In my work as a Short Story Acquisitions Editor at History Through Fiction, I frequently have to deliver bad news. Your story was not selected. Most authors are great about it. They understand that I don’t like telling them we can’t publish their story, but it is my job to choose which stories History Through Fiction will publish on their member site.
Occasionally, I get an angry email, which means that a writer has gone to the trouble of looking up my email address, since we use a submission platform, and they have taken the time to write me, and they have also hit send on that email.
You may have heard this advice before. If you need to vent your frustration, by all means, write the email. But, don’t send it. Let it sit overnight and read it again in the morning, after a good night’s sleep and your favorite morning beverage. Do you still feel like you need to send it?
Ask yourself this question. Are you a professional? Professional writers know that rejection is part of the way things work. What one platform rejects might be just the thing for another platform. Agent/Editor A may love what Agent/Editor B hates. Consider the possibility that your work isn’t quite ready for publication. Yet. That doesn’t mean that it will never be.
Publishing is a small world, and there is a good chance we will run into each other at conferences, on committees—you might even want to submit to me again in the future. If you’ve sent that indignant email, you may have burnt a bridge that you will want in the future.
When you receive a rejection, consider your options:
- Do nothing. Wait to see what others you have queried say about the piece. They might accept it.
- Use the rejection as motivation to keep working. Ask for feedback from someone you trust to determine if you need to revise.
- Take the rejection as a badge of your professionalism. ALL professional writers have been rejected at some point.
Above all, please don’t take it personally. It isn’t personal. It is one rejection of one piece at one moment in time by one outlet. In no way is it a predictor of anything.
PS—please don’t email asking for feedback after a rejection if none was included in the original message. Agents and editors are not lying when they say that the volume of submissions is too large to provide individual feedback to each writer. If I can provide anything that I think might be helpful, I do, but there are not enough hours in the day to give detailed feedback to every writer who submits. It is not personal, I promise.
If you have a short story you would like to submit to History Through Fiction, I am waiting to read it! You can find out more about the submission process here.
