Rejection Etiquette Rant

I love submitting online. As a person living abroad, this saves me postage and the trouble of keeping return postage from another country handy (which can be hard to come by when you can't just drop by the post office), and of course I get the same benefits that domestic submitters do: saving ink and paper, saving time.

That said, I have not had such great experiences with submitting manuscripts online. For example, today I happened to visit the website of a publisher to whose competition I had sent my manuscript via their own online submissions manager, and I discovered, though this wasn't the reason I had gone to their website, that they have already announced their contest winner, but hadn't bothered to notify the rejected entrants directly. Apparently we were supposed to check their website frequently, until the result showed up. Two other contests have also not bothered to report directly to me that they had chosen winners, but seemed to assume that I would check their websites repeatedly, and I mean repeatedly since neither one made their announcement within the timeframe they had established in their guidelines. One contest announced their results on Facebook only, not even on their website. I wasn't on Facebook at the time; how was I supposed to know?

To all of these places each entrant has paid a fee, and provided an email address. Is it too much to ask for a form letter to show up in our inboxes, or for the presses to use an online submissions manager that will contact us when the result has been made?

(FYI: None of these places had given instructions in their submissions guidelines or elsewhere on their webpages to check back for results on such-and-such a date. That I can deal with; I mark my calendar and check the website only once, knowing already that if I have to check the website to get the news, it isn't good news for me. That is not the kind of behavior I am talking about.)

These insulting behaviors are not limited to online submissions. Today I received a rejection letter via the dreaded SASE for a manuscript that was sent snail mail just exactly a year ago. The winner had been announced on the press website back in APRIL, and at that time I wondered why they hadn't informed me directly via the SASE that they had required me to send. Today I see that they have used that SASE to report the winner seven months after the fact and to suggest that I try and enter again this year, as their deadline is the end of this month. They saved my SASE for seven months in order to use it for their own marketing purposes.

I get that presses are small, often non-profit organizations. I support them: I buy directly from them, I subscribe to journals and to repeated purchase programs, I make donations. I don't ask for a personal rejection, just for a direct one. Am I really supposed to spend time (that would be better spend practicing my craft) obsessively checking their websites and/or Facebook pages? Spending that kind of time and attention chasing down results isn't productive or good for my focus or morale.

I know that editors are overworked and are often volunteers. But still, basic etiquette, people. Not to mention good business practices...

Purple Power

Today I got a really great rejection. I say this without sarcasm; I was rejected in the best way possible, with encouragement that my manuscript is good enough to be published in the future (even though this press was rejecting me), and with specific comments on my writing that lifted my spirits. The best part is that this came from a press I consider out of my league, that I only submitted to because the timing was good for me, which it had never been before with this press.

I had been considering whether to stop submitting this manuscript for the time being, but now I will continue (though in the months between when I submitted to this press and today I have strengthened it considerably by pulling the weaker poems and inserting a new section of linked prose poems which I think are pretty strong). I have hope again when until this morning it had been waning.

When I went to enter this rejection in my submissions spreadsheet, I was about to change all the information to red (I color-code my worksheet: black for outstanding submissions, red for rejections, green for withdrawals, and blue for acceptances). I was thinking what a shame it was to code this entry red when I was actually feeling pretty good about the rejection, when I remembered that a month ago I had also received a very encouraging rejection (I'd had to withdraw some poems from the submission when they were accepted elsewhere, and this journal told me they had been very interested in the entire group, and were disappointed when the withdrawal made it impossible to publish the entirety) and had decided to code it in purple because red didn't really reflect what it meant to me. So I happily coded this near miss purple too.

This is, I think, a good practice: to consider encouraging rejections as positive, and to remember them that way. Now when I see purple on my spreadsheet, I'll feel encouraged (not as encouraged as when I see blue entries in a sea of red, but still...). Appreciate your near misses; not everybody gets them.

Rejection Plus

You know the saying "When it rains, it pours"? Well, I never seem to get just a single rejection at a time. A month ago I got two on one day. But they were both personal notes suggesting that I submit to them again. Which I did. And within twelve hours, one of the journals had taken my second submission (haven't heard back from the other journal yet).

Today, two more rejections. One generic, one with an invitation to submit  new work. Will I? I will, yes; it works sometimes, as I was reminded last month. And you should submit a second time when you get the suggestion too. Don't take too lightly those rejections that encourage you to try again--I used to think they were just polite ways to reject me. But they mean it--you should try them again, reminding them that they encouraged you to. And you shouldn't wait too long; a month or two at the most, I'd say, so there's a good chance they'll still recall you and your work.

I'll be sending a new packet out soon....

What's Neat on the Net V

Authors being catty (with their cats, I mean) at the blog Writers and Kitties.

Also, David Cameron at The Review Review does an experiment with the result that The New Yorker ends up rejecting itself. Very funny, and oddly satisfying.

Just Say No

Editor and writer Brian Doyle has a funny essay at The Kenyon Review blog about receiving rejection letters and about writing them. Having a view from both sides of the process, Doyle merrily comments on and remembers the best rejection letters he's seen, as well as discuses the heartbreaks an editor goes through when rejecting certain pieces. We all know the heartbreak of the writer receiving the rejection; now see it from the other side, with someone who never forgets our side too.

Good (but Rejected) Company

Check out this list of 14 Best-Selling Books Repeatedly Rejected by Publishers over at How Stuff Works. It includes books by James Joyce, Madeleine L'Engle, Stephen King, and Robert Pirsig. So if your work has been rejected, rest assured you are in most excellent company.

Oh, and I'm on page 509 of Moby Dick. Less than 30 pages to go and we still haven't seen the White Whale!

Celebrating Rejection

Just in case you don't get enough rejection letters of your own, here is a website listing the text of rejection letters (both standard and "higher tier") from a plethora of literary magazines. It's actually kind of fun to read them, especially when they aren't addressed particularly to you!

Thanks to Nic Sebastian for making me aware of this interesting website.

The Rejection Jar

So my post on rejection apparently hit quite a nerve, judging from the number of hits to my website immediately following its posting. Naturally rejection is quite a popular topic, an obsession really, among the writerly type. Recently I read Michael Kardos's strategy for coping with the big "Not today, dear" by creating "a rejection jar." Check out his post at the Missouri Review's blog for more details. You might as well; those rejections just keep on coming, and having a way of coping is a healthy thing.