Rejection Sans Scorn

An essential part of the toughening-up process, for anyone who aspires to be published by someone other than himself, is: how to handle the fact that not everyone — perhaps not anyone — but the author may be interested in publishing his work.

(As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a bad manager of my own career in at least one respect. Which is, I just don’t submit it to enough places (or rather, to enough people). So maybe I’m not the right person to offer advice about this. But, well, since when have actual qualifications ever denied a blogger his or her say? Right. Never.)

For one reason or another, as Speak Coffee reminds us, handling rejection letters from editors, magazines, publishers, and agents is suddenly (again) a hot topic. The links she provides in that post are handy, but I especially liked the (now four-plus years old) frank, editor’s-eye view of the rejection letter by Teresa Nielsen Hayden at the Making Light blog.

Nielsen Hayden is an editor with Tor Books, and she took it upon herself to explain, as carefully as possible (but with occasional frustration), what an editor might mean by rejecting a given manuscript:

Manuscripts are unwieldy, but the real reason for that time ratio [i.e., disproportionate time spent “opening the packages, logging in the name, title, agent/no agent, genre, and date rejected, and then repackaging the rejected manuscript with a form rejection letter and a copy of the Tor Submission Guidelines”] is that most of them are a fast reject. Herewith, the rough breakdown of manuscript characteristics, from most to least obvious rejections:

1. Author is functionally illiterate.
2. Author has submitted some variety of literature we don’t publish: poetry, religious revelation, political rant, illustrated fanfic, etc.
3. Author has a serious neurochemical disorder, puts all important words into capital letters, and would type out to the margins if MSWord would let him.
4. Author is on bad terms with the Muse of Language. Parts of speech are not what they should be. Confusion-of-motion problems inadvertently generate hideous images. Words are supplanted by their similar-sounding cousins: towed the line, deep-seeded, dire straights, nearly penultimate, incentiary, reeking havoc, hare’s breath escape, plaintiff melody, viscous/vicious, causal/casual, clamoured to her feet, a shutter went through her body, his body went ridged, empirical storm troopers, ex-patriot Englishmen, et cetera.
5. Author can write basic sentences, but not string them together in any way that adds up to paragraphs.
6. Author has a moderate neurochemical disorder and can’t tell when he or she has changed the subject. This greatly facilitates composition, but is hard on comprehension.
7. Author can write passable paragraphs, and has a sufficiently functional plot that readers would notice if you shuffled the chapters into a different order. However, the story and the manner of its telling are alike hackneyed, dull, and pointless.
   (At this point, you have eliminated 60-75% of your submissions. Almost all the reading-and-thinking time will be spent on the remaining fraction.)
8. It’s nice that the author is working on his/her problems, but the process would be better served by seeing a shrink than by writing novels.
9. Nobody but the author is ever going to care about this dull, flaccid, underperforming book.
10. The book has an engaging plot. Trouble is, it’s not the author’s, and everybody’s already seen that movie/read that book/collected that comic.
    (You have now eliminated 95-99% of the submissions.)
11. Someone could publish this book, but we don’t see why it should be us.
12. Author is talented, but has written the wrong book.
13. It’s a good book, but the house isn’t going to get behind it, so if you buy it, it’ll just get lost in the shuffle.
14. Buy this book.

In the current flurry of how best to think of rejection, my favorite bit of advice came from a comment by someone on (I think) Nathan Bransford’s blog. (Apologies to the commenter for not knowing/remembering his/her name for attribution.)

That person said that a writer needs to think of a rejection letter (or nowadays, email message) as a formalized version of what happens when you go into a book store with no particular book in mind to buy. The store may currently stock tens of thousands of titles; you are going to leave with only a very tiny number of all of them in your shopping bag.

The author who p!sses and moans about rejection letters is like the author of one of those (say) 9,999 unpurchased books in the store p!ssing and moaning about not having been among The Chosen. In the absence of specific evidence, you can’t possibly know why your manuscript wasn’t selected. The range of possible reasons runs from the mundane (not enough money in the acquisition account; already have an author with the same name as you; your urban-fantasy erotica doesn’t fit our ages 8-10 product line) to the more exotic and unpredictable (Some jackass hit my car on the way into work, so do I want to publish your freaking book about the evils of the tort system? Like hell I do!).

In short, relax. Don’t panic and rewrite the thing (although stopping to reassure yourself about its publishability isn’t necessarily wasted effort). Don’t take it personally. Just find somebody else to send it to.