What can/do you do with your unpublished stories?

It's up to you. You can try to send it to magazines that have a higher acceptance rate (but, because of that, may not have as wide an audience and/or may offer little or no payment.) Or you can try to self-publish it. Or you can just chalk it up to writing practice and stick it in a folder of, "Awesome Stuff I Will Totally Sell Later When I'm Rich and Famous."

The problem is that if all you've got is form rejections, you don't know if it was rejected because of a writing issue, or the editor's taste, or whatever. You can have a guess, but as the author, your guess is going to be way biased.

If by "mine for parts," you mean take lines you particularly liked and try to force them into another story, that rarely works for me. Maybe I can re-use a character or setting, but single lines don't transfer well.

For shorts, I'm putting them together with the stories that did sell to make a collection. Novels, I'm currently just storing, in the hope that if I get an agent, they might like the backlog too.

scribbledoutname said:

Stuff that you're proud of but isn't selling for reasons other than bad writing (not commercial enough to sell / fails to hook an editor due to rare taste, etc.) and you don't want to just "mine" it for parts?

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I leave them on the hard drive, fully intending to return to them later. Which I never do.

Origami...?

If that situation ever happens to me I plan on just throwing them up online. I'd rather people read them, even if it's for free.

I'm planning on doing that with a few of my stories. If it's very short poetry, I try to turn it into book art - which will eventually sell, and for far more than just the poem would by itself.

I keep them. Magazines change. Aesthetics change. Editors change. I looked at a story that I hadn't looked at in 3 years and I knew quite a few things I could to do "fix" it.

It's more than bad writing that turns people off from a story, it's pacing that doesn't work, characters that aren't jiving, language that falls flat in some places, and so forth.

Also, if I can't mine it now, I might be able to mine it later.

I never completely give up on a story. Sometimes I go back to an old story that was rejected several times and rework it, fixing problems that I've gotten over as my writing has improved. Sometimes a story sells a year or two after I originally tried. Sometimes I don't get from it as much as I originally intended, but if something fails to sell to the bigger markets, I can always sell it to someone else later. Perfect example: I had a science fiction short I submitted to at least 5 or 6 magazines. Rejected every time! Yet some of those were "good" rejections (we just bought something too similar, good but not quite what we want right now, you write like Robert Heinlein but we can't use it {that one had me baffled!}) but then, months later, I found a call for a SF anthology for charity offering a token payment and the story fit their needs exactly. So, it may not have sold at pro rates, but I held onto it and eventually sold it for a small payment and helped a worthy cause in the process. If a story is worth telling, and as long as you believe it's worth rewriting to whatever level your work has reached at a given time, it will find it's place eventually.

I keep it loaded onto a flash drive, hoping I'll eventually finish the story in question. That's usually why it does not sell, because I have notsubmitted it. Now if it were submitted, it might still not sell.

But at present its because I don't submit anything.

I store it somewhere safe (cloud and external drive) and chalk it up as experience gained from a writing exercise, albeit one that went on for 30K words. Maybe one day I'll go back to that crazy book and try to beat the plot into a working one, but it's doubtful.

scribbledoutname said:

Stuff that you're proud of but isn't selling for reasons other than bad writing (not commercial enough to sell / fails to hook an editor due to rare taste, etc.) and you don't want to just "mine" it for parts?

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Well, poor writing, along with poor story, poor characterization, etc., is why almost all short stories fail to get published somewhere, no matter how proud the writer is, or how good he thinks they are.

One or two or three editors might reject a story for those reaqson, but if fifteen or twenty reject the story, the story is, in some way, bad, no matter how much the writer likes it.

I submit every story to as many markets as I can find, and this always means dozens. If a story doesn't sell, I can be pretty darned sure there's something seriously wrong with it, no matter how much I like it, so I let it slide away into oblivion.

I transfer them from computer to computer and occasionally open them, have a read, shake my head, and close them again.

I also keep them as self blackmail, to remind me of how bad my writing can be.

Once I'm satisfied with a story, I keep submitting it forever. No sitting around the basement playing video games for my stuff!

My only solution, personally would be, having betas look at your work to tell you the reason why you've gotten so many rejections. They can help describe your shortcomings and when you're working on your nth draft of this WIP, assuming you wrote multiple drafts, you can make it better. And I suggest that just so you haven't wasted your time on them. It's frustrating to be working on a short story or a novel for so long and have it rejected time after time, but my suggestion is having betas look at it before submitting it to agents or publishers.

Krystal Heart said:

MIt's frustrating to be working on a short story or a novel for so long and have it rejected time after time, but my suggestion is having betas look at it before submitting it to agents or publishers.

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You mean the way all those thousand of other unpublishable stories in the slush pile were looked at by betas? I swear, I see the "let betas look at it" advice everywhere, but slush piles just keep getting worse and worse and worse. If betas had a clue, I don't think this would be the case.

Write faster, send whatever it is to agents and editors until you run out of any possible place to send it. They do know what they want, and they do know how they want it. Betas usually know only what they like and what they don't, and how to pass along advice they read somewhere, which tends to make every story read just like every other story, rather than being truly fresh and original.