Rejection
Nobody likes the feeling you get in the pit of your stomach when you open a letter or email informing you that the story you worked on day and night for the last month is not what the editor is “looking for”. Or worse yet, you receive the all-too-common form letter or simple “it just didn’t work for me.”
Many would speculate that it is some conspiracy of the Postal Service or Internet to keep business churning by paying off editors to turn away anyone who’s last name doesn’t begin with a ‘K’. Maybe the editor was a complete idiot who didn’t realize your genius at first glance. Maybe it was crap. (That’s where editing comes into play). The human factor in getting your story published is a big one. The editor could have marital problems one morning, spill boiling coffee on herself on the way to the office where she is bombarded by stacks of stories – in between which is your gem. Let’s hope her mood improves before she reaches your neck of the pile.
Blankety-blank happens. The only antidote for rejection is perserverance. Like selling a car, getting a part in a play, or anything else; the more you send a story out, the higher the chance it will have in getting published. *** I want to note that you damn well better make sure it is in tip-top shape before sending it out. (See last week’s blog.)
And in keeping with that old saying about misery, here’s some examples to hopefully keep you going.
1. Stephen King’s manuscript for Carrie was rejected twelve times.
2. Ray Bradbury was continuously rejected until he began to sell one story a year. Then two. And it doubled every year after that.
3. Theodore Geisel – His first book was rejected 28 TIMES before being published by Random House. The book was “And to Think That I Saw it on Mulberry Street”. You may know him better as Dr. Seuss.
I myself have recently received the quickest rejection in my own experience, although I don’t believe the Guiness people would be willing to call it a world record. But who knows. I sent the story in on Friday evening and received the rejection at 7:25 Saturday morning. And you know what I did? I sent it right back out.
Rejection blows and it’s part of the game of writing. Get used to it. I want to give you several groups of three words that I would like you to memorize, keep in your heart and put on a sticky note below your shower head. Pick whatever one works best for you
Don’t Give Up
Keep Moving Forward
Send It Again
Who’s Dr. Seuss?
- Sean Grigsby
Short Story Collection FAQ
One of my Seven Deadly Pens partners was curious about some of the specifics of publishing a collection of short stories. Since I’ve already had two published, I had a fair amount of information to share. Here it is for your own edification, should you be curious as well.
Did you approach a publisher with a completed manuscript & table of contents?
Yes.
Did they reject any of the stories or how you had them put together?
A couple of stories got rejected for Despairs & Delights because they were a little too extreme for the editor. Those made it into Magick & Misery, though, which was released through a different publisher.
Did you self publish?
Hells no. See here and here.
What about rights? I would assume many of the stories in a collection were previously published, so did you have any issues with what could go into the collection? Are there rights covering this sort of thing? (I assume there are…) Would anthology rights apply here? What rights would apply to a collected work?
It is assumed that a collection will include a lot of reprints, so that shouldn’t be an issue. What you do need to make sure of is that you’re not violating any agreements with other publishers/editors. If you signed a contract giving print rights to a specific story to Dark Recesses for a year, for example, you need to either wait that whole year before publishing it elsewhere or else ask DR for permission to use it sooner. Anthology rights are rights a magazine purchases in order to include work they’ve published in the magazine in a ‘Best Of’ anthology at a later date. The rights that apply to the collection? It’s your work, and you have the right to publish it, unless you’ve signed a contract giving those rights away either temporarily or permanently.
I have enough stuff right now that would come together to make a 60,000-word collection. Would that be long enough?
Absolutely. Neither of mine are that long.
Did you buy a number of your own copies at a discount to resell?
Yes. As a matter of fact, I can sell signed copies direct from my website for cover price or below and still make a buck or two per copy.
You do that through your website and keep the money, or do you have a deal with your publisher to split any of that revenue?
If I buy them, I don’t get royalties on those copies, of course, but I keep any revenue from their sales, which, depending on the circumstances, can amount to more per copy than I’d see if someone bought the book through Amazon, for example.
– Lincoln Crisler
“The purse! The damn PURSE!!!”
October 22, 2009 at 11:27 pm (Essays, Life, Resources, Social Commentary, Uncategorized) (editing, first draft, patience, submitting, wait, writing)
We’ve all heard it before. Endless amounts of YouTube videos, articles, and books on writing have preached the sanctity of putting away that first draft and come back to it when you’ve grown up. And you know something? They’re right. But how many of us follow this credo? I’ll be the first to cross that line drawn in the sand and say with complete shame that I have no patience. Without giving anything away, I recently finished a story that opens with a woman in a lifeboat, digging through a purse. I never said whose purse it was. I then did the old flashbackaroo and, after a series of harrowing events, lead back to where the story began.
I went through that story backwards, forwards, and even did the Charleston on top of it. Happy with what I had, I sent that baby to the publisher whose deadline was Halloween. I have taken a break from writing between Saturday night and today. I figured I deserved a little “down time” for such a good job and decided to use the time to read “Self-Editing For Fiction Writers”. In the middle of a paragraph, it hits me. The purse! The damn PURSE!!! I never explained how the purse got into the lifeboat with her. I tried to think back and convince myself that I hadn’t made the main character do anything that would rule out the possibility that she did it all with a purse around her shoulder. Nope. Try again. Maybe the other female character had hers with her. It wasn’t like I said whose purse it was. Right? We’ll see.
The point I’m trying to make to both myself and you is that you NEED to set aside your recent work and come back to it with fresh eyes. Odds are you missed something whether it’s an info dump, a clear case of telling, or a damned Coach bag. One thing I’m going to try, and suggest the same to you, is to start work on a new story as soon as you are done with your latest. The new story will give you time to let the old one simmer and also get your mind away from it. Even better, it motivates you to keep writing. Because, are we really writers if we don’t write?
– Sean Grigsby
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