What Doesn’t Kill You (My First Rejection Slip)

I received A’s for all four stories I turned in for my short story writing class, with encouragement from my professor to submit them for publication. Over the past few months, I’ve been doing just that.

My experience, to date:

The first step involves finding the right publication for your story. You might think that’s as simple as searching Google for magazines that publish short stories and submitting your story to them, but I found there’s more to it than that. First of all, you’ve got to find magazines that publish stories in the same genre as what you’ve written. (Makes sense — no sense in sending your horror story to a magazine for children.) Then you need to ensure that your story falls within the magazine’s length requirements. Some magazines define short stories as anything with less than 10,000 words, while others cut them off as low as 4,000. Next I found that many magazines only accept submissions during certain months of the year. Finding a market that’s perfect for your story only to discover that they’re not accepting submissions for the next six months is like taking a cross country road trip only to discover that Wally World is closed for the season.

You also have to pay attention to the magazine’s required format for submissions. Some want .DOC files, some want .DOCX files, some require .PDF files and one asked that you cut and paste your entire story into the body of the email. Even after your story has been written you’ll be tweaking the format for every single submission. I also found that many of the larger magazines charge a submission fee (usually $3).

Finally, most magazines frown upon “multiple submissions,” and request that you should only submit your story to one magazine at a time. You’re supposed to wait until that magazine either accepts or passes on your story before submitting it to another magazine. Of the magazines I’ve submitted to, the shortest advertised wait period is 4-6 weeks and the longest has been 4-6 months. If you’ve only written one or two stories, you’ll have plenty of time to write some more while you’re sitting around waiting for hear from magazine editors.

This morning, six weeks after submitting my first story to Cicada Magazine, I got my first rejection slip. It wasn’t as devastating as I had imagined the experience would be. The email was a form letter that said the story wasn’t a good fit for their magazine. That’s an important thing to remember, and a lesson our professor recently shared with us. Having your story rejected doesn’t always mean your story is bad. Sometimes it simply means that it wasn’t a good fit for their publication. The website LitRejections.com is dedicated to collecting rejection slips from famous works of fiction. And even though it takes a bit of the sting out to know that almost every famous novel was rejected at least once, it’s not really a dinner party any of us are particularly excited about being invited to.

As a kid or even a young man, I would have been more bothered by getting a rejection slip. I would have taken it personally, I think, to have someone say, “Your work isn’t good enough.” But when you begin to look at writing as a business, that’s not what a rejection slip is really saying. It’s saying, “we’re not going to buy your story,” for one of many reasons: maybe the length or tone isn’t right for their publication. Maybe they don’t run stories like yours at all, or perhaps they bought a story just like yours the day before, and don’t need two of them. It’s simply a formal notice informing me that this story, at this time, for this publication, isn’t a perfect fit.

I can live with that.

I’ve started a spreadsheet to track what I’ve submitted to whom. And that story that got rejected this morning at 8 AM? It went to the next magazine on the list by 8:30.