Understanding Rejections
Appreciating the No That Takes You Closer to Yes
Before I begin, I am hereby wishing a very happy birthday to Shelf Life’s biggest fan, Joe. Several people have self-identified as “Shelf Life’s biggest fan,” which—don’t get me wrong!—is something I always love to hear and usually cry about later, not from sadness but sentimentality. That said, biggest is a superlative term and like Highlander there can be only one, and if you do not have each individual Shelf Life printed out, annotated, and collated in a neat stack then you are not on Joe’s level. Have a happy birthday tomorrow, Joe!
Today’s article is about rejection, which as usual is a topic with special significance for writers and other creative content generators but is also broadly applicable to other kinds of folks and life situations. Most writers, in the course of trying to get anything published, will experience rejections. Other life circumstances in which you experience rejection include when you:
Ask someone on a date and they say no.
Apply to a university and don’t get in.
Apply for a job and you don’t get it.
These situations have several things in common with each other and with a manuscript rejection. First, you had to put yourself out there to be in the position of being rejected in the first place. Meaning, you didn’t just sit at home wondering if someone would go on a date with you—you stuck your neck out and asked. You applied for the job. You submitted an application to the school.
Second, you almost certainly don’t know why you were rejected. If you try to buy a car and your credit application is rejected because your credit score is lower than what the financier wants, that’s a situation where you know why you got rejected. When you apply for a job and don’t get it, you almost never know. Companies—at least those with enough employees to put together an HR department—will go out of their way to make sure you never find out why you didn’t get hired. Hiring managers are trained not to give this feedback, because doing so could inadvertently leave the company vulnerable to a discrimination lawsuit.
Likewise, if you ask someone on a date and they say no, oftentimes the person will not tell you why they are saying no or they will tell you a false reason for saying no to soften the blow, for instance, “I am moving to Antarctica next month to do research on penguins so this is a bad time for me to start a relationship” instead of “I am not interested in dating you.”
When you don’t know the reason you were rejected, your mind will try to figure it out. Brains don’t like not knowing stuff. Knowing stuff is their whole deal. Your brain will start looking for reasons why you might have been rejected. Most brains will eventually come to one of two conclusions:
Their reason for rejecting me was bad or invalid; or
My endeavor was bad, and I myself am bad.
A lot of the time, neither of these is true. You know what else brains like? Black-and-white, cut-and-dried situations and dichotomies with clearly marked, opposite sides. Those things are simple. Nuanced truths in between are more difficult to understand.
The third thing that the above scenarios have in common and share with manuscript submissions is this: When you are submitting a manuscript (or asking for a date, and so on), you have a want. For instance, you want your manuscript to be accepted; or you want the object of your affections to go out with you; or you want a job offer; or you want to be accepted to a school. But what we don’t always consider is that the person or entity on the other side of the equation also has a want, sometimes many wants, that operate completely independently of us and whatever it is we want.
A third thing about the brain is it’s very self-centered. This isn’t a bad thing: Self-centered is not an insult, at least not to me. Where should anyone be centered but on themself? Of course we’re the center of our own lives. The brain, particularly, is centered on itself. When we put ourselves out there for something like this, we tend to only see our half of the situation, the thing we want, and so if we are rejected we tend to take it personally, as though the other entity saw our supplication and made a judgment against us personally.
But what’s really happening is the entity on the other side compares whatever it is we are offering with their own list of wants or needs and if it’s not a match, then they decline our proposition. Not because our proposition was bad but because it didn’t meet their needs. Sometimes the offering doesn’t meet their needs because it’s bad but that’s not the only reason it might not have met their needs.
Before I get into the big reasons for manuscript rejections, I want to take a quick paragraph or two to talk about the types of rejections one encounters while being on submission.
Not all rejections are created equal, and in the case of submitting manuscript to agents or publishers, there are two major kinds to know about: The form rejection and the personal rejection.
Just as the name implies, a form rejection is a boilerplate message saying that the agent or editor isn’t accepting your manuscript. It might address you by name or reference your manuscript title but it’s still a form message. A person didn’t draft this to let you know they’re rejecting you, they used a template that they use all the time. Sometimes a person or business has multiple form rejection templates—for example, “not a good fit,” “could use revision,” and “didn’t pique my interest.” These are still form rejections, even if they feel somewhat personalized.
The personal rejection is a message written specifically to you to let you know your manuscript was not accepted. If an agent or editor takes the time to write to you about your work, this is a very positive sign. This means they liked your work enough that they want to encourage you, even if they are declining to sign it. With this type of rejection, you may get actionable feedback or helpful guidance on what to do next. While a personal rejection is still a rejection, it’s almost not even the same animal as a form rejection.
Alright, on with it. Let’s talk reasons why manuscripts get rejected.
The Manuscript Is Bad
Sometimes a banana is just a banana. Sometimes manuscript quality really is the issue.
However, there are different ways in which manuscript quality might fail to meet the standard an agent or market is looking for. The problem could be with plot, story, or character; or it might be that the sentence-level writing is not where they want it to be (telling instead of showing; spelling and grammatical errors; dull prose).
How can you know manuscript quality is the issue if the person you submitted to returned a form rejection and didn’t give you any feedback to improve? There are several ways to find out.
Ask yourself: Have you revised, edited, and polished this manuscript or is this an early draft?
Get an impartial reader to provide feedback on a sample (trade critiques with another writer or submit to a critique site); don’t ask a friend or family member who might spare your feelings.
Solicit beta reads of the full manuscript (again, from impartial readers; pay someone or trade manuscripts).
Hire a professional for a manuscript evaluation to get feedback on where you can improve.
If you’ve done some or all of these things, reconsider the feedback you received. Did you get feedback that you dismissed? Give it a second look. When you solicit critique and feedback, you do not have to use all of it. Understanding which feedback to use and which not to use is an important skill for an author to cultivate. But if you’re receiving rejections, go back through the feedback and advice you did not use and see if there’s something there that you could use.
Please allow me one moment to mix television metaphors: Even though sometimes a banana is just a banana, there’s always money in the banana stand. Yes, sometimes you get a rejection because your manuscript doesn’t meet the standard of the person you submitted to. Keep revising, keep improving, keep submitting.
Their Docket Is Full
This seems to be a little-known fact about literary agents: They do not have infinite capacity to represent authors.
Think about doctors’ offices: They’re either taking new patients or they’re not. That’s because they have a limited number of patients they can reasonably see for routine checkups and sporadic medical events, and if they take on too many patients their wait times for appointments will become too long to provide timely care. They want to keep their appointment calendar full because that is how they make money, and they even overbook to compensate for missed appointments, but at some point they will reach capacity and cannot reasonably keep taking new patients.
Agents and agencies are the same way. Don’t they make more money the more authors they sign? Well, yes, but only to the point where they no longer have enough working hours to service their authors. Agents don’t just read your manuscript and then forward it to an editor. They read your manuscript and offer feedback and suggestions to get it ready for submission, they manage the submission to editors—with whom, by the way, they invest time into maintaining good relationships so they can, you know, continue getting manuscripts accepted—they negotiate your contract, they negotiate your production schedule with the publisher, they read your future manuscripts and do it all over again. And they do that for all their other clients. And they look at queries like the one you sent.
When an agent is open for queries, that does not mean they have infinite capacity to take on new authors. It only means they are open to reading queries. It could mean they are actively adding authors to their list or it could mean they are technically full up but they still want to get queries in case something really super special comes along. “Open for queries” doesn’t mean the same thing every time you see it. The agent (or editorial calendar) is full right now is a reason for rejection that has nothing to do with the quality of your work.
You Didn’t Follow Instructions
Professional agents, editors, publishing companies, and magazines that publish short fiction and poetry are all very clear about how they want to receive subs. The instructions on their website are not suggestions. One of the quickest ways to a form rejection is to skim over the instructions or deliberately disregard them.
The first things most agents and editors/publishers will let you know is, for fiction, they’re only accepting unsolicited queries for finished work. If your query letter says something like “I am currently working on” or “I have completed 40,000 words out of”—that’s a rejection. No matter how good your idea is or how compelling and well-written your query letter, if they said they’re only considering finished manuscripts that means they are only considering finished manuscripts.
Read all the instructions. Did you create your email subject line in the format they asked for? I love Query Shark and I love that buried in the instructions for submitting your query for review by Query Shark they mention that if your subject line does not read “Query Shark: I promise I read the archives thoroughly” then they might discard your letter out of hand. Many agents and editors who accept queries by email (as opposed to through a submission management system) have a specific format they want the subject line to follow. If you don’t follow it that’s like grabbing them by the shoulders and screaming at them that your reading comprehension is poor. Poor reading comprehension is generally not a desirable trait in an author. Failing to format your message correctly is a cause for rejection.
If the person or company you are contacting wants a query, send them a query. Don’t helpfully send them more than what they asked for, like ten pages of your manuscript or your full manuscript or three full manuscripts for them to choose from. This will not demonstrate that you are an overachiever. Again, it only telegraphs that you cannot follow instructions. Failing to follow submission instructions will result in a rejection.
You Barked Up the Wrong Tree
One of my favorite things—and by favorite I mean least favorite, or perhaps “a favorite thing to dunk on”—is men loudly complaining that they don’t understand what women want right over women calmly explaining what we want. Similarly: “I don’t understand what agents want, it’s so esoteric. How could I possibly know what they’re looking for?”
Agents and publishers are extremely clear and up front about what they are looking for. With a little internet research it is very easy to make sure you’re targeting the right inboxes with your submission. Before I share those, here are a few ways to not target the right inbox with your submission. I repeat, do not do these things.
“This agent represents my favorite famous author, I’ll query them.” Agents who rep household names are likely to be super busy and drowning in queries.
“This agent repped a book very similar to my manuscript.” Okay, but is that what they’re still looking for, today, right at this moment? Because if that book is out in stores and you read it, they signed it at least a couple years ago. They are probably looking for something else now.
“This agent wants adult romance and my manuscript is young adult romance; how different are they really?” Don’t send agents stuff they’re not looking for and then act surprised when they don’t want it.
To find out what an agent, editor, publisher, or literary magazine is looking for, you must first find the place where they explicitly say what they are looking for, and you must read that, and you must accept it as the truth.
If you are submitting to an agent or editor, check that individual’s page on their agency’s or publisher’s website. These pages will have guidance on what the individual is looking for.
If you are submitting to a publishing company or a literary magazine (as opposed to an individual), review their submissions page to see what they’re looking for and then read some of what they’ve published. If they publish novels and you want them to publish your novel, this means read some of their novels. You’re asking them to read yours, right? And if they have a whole list of titles and none of them appeal to you enough to read them, then why are you submitting to this publisher? The best way to understand what a company or magazine wants to publish is to read some of what they publish.
Conversely, if a page has a list of things someone specifically does not want, then do not send them your manuscript should it include any of those things. If they said “no werewolves” and your manuscript has werewolves, don’t send it. What about if it has just one werewolf? Don’t send it. What if it’s a werecoyote and not technically a werewolf? Don’t send it. This agent does not want werewolves and it’s a very safe bet they don’t want to play “rules lawyer” with you about what counts as a werewolf, either. Don’t send them your werecanids. Just move on.
Send people what they want to receive. You cannot change what an agent or publisher wants to receive, and you definitely will not change their mind about what they want to receive by sending them something they do not want to receive and then banking on your work being so darn good that they will accept it anyway. Sending something that doesn’t fit what the agent or publisher is looking for is a reason for rejection.
In submitting, as in many other endeavors, you will statistically get “no” more than you get “yes.” The only people who never get a “no” are people who never attempt anything. Every no brings you closer to yes. If you are refraining from submitting because you don’t want to hear a no, bite the bullet and start getting some of those nos out of the way.
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