How to know the reason for rejection?
Just out of curiousity, how do people figure out the reason their work is not accepted? I tried submitting my work to a newspaper but the editor rejected it with a brief message. How do people get feedback on their work besides friends and family? I mean how do people know what to improve on if their work is rejected.
I write in Chinese, but I suppose this question is valid regardless what language I write in.
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Publications don't explain why they reject things because:
a. It takes time.
b. If they do, people will argue with them and call them names.
c. If they do, people will try to fix the piece and send it back, creating even more work for them.
But there are really just three reasons why a publication rejects something:
It is too badly written to be salvageable with reasonable effort.
It is not a match for their needs. Most authors operate on the basis of trying to find homes for the pieces they want to write. Most publications operate on the basis of publishing material that appeals to a very specific interest group in a very specific way. Writers who study the needs of specific publications and write what the editors need have a very high success rate. Writers who write what they want and then shotgun it to every publication in Writer's Digest market books have a very low success rate.
Their pipeline is full. Yes, they publish halloween recipes in their October issue, and yes you sent them a yummy recipe for pumpkin spice cookies, but they already have enough yummy pumpkin spice cookie recipes on file to last till kingdom come.
Many authors seem to think that if only they could fix the writing, they would get published. But most of the time is is not the quality of the writing that is the problem (and if you cannot tell if it is the quality of your writing that is the problem, you are a very long way from publication). The problem is that you have sent them a piece that does not meet their needs or that they already have more of than they need.
This is why every editor, on their website and market listing, lists exactly what they are looking for (and not looking for) and urges writers to read the publication before submitting. Because most of the submissions they get are not on topic for them or are already over subscribed.
Alas most writers write before they market, and thus end up sending in the MS anyway hoping against hope and reason that the brilliance of their work will blow the editor away and make them throw all their guidelines out of the window. And thus they waste both the editor's time and their own.
So, chances are the publications told you exactly why your work was rejected, and told you in advance, before you ever sent it in, before you even wrote it. You just did not pay attention.
And, for the record, I am guilty of this as much as anyone.
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I have been rejected many times with no explanation.
I think sometimes, like any competition, what I wrote is just not the best of what they had to choose from at the time. They can't publish everything, some editors say they cannot publish 1% of everything they receive, so there is no 'reason' I got rejected that is specific to what I wrote: I am in the same pile as dozens of other people, rejected because some other author wrote something more compelling than me. I got rejected because I wasn't the best thing they read that day.
If you have a specific venue that you want to get into, like a newspaper or particular publishing house, one way to learn anything from that is to try and figure out what the editor IS publishing. Imagine you are trying to learn how to predict what topics they like, the style they like, whether they like simple sentences or complex ones, whether they like highly educated language and grammar or more common language and grammar; similarly the education level they like their writing at. Does the political writing they accept tend toward the middle, or one end of the spectrum? Do they like emotional words and content, or do they prefer dry and emotionless prose? If there is humor, what TYPE of humor is acceptable, and what do you NOT see? For your newspaper, do most of the published authors seem to have credentials, like academic standing, political standing, or social standing (businessmen, school leaders, charity leaders, religious leaders, etc)?
Consider structure: the lengths of sentences, and paragraphs. The lengths of dialogue sentences.
All of these things (and any other generalizations you can think up) are metrics you can use to compare or categorize 'writing'. Some of what I mention may not apply to newspapers, or non-fiction, but I hope you get the idea.
Use such metrics to compare YOUR writing to the writing that gets published. Obviously the words are different, but you need to try and separate what your editor accepts from what they reject, and all you have to work with is what they have accepted!
That isn't as hard as it sounds; it is like trying to generalize my interests in fiction based on what what books I have bought: You'll get a pretty good idea, even though you don't know which books I have considered and rejected.
This kind of analysis may reveal why you were rejected. It may not, but if you can develop any mental model at all of what the editor accepts and prints, at least it can guide you toward writing pieces with a better chance of being published.
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