Reading Time: 6 Mins
I received a rejection email last night at 12:38 a.m. for a short story I had submitted to a popular and prestigious magazine.
I knew I was swinging for the fences by submitting there. After all, I am an unpublished author and this was also my first real foray into trying to publish genre fiction.
The submission portal tells you the average response time for the magazine and it has hovered at around 30 days during my entire time observing it.
I figured I would hear back with a rejection at around the 30-day mark. I was fine with that. I’d move onto the next one on my list, not wanting to have multiple submissions out for the same piece at the same time.
30 days passed. I figured I would hear within 40, then that milestone passed as well.
At around 90 days I started to dream. This was three times as long as the average response time – this had to be a positive sign, right? I had made it past the initial slush pile readers and had been moved up the chain a bit.
Still, it was a cautious optimism.
By day 120 I was checking the portal daily, watching my number drop in the queue. I was 12 for a long time, then 9, then a quick drop to 4 before hitting number 3 in the queue late last week.
They were working through the backlog and would soon be at mine.
The dreams were real now; could you imagine if my first publication credit was in a magazine of this stature? I stopped writing my next short story, pinning so much hope on this one.
Yesterday was day 140.
The rejection letter was nice enough and was sent from the editor herself. Nothing specific and likely a form, but thoughtfully written.
And here I am today back at ground zero with it, and with not much else written during the last three weeks either.
I need to remember that the proper mentality to approach this with has less to do with the words on the page and more to do with the fact that this is a numbers game.
I worked my way through University selling newspaper subscriptions door-to-door. You want to talk rejection, man, that is the job for you.
I learned so much in that line of work and I need to start applying those learnings on my publishing journey, with some necessary tweaks.
Here are those learnings and how they have informed the three golden rules I’ll be following from now on.
1. Ramp up the at-bats
A good night selling meant hitting double digits; if you hit 15 sales you were upper echelon. Pulling a 7 would be bare minimum. Anything less than that and there might be questions around how hard you worked.
I would knock on at least 100 doors a night to get double digits, sometimes 150. There were no shortage of doors and if you were selling on average one in ten houses, that meant every “no” you got was simply one of the other nine.
In getting published, this is a lot trickier to manage mentally because the next door is not just a minute away. In my example above it was almost five months that this one story was, essentially, out of play. Sure, I can submit to the next magazine on my list today, but the length of time it takes to get rejected can really play on you.
So to ramp up my at-bats, as it were, it only makes sense to have multiple submissions out at the same time, which means sitting down and actually writing the stories. I have no shortage of ideas, I just need to do the work, submit them and forget them and let the system take them from there.
Focus on that next house, that next sale.
Do the work.
Hustle.
2. Perfect the pitch
While I would use pretty much the same pitch when working door-to-door, I’d tweak it depending on the neighbourhood I was in. If I was in a neighbourhood that mostly read a competing paper, I’d play down the editorial slant. If I was in a lower-income neighbourhood, I would play up the savings.
I can’t just copy and paste the same query for each submission, which I’ve more or less been doing.
I need to be doing a little more research on each publication, first and foremost to ensure that what I’ve written is a fit, and secondly to see if there are any clues or references I can pick up that can help me better tailor my query.
I write a strong query letter, I know this, but I can tend to get lazy with it and not tune it more to fit my audience.
This needs to stop.
3. Wallow when the work is done
When you get a door slammed in your face you have exactly the length of time it takes for you to get back to the sidewalk to get a smile back on your face.
If the next house sees you walking up to them looking defeated, you’ve likely already lost the sale before you even knock on the door.
I would always try to reset both my attitude and my face before hitting the sidewalk so that the next house, should they be peeking out a window, would see the best me I could present.
At the end of the night, if sales were tough, we would all commiserate with each other. Drinks would be had, we’d vent and rail about the grind killing us slowly, but doing that before the work itself was done would have only ever led to even worse results.
I think it’s fine to get down on yourself a little bit every now and then; it’s normal, don’t fight it. Disappointment is natural. After 140 days in the queue, last night really, really sucked.
But what I need to do instead of throwing an immediate pity-party is to tweak the query, submit to the next publication and write a little bit more of the WIP so that I’m working towards more at-bats.
If I prioritize those actions, not only will I be contributing positively towards my publication journey but I will feel like I am more in control of it as well.
When the laptop is closed for the day, sure, let disappointment sink in a bit. Vent and rail to those who might listen. It’s cathartic and good for the soul.
The difference is in the timing, because if you do that after the immediate work is already done, it will be so much easier to get out of that funk and back into your groove because you’ve already completed the most important next steps.
Look, this whole thing is a learning experience for me over these last six months and maybe what I’ve said above is complete bunk or maybe it’s advice that has been said out there a billion times. All I’m trying to do is record my experiences here and hopefully learn and grow from them.
Ramp up the at-bats.
Perfect the pitch.
Wallow when the work is done.
I’ll try these three golden rules for the next six months and see where they land me.
At the very least, writing them out today has helped me get over the funk of last night and I am ready to hit submit again this afternoon.
Thanks for reading.