On personal rejection

If you've written fiction and tried selling your work, you're familiar with the level of rejection that's involved. A hard-working author will spend years trying to sell a story, constantly getting rejection after rejection. Most of these rejections are of the "form" variety, which basically say "We aren't interested in buying this."

Some editors and publications, however, send personally written rejections -- ones that take a sentence or three to say why the story wasn't purchased.

For many authors (myself included) these markets are gold. It's an opportunity to have the very person you're trying to impress with your story tell you why they weren't impressed. Any market with a history of taking the time to personalize their rejection letters goes to the top of my preferred market list.

But authors are a sensitive lot. It can be difficult to have the flaws in your writing pointed out to you. In case you're not already aware of it, it is never appropriate to respond to a personal rejection, especially if you disagree and want to argue with the editor or slush reader. If such an activity does not get you officially banned, it will at least irritate the editor enough that he'll never seriously consider buying your work again.

But sometimes you get a personal rejection that just begs for a response. Sometimes the editor is so rude or condescending that they've really earned someone telling them just what an asshole they are. In such cases, they make their publication look unprofessional, and double the desire of the author to respond and point out just how unprofessional they are.

Let's look at the type of editors that give personal rejections and go into more detail about why it's foolish to argue with them:

1. Ones that really care about writers and want to help them become better writers: These fall into two subtypes:
   1. Ones that simply wrote a snarky rejection by accident.
   2. Ones that have poor social skills or are nasty people by nature.

   If you snark back at either of these types, nothing good can come of it. They write dozens of rejections at each reading session, and they aren't about to waste any of their time dealing with your response. They also know that nothing good will come of them trying to clarify that they're trying to help you, so they're not going to respond.

2. People who are in this to hurt you: Fact is, there's a percentage of the population that enjoy causing other people pain. These people try very hard to get themselves into positions where they can easily inflict pain without being imprisoned. While the amount of pain inflicted using a rejection letter is tiny compared to a hydrogen bomb, it's complete legal. If you respond to these people, you'll only be encouraging them that it's worth their time to keep being assholes.

So, the advice I have for writers:

1. Prefer markets that provide personal rejections. Try to use the advice to make your writing better.
2. If you get a personal rejection that you feel is unreasonably harsh, just ignore it.
3. If you continually get unreasonably harsh rejections from a particular market or editor, stop submitting to them.

Now, a bit of advice for editors:

1. It seems like some slush readers feel that they must be harsh in a personal rejection letter. If they're good slush readers, school them gently not to be assholes.
2. If you personally feel that personal rejections must always be harsh, then take a moment realize that you're wrong. It makes you look like a worthless asshole. Case in point, the rejection I received that prompted this article was unnecessarily harsh in such a way that it was obvious that he slush reader was grasping at straws to find something asinine to say. It made the market look unprofessional to me, and while I won't reveal the name publicly, I've shared it with writers who I'm on personal terms with, and I suspect a lot of them won't bother to submit to it.
3. If you have a slush reader who feels joy when causing other people pain, fire them.

The point of this whole game is to create wonderful fiction and share it with readers. If your actions are not pursuing that goal, you're doing it wrong.

Go write something.