information. If you sent your epic adult romance novel to a Mr. or Mrs. To Whom It May Concern at ABC Children’s books you are asking to be turned down. Many authors don’t realize that feedback, a reply of any kind, is valuable information and not a rejection. Looking at it as a personal rejection and pinning it to the wall is to completely miss the value of it. A very impersonal response may mean you made big errors in the submission of your work and were filtered out immediately. Maybe you put the wrong name on the envelope or a generic honorific. Perhaps you are sending the publisher a genre they don’t publish. Maybe you didn’t give them the physical format they requested, you know: 1 inch margins, double-spaced, font and size, etc. So, a printed form telling you they are not interested, or must pass on your work, may mean you were filtered out early, whereas a more personal letter means you made it farther through the submission process. When a publisher gives you a list of specific information such as the genre they are interested in, who to submit it to, and how to submit it, and usually much more, you can get far just by delivering what they want.

Believe it or not, even with all the talk of competition (another blog post I assure you) publishers are usually starved for good content. It is my understanding that there is a dearth of publishable material. Publishers would love to get that great material but I suspect a lot of good writing is filtered out early on. My theory is that the really creative types with great stories are often terrible at details like names and formatting. It’s the pinheads that are good at that stuff, but bad at creative storytelling, that are choking the publishers and agents with all their crap.

And that is because a lot of that crap is resubmissions. I am not talking about a submission someone worked hard on to improve but resending of the exact same package back to the publisher or agent. Resubmissions are a waste of everyone’s time and money and, believe it or not, publishers and agents get a lot of submissions that have already passed through their system and were filtered out. At first I thought the people resubmitting like that were stupid, but I realized that they simply weren’t taught how much control they have over the writing and publishing process. Most aspiring writers are taught that the whole shebang is all personal and you will get rejected many, many, times. So in the mind of the wide-eyed aspiring writer it’s all luck and a personality contest. So, if it’s all the luck of the draw, it stands to reason they would treat a submission like a lucky lottery number and play it again and again hoping to win the next time around.

If you look at why your work wasn’t picked up by a publisher, you will learn what to fix. Each time you improve your submission or the work, you get farther up the ladder of success. And it doesn’t take much to move up that ladder. Especially nowadays as the computer makes it infinitely easier to find the right publisher or agent for your submission. You can also self-publish and that allows a writer to accomplish many goals that were impossible a short time ago. Not everyone wants or needs to go the traditional publishing route. What route should you take? That is yet another topic for a future posting.

I have read that publishers estimate that up to eighty percent of their submissions are filtered out for the most simple of reasons. There are numerous articles on the submission process and most publishers and agents give a great deal of information on the Do’s and Don’ts of the submission process as it pertains to their company or agency. They will usually tell you what they are looking for and everything you need to know to send to them.

I have taken and audited several college level writing classes. Every professor had a doctorate and none of them had any significant publishing credits. They all spoke with great authority on the submission process that resulted in a mountain of rejection slips. They told tales of the great literary genius (referring to themselves of course), who even had a doctorate (they always make sure to mention that!) that submitted their work hundreds of times and collected hundreds of rejections and pinned them to the wall. In their minds they are thinking, all these rejections prove that publishers are assholes and will assuredly reject you if they rejected a genius such as me (with my doctorate). They believe it must be personal if they didn’t get published and yet they fail to understand how the submission process works and that publishing is a business. Publishers are concerned with markets, profits, genre popularity, audience size, and more. If you can demonstrate an understanding of that in your submission it goes a long way towards your success.

So… What, you may ask, should I do if I actually get a hateful, personal, letter that uses the word reject, rejection, or ‘big steaming pile’? That’s easy, first ask yourself, do I know this person? Is this the guy I left at the prom for the janitor? Is this the girl I made vomit by pouring salt in her milk at summer camp? Is this the neighbor whose purebred dog I shaved right before a national dog show? Ok, if it isn’t someone you personally wronged, then move on to number two.

Number two is asking yourself, “What the hell is this person’s problem?”

It isn’t you, a reply like that means the sender has a mental problem. Case closed. But most importantly, would you want to be in a relationship with a person like that? Would you want to sign contracts with them? Would you want to trust your creation with them?

There are just too many audiences, markets, topics, and writers just like you with your unique perspective to ever go unpublished. The first thing you must do is to drop the word rejection from your vocabulary and look at people who use it with contempt and disgust, with a dash of pity (but mostly contempt and disgust).