Rejectomancy

[Aggy B.]

REJECT: to refuse to accept, consider, submit to, take for some purpose, or use

-MANCY : divination

I'd never heard this term before, but lo and behold, Google had. For those who are neophytes to this art like myself here are a few articles to help explain and discuss.

- Abyss and Apex
- Wyrdsmiths
- Urban Dictionary

With these thoughts in mind, why don't we have our own thread to practice this divination?

(Izz put me up to this. Throw rocks at him. Send him virtual hugs.)

[Aggy B.]

I'll start. Subbed a short story entitled The Vampire's Ward to an anthology of steampunk erotica.

This is the rejection I got.

Hi Aggy,

Thanks so much for letting me consider your story for my steampunk erotic romance collection. While I enjoyed it very much, it isn't quite what I'm looking for in this collection. Best of luck to you in placing it elsewhere!


Kind regards,


Editor

*personal details such as editor's name and my name have been removed

What do you think? My guess is that "vampire" didn't equal steampunk in the editor's book o' rules.

[Izz]

This looks like a nice form R to me, Aggy. Probably made it to the editor's 'consider' pile.

ETA: it's possible the editor didn't like the vampire aspect of it, or it could be that the other stories they've bought are trending towards a certain theme and they want to go with that, or something else.

Conclusion: get it back out into the ethers!

(and for being the first person other than me to start a thread in our shiny subforum)

[AnnieColleen]

I don't have enough Rs yet to do much of this. More cricketomancy, recently. (Ooh, they've rejected stories more recent than mine! Hey, mine's been there right about their average time for acceptances... )

Glad to see the thread, though.

[Nathaniel Katz]

I got rejected by F&SF in five days. Counting shipping on both ends. And one of those days was sunday. I don't think they liked it...

[pangalactic]

Originally Posted by Nathaniel Katz

I got rejected by F&SF in five days. Counting shipping on both ends. And one of those days was sunday. I don't think they liked it...

I got a 10 day reject from F&SF including international shipping. It contained the words "this story couldn't grab my interest."

[MattJ]

In'tl snail mail rejection must be the worst. I won't know: I'm not ponying up $10 to send off to Interzone or Black Static.

Originally Posted by pangalactic

I got a 10 day reject from F&SF including international shipping. It contained the words "this story couldn't grab my interest."

[pangalactic]

Originally Posted by MattJ

In'tl snail mail rejection must be the worst. I won't know: I'm not ponying up $10 to send off to Interzone or Black Static.

Oddly enough, I just got a reject from Black Static last week as well. To add insult to injury, I (somehow) hadn't attached enough postage to my SAE, so I had to pay the extra plus a £1 handling fee to get my letter from the Post Office, just to find it was a rejection. Also, they slide in a subscription order form with the rejection slip. Nice of them.

I'd love to sell to Black Static though. It's one of my favourite magazines to read.

[zanzjan]

Originally Posted by pangalactic

Also, they slide in a subscription order form with the rejection slip. Nice of them.

Ouch about the postage. )-:

I would have to guess (and I'm totally just guessing here) that there are two reasons for including the sub form:
1) An awful lot of writers (especially new ones) send work off without having the faintest idea what sorts of stories a particular magazine publishes. One of the best ways of getting that sort of knowledge is to actually read an issue or two, and a subscription is a good way of doing that.
2) Short fiction markets are all really, really hurting. If any of us writers want to have magazines to send stuff to, there have to *be* magazines, and one way to help that stay true is (if you can afford it, of course) to subscribe to a few that you, as a reader, enjoy. Since we tend to both read and write things we like, it works out quite handily that the magazines we enjoy reading are also more likely to be good fits for our work.

-Suzanne

[Izz]

Got a personalized R back this morning (i know it was personal rather than nice form because they referenced specific aspects of the story). It was a nice R, but still an R. The point they raised re why they didn't take the story was very valid (ofc), but i don't feel like rewriting.

That was its 10th R, and it's been close at several venues (was held by one pro-paying mag for over 300 days). If it hasn't sold after 10 more markets i may think about retiring it

[Nathaniel Katz]

Originally Posted by Izz

Got a personalized R back this morning (i know it was personal rather than nice form because they referenced specific aspects of the story). It was a nice R, but still an R. The point they raised re why they didn't take the story was very valid (ofc), but i don't feel like rewriting.

That was its 10th R, and it's been close at several venues (was held by one pro-paying mag for over 300 days). If it hasn't sold after 10 more markets i may think about retiring it

Damn, what venue? That's a bit much. Did you at least get a personal rejection after all that time?

[Izz]

Originally Posted by Nathaniel Katz

Damn, what venue? That's a bit much. Did you at least get a personal rejection after all that time?

Yeah, got a personal R. The editor was very apologetic. Basically it boiled down to the length of the story versus space in the mag.

[theresa.mcclinton]

Originally Posted by Izz

That was its 10th R, and it's been close at several venues (was held by one pro-paying mag for over 300 days). If it hasn't sold after 10 more markets i may think about retiring it

At what point do you consider retiring a manuscript? I am writing a series, and if it never gets accepted by an agent, I don't know if I could retire it and just put it away to collect dust. I'm attached to my characters and I want them to be out there.

What do you do if you get R by all agents but can't bear to let go of your story? Revise query and synopsis before resending it? Is that even recommended?

[Izz]

Originally Posted by theresa.mcclinton

At what point do you consider retiring a manuscript? I am writing a series, and if it never gets accepted by an agent, I don't know if I could retire it and just put it away to collect dust. I'm attached to my characters and I want them to be out there.

What do you do if you get R by all agents but can't bear to let go of your story? Revise query and synopsis before resending it? Is that even recommended?

Hi theresa Welcome to AW and to the W1S1 room!

We mainly talk short fiction in this thread (though that might change now we have the Novel Challenge going in here), so you have to weigh our posts accordingly

For short stories, it depends on the story. I've got a couple that've been to 20+ markets that i still want to sell because i think they're good enough, and i've retired some after 5 or 6 markets because i know they're not good enough, and the level of rejection i was getting for them proved my instincts right.

For novel length fiction, well, i'm not particularly experienced there. I'm just getting back into writing novels this year after eighteen months off, and i've only queried one novel in the past. After about 40 or so agent Rs (i sent out 5 queries a week for two months), with only 3 or 4 asking for more pages, i trunked it. I would've sent more, but i'd gone through the reputable agents in my genre who accepted e-queries, and sending hardcopy from New Zealand is expensive.

However, i've heard of writers who've queried more than 200 agents before finding the right one, which agent has then sold their work to a good publishing house.

There's some good info in the Ask the Agent forum about this sort of thing, so maybe you might want to browse around in there

Hey, have you thought about joining our Novel Challenge? It might be a good motivational tool, and it's always fun to hang out with other writers doing similar stuff.

[JenWriter]

Originally Posted by theresa.mcclinton

At what point do you consider retiring a manuscript? I am writing a series, and if it never gets accepted by an agent, I don't know if I could retire it and just put it away to collect dust. I'm attached to my characters and I want them to be out there.

What do you do if you get R by all agents but can't bear to let go of your story? Revise query and synopsis before resending it? Is that even recommended?

I queried about 30 agents for the novel that got me my agent. Before that, I sent out around 60 for another. For that one, I wish I had stopped halfway through and realized something wasn't working to do a revision, but I'm happy with how things turned out. In hindsight though, I can see that a revision might have yielded better results before exhausted the query pool. A friend of mine queried over 100 agents for one of her manuscripts. She landed an agent and then later a three-book deal with a top publisher. So, I think it boils down to how much you believe in the story and how many agents in your genre you can find to query.

[cathyfreeze]

Aggy,

Rejectomancy! A long and honored waste of time tradition.

"it isn't quite what I'm looking" is standard-reject #1, i fear. Could be anything. Second cousin to "Doesn't quite fit our mag."

cat

[NicoleMD]

I've gotten 11 rejections this month, which works out to one pretty much every other day. It's been tough, but I guess that means I've got a lot of stories out there. So maybe it's a good thing?

Nicole

[cathyfreeze]

Yes, Nicole! You should always be like that and never, ever like me, who hasn't subbed anything until now for 2 yrs!

[Sagana]

I have now discovered that markets hold twitter fic as long as anything else. That seems wild, but actually they probably get much, much more of it so the slush piles are just as high.

I know this is the cricketomancy kind, but it's what I've got right now. Maybe it fits the genre if you look at it sideways?

If I *had* eleven stories, I'm sure I'd have more to say in this thread. So far, I have three and working on four, not counting the twitter ones. Yes, I'd say that's a very good thing

[AnnieColleen]

I think it fits here -- or else we should go start our own thread! (One of my stories is right in the market's "average acceptance" zone, & duotrope has responses -- ok, rejections -- coming for older & newer submissions...the crickets are having a field day.)

[Izz]

Originally Posted by AnnieColleen

(One of my stories is right in the market's "average acceptance" zone, & duotrope has responses -- ok, rejections -- coming for older & newer submissions...the crickets are having a field day.)

Oh, i hate that. Invariably i get my hopes up, only to have them shattered a week or so later.

[AnnieColleen]

Yep. I'm trying to focus on those "older" rejections to keep the hopes in check.

Or focus on new stuff. Not working so well.

[AlwaysJuly]

Here's my rejectomancy topic of the day. I'm at about 10% personalized rejections. I know some people say if you aren't getting personalized rejections, it might be time to revisit the story in edits, maybe get some new crits, because you're possibly well off the mark.

But, erm, I'm subbing to pro markets with no short story credis to my name. Well, and non-pro literary mags that are swamped. So I don't know how meaningful those form r's are.

What to do, what to do?

[AlwaysJuly]

I love the term cricketomancy too, by the way! Too funny. I have some stories that have been out for a while, but I try to ignore how long it's taking.

Though Lightspeed got me back an r in a day.

[shelleyo]

I'm at 11 rejections for the month (though 9 if you count that 3 were in one poetry batch--I count it as 11). That number will undoubtably get higher. The only other rejection this year was in February. Of course, I've made 23 submissions just this month compared to 4 each for Jan and Feb, so it makes sense the number's going to be higher.

Right now I have 15 things out, though a few are at the same place, and there are a couple of poems in there, as well as some micro stuff and the longest original story I've done to date. It's quite a mix.

I have several submissions planned this week. I just need to recheck guidelines and organize everything. I'm also hoping to have everything written so far in W1S1 out by the end of the month, as I still have two in revision stages from February, both of last week's stories in revision, and one that did get submitted but was rejected, and I decided it's actually two stories instead of one. Got a two-fer that week and didn't even know it.

I'd sure like to be able to write a story at the beginning of the week, revise, and send it out that same week. I have done it, but if I tried to do that every week, it would result in me sending an awful lot of stuff out that's just not ready. I'm thinking that might change as the year goes on, and it'll get easier to get things revised a little faster. But if not, that's okay with me, too.

Shelley