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:
