How do I know whether to revise or submit elsewhere?
I wrote a few short stories over the past few years, and I have shared a few of these with beta readers and asked for feedback. I have one that I decided was ready to go find a home, so I found a journal that I thought was a good match and submitted it. It was rejected.
I don't take the rejection personally. I know there are a lot of reasons to reject a piece, but that's the rub -- I can't tell if it was rejected because it's crap or for some other reason. I also can't tell if the rejection was a form letter or not. It was via email and the editor invited me to join their writing group. That could be a nice "hey, get to know us better" or it could just be stock. I can't tell.
I want to invest my time wisely. I know that even good stories get rejected and that it takes time to find a place to publish. I wasn't expecting to get work accepted on the first try, but I also wasn't expecting that I would suddenly falter in my feeling that this story was ready for publication.
How do I decide if I should spend my time re-writing this story, or if I should look for another place to submit it and spend my time writing more stories instead?
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Editors often reject stories for reasons that have nothing to do with the “quality” of the story (whatever that might mean).
A few weeks ago I watched seven editors select stories for anthologies. Each editor was buying stories for their own anthology. There were about 250 stories submitted by 40 writers. Every editor talked about every story, and said whether they would buy it if they were editing the anthology.
I haven’t tallied up the reasons for rejection, but it seems to me that approximately half were for reasons like:
- Personal taste. Just not the editor’s kind of story. This happened a lot. I would say that a quarter of the rejections were for this reason.
- Balance of stories. The editor already had two humorous stories, or too many stories in the same genre, or too many in a very similar setting, or …
- Fit with the anthology theme or requirements. The editor couldn’t see how the story was clearly connected to the theme of the anthology. An editor rejected one of my stories because it was a cozy mystery, and she had explicitly asked us not to submit cozies. I goofed. “You, sir, have committed cozy!”
Note that the 40 writers were all invited to submit stories. They were all known to the editors to be generally good writers. So these were not typical slush pile stories. Overall, about a third of the stories were selected.
I like to apply Heinlein’s third rule: You must refrain from rewriting, except to editorial order. And by “editorial order” he means the order of an editor who could buy your story (not an editor that you might hire to make suggestions).
So I don’t rewrite stories unless someone who wants to buy it asks me to. And even then I apply Ellison’s Addendum to Heinlein’s third rule: … and then only if you agree.
My recommendation is to send it out again. And again. And again. And maybe package it into an ebook (and maybe a paperback) and put it up for sale.
Move on. Write something else.
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William Edward Hickson put it perfectly; If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. If you truly think your beta readers have put forth the effort to really give you their true opinion on your work and you have edited it a few times, read it through a couple more to make sure it flows well, try many, many places before you just throw it away.
You stated that you want to use your time effectively and wisely, and sometimes, waiting for the right publisher is the right thing to do. Sometimes, especially if it is a longer work that took much more time to write and edit, it is worth those few more days spent looking for someone else to publish it.
If the publisher is willing to give you criticism and a little bit of insight on as to why they turned it away, listen carefully. Learn from your mistakes and your writing will improve drastically. Listen to what people have to say, because it is they that are on the receiving end of your work. If they are unwilling to tell you a reason, do not give up hope. Try, try again.
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You can certainly look at it from the market perspective. What one editor rejects another may accept. What 100 editors reject, the 101st editor may accept.
But you can also look at it from the perspective of your own ability to make it better. The passage of time allows us to see work in a new light. Reading it over after a rejection, you may find:
- That it still seems fine to you
- That you can see problems with it but don't immediately see how to fix them
- That it has problems and you can immediately see how to fix them
In the first case, send it out again. In the third case, revise and send it out again. The second case is the tricky one. You can send it out, get a critique to see if it helps you come up with a fix, stick it in a drawer and pull it out in six months, or sit down and rework it until you figure out what the problem is and how to fix it.
Personally, my rule is, if I can't see a flaw, send it out. If I can, don't send it out till I figure out how to fix it.
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