What do you usually do with rejected manuscript?

wait- you got one rejection and you're ready to call it quits? Or am I missing something here?

Yeah- keep sending it out! And work on a new shiny story to take your mind off it. You do get totally numb to rejections in the end. It's usually a matter of personal taste and nothing personal

Keep trying. I've had at least 10 rejections looking for publication for my short stories. You can't let it bother you. Brush it off and keep going.

ravenklaw said:

I know you mean well. Thanks, anyway. I'm not quitting. It's just that I started to hate the rejected manuscript. The rejection letter didn't actually say anything other than well, not their cup of tea, but I have an averse reaction to it and this time it's against my very own manuscript as though I want to detach myself from it and start from the scratch.

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Of course I meant well- sorry if it sounded otherwise- we should all support one another- this is a hard business- I meant- you should never give up- I had over 200 rejections before I got published and yeah every one stung a little, but you pick yourself up brush yourself off and keep on keeping on. Right now I am querying as well and the rejections are rolling in, as well as requests for material, so keep going it only takes one person to say yes.

ravenklaw said:

I need that hard punch in the gut type of reality check though and that rejection is inevitable. I thought I'd just brush it up like what everybody said, but hating the manuscript is probably just a projection of hating myself for coming up short. But really thanks. I'll revisit the book and revise when I'm ready to even re-read it.

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Getting a form rejection doesn't mean you've come up short. Your book could be a bestseller. It just means that ONE person in the whole wide world of agents didn't feel strong enough to take it on. I mean som agents get literally (literally!) 5000 submissions a year and take on maybe two clients. You mean every single of those 4998 that didn't make it sucked? Of course they didn't!

Just make sure you think the manuscript is as good as you can possibly make it and if it is, carry on when you're ready I'd send a lot more than one at a time though, too.

ravenklaw said:

I got my first rejection a month ago. It hurt me and my ego no matter how I prepared for it and how many rejection stories I read. I loved the manuscript before I sent it and then when it got rejected, I started to hate it. What do you usually do with your rejected manuscript?

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You didn't read it when you got it back, did you? That's always a mistake. Just send it back out the next day. I've made thousand dollar short story sales after close to twenty rejections on a story, some from magazines that paid on a few dollars.

You have to separate your writing self from the submission self. One is pleasure, and the other is business.

Read this, believe it, and follow it: http://www.sfwriter.com/ow05.htm

Calla Lily said:

I'm a big proponent of letting Rs and crits percolate for a few days before starting to work with them. It's never easy to learn the book isn't All That.

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Yup. This. Of course, this applies more to a rigorous crit than a form rejection, which could mean everything or nothing.

I go through a broad spectrum of emotions after getting a rigorous critique. One of them is always the horrible, sinking feeling of Ohhhh, no, I thought this was good; what's wrong with me? How can I possibly be a Real Writer if my self-critique skills are so poor? Etc., etc.

Once that sinking sensation has had time to dissipate, I realize the crit has taught me a lot. I still feel like an idiot, but I pick myself up, remember why I love my book, and make it better. (Of course, that depends on the book. Sometimes trunking it and moving on may feel like the best thing to do.)

I'm starting to believe that the only truly useful critiques come from readers who like something about your manuscript and are willing to tell you why it isn't fulfilling its potential. (Someone who just plain hates it, or didn't get past page 5, or "doesn't get it," won't have much to say that you can learn from. Neither will someone who praises every aspect of it to the skies.)

Finding such tough-yet-supportive readers for a particular ms. is extremely hard — busy agents don't have time for in-depth feedback unless they're considering representing you, and friends and family don't want to hurt the writer's feelings. I've had many readers who basically just stopped reading or told me, "It's confusing" — which let me know the book sucked, without giving me a path toward fixing it.

It's important to get that "meh" feedback, too, but it shouldn't be given undue weight. Sometimes particular concepts and genres just don't work for particular people. (A romance reader may not "get" space opera or vice versa.) If you bore or perplex someone who seems like the ideal target reader for your book, that person is the one to seek detailed feedback from, because he or she may be able to explain exactly what's not working.

If you're having a strong negative reaction to your own writing, it actually probably ISN'T time to be trying to sell it. Only if you really believe in your work should you keep on submitting it.

Give it time and work on something else. If that something else turns into the manuscript you really believe in, great! But it's also possible you'll go back to your old work and love it.

I've got a bunch of books that never got accepted, and a couple of them I've genuinely abandoned as flat-out bad. But several I fully intend to revisit.

Ugh, i'm sorry you're in this place of hating your MS! I'll share a personal story, too--I was in final edits this past month, and when I got the last few notes I just had this weird emotional reaction where I couldn't look at the piece for like a week. I felt so overwhelmed and defeated. And these were tiny tweaks on a polished, to-be-published MS.

So, I guess the moral of the story is. . . it never goes away for good? That's a horrible story, I apologize.

Really what I'm trying to say is, I feel you. Can you give it a week, wait for more feedback, give it another week, decide which feedback you agree with and which is totally wrong, and then revise? What worked for me to help me get back into edits was trying to reconnect with the early things about the story that made me want to write it. Do you have a playlist that you listened to while drafting? Or some art that inspired you? Or can you read someone else's work, someone you admire? That always helps me.

Good luck and feel better! I hope this part passes quick!

It always stings. You've worked hard and you think it's awesome and then - BAM.

What I do, is think to myself that the rejecter has poor taste, is missing out, and what not (it doesn't matter how narcissistic this sounds - it's healing), and then I start my own little 1 person fandom, give my manuscript some loving, and self-publish
While I admit I used to let it discourage me. But no mas!

You know, maybe the rejecter was right, or at least had a point, but that doesn't mean you should hit Delete and trudge into a dark little corner. A manuscript rejected by a publisher is kinda like a girl rejected by a crush. At first she's crushed, then she gets up and says: it's not because HE doesn't want me, that I'm unwantable! And then she either loves herself instead of looking for love from external sources, or finds a new crush to try (and hopefully still loves herself though).

ravenklaw said:

I know you mean well. Thanks, anyway. I'm not quitting. It's just that I started to hate the rejected manuscript. The rejection letter didn't actually say anything other than well, not their cup of tea, but I have an averse reaction to it and this time it's against my very own manuscript as though I want to detach myself from it and start from the scratch.

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You hate your manuscript because one editor (and it might have just been a slush reader) rejected it? Why? Why would their rejection effect how you felt about the story before the rejection? For all you know, that editor might have just had a bad day, maybe your story reminded them if something bad that happened to them, maybe they already accepted a story similar to yours and couldn't take yours also? There are so many reasons a manuscript gets rejected and many of those aren't have little to do with the quality of your story. I understand how it feels like a punch in the gut, how it feels like they're rejecting your baby, or even you as a writer, but those are all YOUR feelings and have nothing to do with the reality of what happened. Take a deep breath. Squeeze the hell out of a stress ball. Then reread the story. Realize its still wonderful. And send it to the next market.

holy heidi said:

Ugh, i'm sorry you're in this place of hating your MS! I'll share a personal story, too--I was in final edits this past month, and when I got the last few notes I just had this weird emotional reaction where I couldn't look at the piece for like a week. I felt so overwhelmed and defeated. And these were tiny tweaks on a polished, to-be-published MS.

So, I guess the moral of the story is. . . it never goes away for good? That's a horrible story, I apologize.

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Thanks for sharing that, HH! It's not horrible at all, because it's good to know that can happen at any stage of the process. Forewarned is forearmed.

I'm starting to think I have a touch of bipolarity in my feelings toward my manuscripts. It's either euphoria or uuggggh, I can't write, I hate this. The only way to escape the extremes is to get back in the flow of things, stop judging, and just write.

Maybe over time writers achieve level-headed equilibrium and manage never to love or hate their manuscripts, never to have urges to frame them or burn them or throw them out the window into a sub-zero blizzard. I have yet to find out.

The first rejection hurts.

The second rejection hurt.

Who am I kidding? They all sting like crazy, but the only way to develop a tolerance is to keep going back for more.

It's also the way to get anything that is NOT a rejection.

I recently attended a conference and in one of the sessions, the speaker (a guy who has several published books, including one currently in development for a movie) explained how he STILL gets rejection letters for projects he's working on.

Don't look at rejection letters as an evaluation on your writing abilities or the quality of the manuscript.

Agents are humans. You cannot control the mood they are in on the day they read your query letter. You cannot control whether the day before that agent just found his perfect manuscript that he's going to groom and take care of for the next 18 months. You cannot control whether that particular publishing house has met its quota for your particular genre.


Agents get thousands of query letters and they will only ever sign a handful of new writers per year.


It sounds to me that you had unreasonable expectations, which is something all new writers do when they first start querying. We all assume that "I'll be the exception. My work is so good, that this agent will sign me on the spot."
It's devastating when that fantasy doesn't pan out.

All successful writers have gone through hundreds of rejection letters before they find representation.

Simply getting one rejection letter is no reason to quit. In all likelihood, it was a form rejection letter. Your agent didn't like your query letter, or he didn't like your first page. Maybe you have a glaring typo, or a cliched opening. Maybe your query letter isn't clear.
OR, maybe your agent has personal preferences or pet peeves that you happened to tick off. Again, agents are humans.

Giving up will get you nowhere.

What do I do when I get rejected? I reflect upon the sage words of one Cave Johnson, of Portal fame:

Cave Johnson
When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade! Make life take the lemons back! Get mad!

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So I get mad. Then I send the ms to another two or three agents.

Or that's how I want it to be. Instead, I spend an hour or so doing some self-pitying moping. Then I read the rejection again two or three times and get mad.

ravenklaw said:

I got my first rejection a month ago. It hurt me and my ego no matter how I prepared for it and how many rejection stories I read. I loved the manuscript before I sent it and then when it got rejected, I started to hate it. What do you usually do with your rejected manuscript?

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Submit it somewhere else. One of my best paid short stories was rejected 9 times before being accepted utterly unchanged and with great enthusiasm.