Is That Personal?

Get Over It!

Recently we’ve been receiving a lot of personal rejections. This is fine. Rejection is something that everyone must learn to deal with. It gets easier with time. Each rejection stings less and less. Eventually you come to crave rejection, or, if not rejection, acknowledgment. We feel invisible when long stretches pass and we have not been denied.

Unfortunately, however, most personal rejections are too dulled down. They’re rarely specific. More often than not they sound like back peddling, which begs the question: Why do most literary magazines feel that you have to let writers down easily? Are we all that soft?

Most personal rejections aren’t that personal at all. They read something like this:

Dear (writer’s name),

While we truly enjoyed this piece we don’t feel we have a home for it at this time, but we encourage you to submit to us in the future, because we feel that your writing is very strong.

Signed,

Editor

These versions of personal rejection are ridiculous. Their personal appreciation is an illusion. We suspect they exist more with print magazines, as most online magazines are free, and it seems to me what this rejection letter really says is:

Dear (writer’s name),

We don’t like you, but we want you to like us. We hope that if you like us you will continue, or start, to purchase our magazine.

Sincerely,

The Editors

The personalized-form letter has emerged from online submission managers. You know when you’re getting a form rejection from a snail-mail submission. It generally comes as a Xeroxed mini-sheet accompanied with the first page of your manuscript in your self-addressed stamped envelope. It might be signed by a human being, but usually the whole thing looks mass produced.

No thanks. Thud.

With e-mail rejections it’s less obvious when you’ve been formed out. But chances are if the language isn’t specific to anything about your writing, you’re getting batch rejected. But there’s nothing necessarily wrong with that. However, when you really investigate the language of a personalized form rejection it makes the publication you’ve been rejected by seem ridiculous. Most of these letters vary from pub to pub, but what remains at the heart of them is this message: You’re great. We’re not publishing you. Keep trying.

That’s an odd mish-mash of logic trains.

1. If it’s great why aren’t you publishing it?

2. If you didn’t like it why would you want me to send more?

3. If you did like, but aren’t publishing it, why would I send you more, because you just told me you don’t publish the things you like?

Of course it’s generally not that crude, and we’d imagine most publications use personalized form rejections to, in some way, be kind. Many publications get thousands of submissions to fill a few spots, and those on staff work long hours (for which they get no pay) culling the slush pile in the hopes of retrieving a story that they feel will fit their publications aesthetic, at which time, at least in most cases, said slush pile scowerer would then pass the story up some chain of command, or bring it to the attention of some jury, only, in many cases, to see the story ultimately rejected. It’s a brutal thankless endeavor, all the work that goes into pre-publishing. And we think that those who do this job should feel no obligation to be nice.

We are huge fans of Eyeshot’s rejections. We also feel that Keyhole has implemented a brilliant new submission policy:

NOTE: We will no longer respond to submissions unless we are interested in publishing your submission(s), or unless we feel like it. All submissions will be read. Please do not send queries about the status of your submission(s). As always, it is absolutely free for you to submit. And of course you are welcome to submit simultaneously to as many journals as you like.

We feel that both cases are honest ways to handle rejection.

Here at Dark Sky Magazine we use a pretty standard rejection letter. If we feel that the letter needs to be more personal, we personalize it. We figure if we’re going to take the time to pretend to give you personal attention then we may as well actually give you personal attention, because the time difference between honesty and mockery is something like twenty seconds, and we have twenty seconds for you. Shit, for you, we’ve got twenty-five.

And with that said, Dear (Reader’s Name), we hope you have a good day. — Brian Allen Carr

Video: Rejected