The Cold Sting of Rejection

In college, Madison Smartt Bell talked to us about growing rhinoceros skin. It's the tough hide you need to deal with rejection after rejection. Rejection can seriously throw your mind into some strange mental loops. I've been through it most potently with short stories, which I've submitted to both large and teeny venues. When you get rejected over and over again, even an acceptance is tinged with negativity. You go all Groucho Marx and think, "It's obvious I suck. If this magazine accepted me, they must suck, too. I can only get published in a sucky magazine." It's a vicious cycle (circle?) of negativity that you can only overcome through blatant mental combat against yourself.

With firm consistency, your cold, hard, calculating sensible brain must remind your mercurial, sensitive, easily bruised ego the following:

1. Rejection does not (necessarily) mean your stuff is bad. Agents, as one example, can get up to and over 10,000 queries a year. You might have gotten to a cranky, sleepy agent before they had their coffee. You might have named your romantic lead Bob, and a guy named Bob just dumped your reader. Maybe the press only buys one fantasy per year, and they just inked that deal yesterday.Wrong time, wrong place type thing. It's not you, it's them.

2. Rejection is good because it means you have something to submit. That is an enormous accomplishment in itself. Print those rejections out and stick them to your wall like badges of honor. That's what I do. That's what the King used to do, too.

3. Rejection doesn't cost as much as it used to. Not too many years ago, you'd have to print out your whole darn 350-page MS and snail mail it to an agency or press, hearing the little "cha-ching cha-ching" every time you went to the post office. Email is on top now, and while it allows for faster rejections, it also allows for faster "let me see some more"s--and it saves the starving novelist time and money.

4. There are other fish in the publishing sea. You don't have to give up until you've approached all of them. If you get good feedback, make some revisions and feel free to approach them all again in 6 months. And if you're still not getting the bites, remember...

5. ... Self-publishing has lost a lot of its stigma. Lulu.com and CreateSpace are pretty writer-friendly ventures, especially if you have some friends who are handy with InDesign or copy-editing. You can also VERY cheaply make your own e-book and sell it on Amazon for a whopping 70% royalty. That's a pretty amazing fall-back plan that is new for this generation of writers.

Myself, I've put out some early feelers: 6 queries to agents so far. I'm still tinkering with the end, after which I'll buy my membership to Writers Market and execute my full-out plan. I've gotten 2 rejections so far. They weren't easy. Form rejections, they made me second guess EVERYTHING about my book.

But it's time for third guesses and second chances.