Saturday, August 18, 2018

I'm Not Getting Enough Rejection

Thursday #ShareYourRejection was a thing on Twitter. Writers, and I suppose others, shared stories of their most significant, ironic, humorous rejections. While I have plenty of rejections filed away, I don't have a juicy one. The best I can come up with is the guy who told me many years ago that they weren't interested in my story, but I wrote a good query letter. Yeah, that's not much.

As a result of the #ShareYourRejection thing I stumbled upon a Brevity Magazine blog post by Jay Vera Summer. In #ShareYourRejection: I Received 330 Writing Rejections in One Year, and I'm So Happy About It, Summer describes how she spent years submitting manuscripts, much as I have in the past. She'd submit, get rejected, think about it, submit again, get rejected again, and give up after a few times.

And then one year she submitted stories 330 times, getting 330 rejections. But she also got 12 acceptances.  "To earn those twelve acceptances," Summer says, "I had to sustain 330 rejections...That’s roughly 28 rejections for each acceptance."

I made a little over 30 submissions last year and the year before. And, yes, I "sustained" a little over 30 rejections each of those years. I've only submitted 17 manuscripts in 2018, though I have had one publication. I need to crank up those submissions. Fortunately, I've been heavily into market research this month, prepping for a submission binge after an autumn trip.

Cranking up submissions means cranking up rejections, of course.  But, hey, that's the job.

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