I keep a spreadsheet of every submission I have ever sent and most of the cells look like this
Should I set it to auto-format to red-on-red like a low oxygen alert on a spaceship? Probably not. But I do anyway because that’s what I’ve always done.
Rejection is inevitable when you are trying to get any kind of writing published. I want to take you through what it took for my short story “Can’t Take Everything” to go from my computer to published online.
For this post, I am going to skip over the parts of a story’s conception, first draft, rewriting, rewriting some more, fine tuning, finding where to submit1 , and revising after rejections. Let’s assume we have a story ready to go out on submission and we’ve clicked send…
The cold hard numbers:
I submitted this piece 39 times between August 28th 2018 and February of 2022 (a 1263 day total). It was:
Rejected 35 times
Accepted once
Withdrawn after acceptance from 3 places
To give you an idea of how these happened— because it wasn’t one large submission and 4 years of waiting— I have tried to have most of the data tell a story. Below are most individual submissions I sent, date in days past on the bottom, and each submission is the corresponding length before getting a yes/no. It begins from the bottom and goes up (because I couldn’t figure out how to change that in my program).
2
It started with two submissions, big places that were journals that get tons and tons of submissions from writers all across the world. The odds were low, but I swung for the fences right out the gate! And one of them really took their time, holding onto it for more than 400 days!3
The graph shows sending it to one of two or three places here and there, waiting a bit to get a response, then sending it out again. My biggest day was 10 simultaneous submissions about 820 days in, all to places I felt I had a smaller than normal chance of getting accepted so I felt okay sending it out to more than I normally do. Finally the graph stops on a submission that was out for 11 days with a wonderful email saying “Yes.”4
Three Types of Rejection Letters
Every rejection letter is as unique as the publication and editors that send them. Most often they send what are called “form rejection letters,” meaning they have template(s) already written up and can modify it if need be or sent the same, carefully worded letter to anyone they have decided not to publish.
Let me show you three different ones I received and how they differ.
Letter One
Dear Nathan Goodroe:
Thank you for sending "Can't Take Everything." After careful consideration, we've decided this submission isn't right for [Redacted Press Name]. Our reading period will remain open through May 31st.
Kind regards, The Editors
Nothing much to say here. It’s a clean and simple letter saying we read it and it wasn’t right for us. Does that mean it was bad? Did they accept a piece exactly like it minutes before? No way to know! I could spend a whole day agonizing and creating a story in my head, but ultimately, there is no way to know anything that happened on the other side of the screen. All I can do with this is go to my spreadsheet and mark it Declined for that publication.
Letter Two
Dear Nathan,
Thank you for sending us "Can't Take Everything". While our editors enjoyed reading it, we have decided it is not a good fit at this time.
We wish you the best of luck in placing this elsewhere and hope you will consider submitting again in the future.
Best wishes,
Now on the surface this may seem the same as the previous, but there are a few key additions: “Our editors enjoyed reading it,” and “hope you will consider submitting again in the future.” Publications have no need to encourage writers and writing they don’t want to read to continue to take space in their mailbox. If they say to trying them again, they mean it. That is my invitation to put a little star by that press and keep them in mind for whatever I have ready next. Getting warmer.
Letter Three
Nathan,
Thank you for submitting your work to [Publication Name]. While we ultimately did not choose your work for publication, I want you to know that it was carefully considered in the final rounds of deliberation. We regret not having enough room in the review to publish more of the very good work sent to us. Can't Take Everything was an arresting piece. The writing and pacing is very strong. It was up against some very tough competition, and as such it needed to do a little more. We wanted to do more than (just) present the obvious terrible world this guy and his family are left to endure. But this is riveting writing. Keep going!
We will re-open to submissions soon for our next issue. We hope you’ll consider submitting to us again!
This is the best kind of rejection letter for me. They read my work, wrestled with it, and told me that it was close to making a home there. But it didn’t, and they include what they felt could make the piece even stronger. And the extra cherry on top was they invited me to send them another piece for the next issue to step up to the plate again. Could they decline the next piece I sent too? Absolutely, but I’ve piqued their interest. This helps me as a writer looking for publications to call home know I’m getting closer.
Reframing Rejection
I love my library more than almost anywhere else. I love walking through the rows of books and running my hand over the shelves, hoping for something exciting to find me and ask me to take it home. I must look at a hundred books each time I am there: pulling them off the shelves, flipping through the pages, and checking the back cover copy. But almost all I look at end up back on the shelf.
Did I “reject” all of those books? Well, kinda. They weren’t for me on that day and on that trip. There are almost too many reasons why a particular book doesn’t end up being scanned and brought home, but it isn’t “This is a bad book and no one should check it out.”
I tell myself that is what the editors are doing with my story. Maybe it would have hit different on another day or they just read a future “Best American Short Story” and mine seemed like a letdown after that. I try not to imagine what they thought. If they want to tell me, they will. All I have to do is go update my spreadsheet, and start looking for another place that might be excited to see my words in their inbox.
Something I don’t feel good at AT ALL, but has been helped some by this neat little site: ChillSubs.com. You can search by all the best little parameters and find a few places. Obviously the best next step is to read as many pieces as you can to get the “je ne sais quoi” of any publication.
Shout out to this site for some help doing some data science formatting I couldn’t figure out on my own.
By far the longest time my work was sitting “on their desk.” Over a years worth of time, but when I followed up a year in, I was told that it was because it was being passed around, a thing that happens at most places. Many editors read your work and talk about it.
Some more stats: Mean submission time was 115 days and the median was 90 days. I assume the mean is really thrown off by the 400+ one. With that taken out the new mean submission response time is 104 days.