Snap Rejections (Or; Wow, That Was Quick!)

I edited an e-zine for a while and answered as submissions came in when I had the time to. It often didn't take more than a couple of minutes to scan something and see that it just wasn't it. Sometimes it would be completely wrong for us, say, a children's story, poem, or something else that we didn't accept. Other times, well, if the first page or two is poorly written, it is not going to magically get wonderful on page three. So, I'm going to say, yes, they read as much of them as they need to in order to make their decision.

If you spent much time with a slush pile, you'd see how very little time it takes to weed out the majority of submissions that aren't right for the publication. "They're not reading submissions" is a common suspicion of newer writers but it really doesn't make much sense from the other side. Sending things back takes time. If they didn't want to spend any time on it, they'd just let it sit there, not bother hurrying up so that they could ignore you. At the larger magazines, it could be your submission didn't make it past the first reader, someone who has a set of criteria by which to weed things out, with the ones that make it through that round taking longer.

It often takes only two or three seconds to reject something. Acceptances take a little longer, but often no longer than it takes to read the piece, which can be only a few minutes. There's nothing unusual about either. I've had rejections and acceptances in only a few minutes on several occasions.

My experience has been that this gets more common as you make more sales because many editors recognize your name, and read your story as soon as it comes in.

The things I've learned about rejections, especially quick rejections:

- did you follow their guidelines to the letter? If not, for a lot of places, insta-reject.
- Are you in their genre requests? If not, see above.
- Do you show more errors in the first paragraph than found in most published works? If so, see above.

And those are just the easy ones.
Everything beyond seems so subjective to reader and editor alike.

Jrubas said:

I’ve gotten a few of both...a couple from a big “oh-so-busy-we-can’t-personalize-your-rejection” horror juggernaut

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I once got a rejection that began "Dear Pat."

If it hadn't specifically referenced my story, I would have thought I'd received someone else's rejection.

Are you even reading your slush pile?

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Some submissions you don't need to read. If a query letter suggests the manuscript is not acceptable - too long, genre you don't publish, full of mistakes, etc - that makes the decision very easy. Check out Slush Pile Hell for more examples.

I occasionally review books on my blog, and I get a lot of unsolicited emails from people who want a review. With one such email, I knew after reading the first sentence that I would decline, because the email started, "Dear Marian: Raped at the age of seven, I was a lonely child." My sympathies and best wishes to the author, but I don't want to read novels about child abuse. If I sent rejections, I would have done so ten seconds after opening that email.

In the last couple of weeks, I've received two rejections on short story submissions faster than I received the automated acknowledgement that my submission was accepted.

And I imagine sometimes, it's not even the quality of what you subbed or that it's the wrong genre. Maybe it's an alien dog story, and they've had a run of those lately or something. It would have to be amazing for them to consider it further if it's too much like something else they've accepted recently.