Acceptance/Rejection

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Birol

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That's a good question right now.
Once you started submitting, how quickly did you have something accepted? Were you paid for it? What form did payment take?

If you met with early success, were you prepared for rejection later on?
 

KTC

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My first submission was to the Globe & Mail. I was accepted and paid, in the form of a cheque. I thought, "Wow! I can get used to this!" To have that feeling instilled even deeper, my second submission was to CBC Radio Canada. I was accepted, and paid in the form of a cheque. Then I was shocked when my next two submissions were rejected. So, in answer to that question, I was in no way prepared for rejection later on. I thought there must have been some sort of grave error on the part of the editors rejection my submissions?
 

drachin8

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I started submitting short stories on June 24, 2006, and am still bedding rejection (I've learned much since I started writing last year; so much that my early stories make me wince now). So, I hope this process is training me enough not to take acceptance for granted when (not "if", dammit!) that time finally comes.

We shall see.


:)

-Michelle
 

RMS

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My first "submission" was a gardening tip to OG magazine, and I was paid royaly with a baseball cap! LOL I still have it as inspiration. My second submission was to a contest, I came in 8th place which included a check. I was thrilled. Since then I've been running about 50/50 with acceptance and rejection.
I don't write as much as I'd like to but I have found that there is strength in numbers, the more I send out, the higher my acceptance ratio seems to be.
 

maestrowork

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My first few pieces (essays, reviews) were accepted quickly by paying markets. So it kinda spoiled me a bit, until I started querying agents on my novel. Out of my first 15 letters, I only got one request for full (followed by a rejection of the full). So that kinda hit me hard -- first taste of real rejection. However, since I am an actor, I'm used to rejections/not getting the part. So I recovered from that rather quickly. I spent weeks rewriting my query -- and it was a good thing to do!
 

triceretops

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Started writing novels from 1978 to 1981. Wrote ten of those dinks. Did not submit them, cause all I had was a typewriter and didn't feel like I was good enough with spelling and grammar. Seven of them were typed first drafts--the other three were longhand. Stopped writing from 1981 to 1987

Tried to sell short fiction in 1987 (had a computer by this time). Took me 55 rejections before I started getting paid in copies from micro mags. Then I hit some big sales in the slick magazines and landed in the SFWA. Placed as a finalist in the L. Ron. Hubbard Writers of the Future Contest. Sold about 15 shorts all together. Sold two horror radio scripts for $1,000 apiece (11 pages each). I next wrote three more novels, but had a computer by this time, so I polished them up and sent them out. Richard Curtis took me on and subbed those novels. Nothing happened except a close call when one book went straight to Hollywood and fought it out with Jurassic Park. I lost. A year had gone by.

I decided to try my hand at non-fiction books because an author told me that was where the money was and non-fic outsold fiction by 3--1. I listened and wrote up my first proposal and three. It sold two days out of the gate. Got $1,500 advance--it earned out about three times that amount. Next non-fiction book was sent out completed. It sold a week later--$2,000 advance, and earned out three times that ammount. Not bad for a little guy, and it was quick cash, since it only took me a couple months for each book.

I waited another year for those three novels to sell via Richard Curtis, and then blitzed the market one last time with dozens of novel queries and chapters. No hits. It was now 1991 and I was fresh out of platform for any more non-fiction books, so I couldn't tap that again. But I was really, really disgusted after having no luck in the novel market. That is where my love resided--SF and Fantasy. I quit writing for good in December of 1991, sold my computer and broke my pencils.

Had a house fire in 1993 that burned all of my hardcopy manuscripts and floppys. I lost 13 novels. I didn't care then.

I care now. I started writing again December 2004. I had no idea what the internet was and how much publishing had changed from my days. I was determined to get started and show the agent/editing world that my shat didn't stink, and I had all of these previous, wonderful credits. How hard could it be? What a bitch. I've written six books in a little over two years, got an agent, and sold two novels. I swear I went through 18 months of sheer hell. I must have made close to 250 submissions, with only about 125 of them actually rejecting me through the written word. I guess it was worth it, but I'm still numb from the experience.

If you met with early success, were you prepared for rejection later on?

No, I wasn't prepared for anything like this. I did not realize how tougher it is right now and how glutted the market it is. I had no idea that most of the advance-paying/offset small and medium publishers were gone or had been absorbed by the big five. Didn't EVEN know there was a big five. Did not know what POD was, either.

I had the painful realization that all of my credits (including 350 newspaper interviews, stories, and profiles) did not have any bearing on my being accepted. None. That was a real shocker. I had to start exactly where I began--at the bottom of the list just like everybody else. Why? Because I had a cart-full of crap and no novels. Even if I had had novels under my belt, I know they wouldn't have given me any pull. So if someone tells you that story trumps all--believe it. I think writers who have little or next to nothing in credits are just as likely to get picked up by a publisher. This was my experience, anyway.

I've written about 18 novels and three non-fiction books. I've sold four books out of that stack. What have I learned? Never do this without being organzied and with a definite goal in mind. Go straight after that goal without stalling or skipping all over the place. My writing life has been a shotgun blast when it should have been single bullet aimed dead at the target. Never quit. You will regret it for the rest of your life, and spend feverish hours trying to catch up for the lost years.

The science fiction writers that I started out with so long ago are finally going to welcome me to the fold (I hope) in a few years, but they'll be saying "Gee, Chris, you sure took the long way around the mountain to get here!"

Tri:e2BIC:
 
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Namatu

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My first submission, to a magazine, was accepted. <Enter long lull of me not finishing anything.> My second submission, this time to agents, met with lots of rejection. It was disappointing whenever a favored agent turned me down, but not unexpected. This was my first novel-length work and it taught me a lot.

It bothers me more when I don't receive any acknowledgement. I exist! I submitted! I sent a SASE - Send. It. Back. (Admittedly, a peeve of mine.)
 

stormie

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The strange thing is, when I decided to become a writer, I read everthing I could about writing and then submitted an essay that took only a half hour to write, and only about another half hour to revise. This first actual submission was accepted by a Catholic newspaper. The editor called me and told me how wonderful the piece was, had I been writing a long time, the garbage he usually gets, and I did receive a small payment.

It spurred me on to write more, submit more to other publications. I was prepared, though, for rejections, since I already read on other writer's boards about it (at that time, I relied heavily on www.rejectioncollection.com). And it's rare when I can write a 1,000 word essay in so short a time and that it hardly needs revisions.

Even though there are many days when I feel like "Why do I bother?" I haven't looked back. It's over seven years now.
 

Jamesaritchie

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Time & rejection

Once you started submitting, how quickly did you have something accepted? Were you paid for it? What form did payment take?

The first story I wrote, almost a novelette, sold to the first magazine I tried it on. They sent me a check for $450, which all those years ago was excellent money. Just about as much as my day job paid in a month. The next two short stories also sold, and then I quickly wrote a novel (In twenty-one days), and the first agent I tried it on took it, and she sold it to a published a month or so later.

If you met with early success, were you prepared for rejection later on?

Now, here's the deal. No, I was not prepared for rejection. I knew nothing about writing at the time. I had never dreamed of being a writer, I had never read a how-to book about writing, and the internet wasn't yet very popular, and I had never even seen a computer.

I had no clue about grammar or punctuation, etc. I wrote that first story because it seemed a possible way of making money. I just read a grammar book, wrote the story in a couple of days, and mailed it to the magazine.

This is how naive I was. . .I wasn't prepared for rejection because I didn't even know magazines or book publishers could reject stories. I thought you wrote them, sent them in, and they bought them. needless to say, I was extremely surprised when I learned about rejections.
 

heatheringemar

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It took me somewhere between 50 and 75 rejections to get an acceptance, and that was to a non-paying lit mag (Gothic Revue). The very next month, I had my academic article accepted by Celtic Cafe (also non-paying), a flash piece was accepted by The Gothic Revue, and then a short was accepted by Echelon for their ebook division (which is a paying market).

Now while I didn't expect my first things to sell right off the bat, I still wasn't prepared for rejection. I'm a fairly sensitive person, and so the first few rejections were a little hard to take. After that, I got frustrated with repeated rejection; I couldn't figure out why they kept saying 'no,' and then I realized I was a story-teller and not a literary writer. After I readjusted my submission tactics, it didn't take very long until I got my first acceptance.

Even now, sometimes a rejection is a bit hard to swallow (it depends on how it's written, there was one that was particularly nasty that didn't make me feel too hot), but anymore it's not such a big deal. They don't want to buy my stuff? Oh well. I'll try the next guy.
 

swvaughn

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Uh... I dunno. It's been a long time. The early days are hazy.

I got my very first novel accepted and I only had to pay $400 to have it published! (whoops... too bad I didn't know about this place back then).

I started getting paid for writing when I started working for RTIR magazine back in 19*cough*. And I don't do short stories, so I can't claim any cash for mag submissions (haven't done any).

Once I won a flash fiction contest on a blog and got a $25 Amazon gift certificate. Woot!

And now I need coffee. Or possibly a stiff drink.
 

weatherfield

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My first "submissions" were stories for English department scholarship competitions, and let me tell you, that's where it's at. The money was very good and the pool was very small. The first real submission I had was a story I'd turned in to workshop. A boy in my class asked if I would submit it to a competition he'd heard about at a smallish literary journal. I did, not really expecting anything. I mean, I still felt like a little kid. I didn't win, but I got runner-up, which paid in copies. Looking back, the story is really not very good, but publication was important, because it was the first time I thought that I might have something other people wanted to read.

Rejection hasn't been a big deal (although it will probably feel horribly different when I start trying to shop a novel). I think school has conditioned me to expect rejection. Since I was about eighteen, I've been in a lot of workshops--some excellent, some less so--and there's nothing like being rejected for half an hour by a roomful of your peers to toughen you up. I've also been an editorial assistant, which is basically typesetter, copyeditor, and professional rejecter. It helps to be on the other side of it. Once you spend every morning with a slush pile, I think the reality sets in. You reject things. Hundreds of things. It's never personal, and sometimes it's not even because a story isn't good. Editors are not lying when they ask for a certain type of story.

Last summer, I started submitting to the big literary journals and getting rejected, which was not remotely shocking. Something shocking was that, at the same time as I was submitting literary stories, I wrote a little story for a dark fiction contest because I liked some of the judges, and I placed. It was my first genuine paid publication, and it paid a lot more than a lot of the literary journals do, so I'm thinking I might pursue the dark fiction avenue as well, or instead. Also, entering the contest was an attempt to build some street cred for when I start querying on my novel, which is not literary. In some ways, that's the part that feels most valuable about this whole contest development; like I just proved I'm not relegated to pretentious litfic, but can produce something commercial if I try.
 

Cav Guy

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My first stuff came out in the mid-1980s (gaming articles and then a rules supplement), and I went through all that with no rejections. Same for my non-fiction in the past couple of years (2 articles for history/military affairs journals - 1 published and the other in the peer review process). All these went for either cash or copies of the journal. The rules supplement became a somewhat messy affair due to the company filing for bankruptcy.

I haven't been as fortunate with my fiction, though. Granted, I don't send much out (only one novel so far, and it's been turned down by one agent and is in revision right now). Also had a horror short rejected by a magazine, which was more or less expected but still dejecting.

Did any of this prepare me for rejection? Well...I'd say yes and no. I'm much more confident about my non-fiction than I am my fiction. It's hard for me to really say where I am with it at the moment, especially the fiction.
 
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Pat~

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I think my first ever "submission" was about 14 years ago, when I wrote my first letter to the Dallas Morning News. It got published, and I remember thinking what a kick that was, but I didn't start writing again until 3 years ago, when I wrote a nonfiction book for women dealing with depression. After I wrote the book, I figured I better learn what to do with it, so I researched, attended classes and writer's conferences, and got interested in writing articles and devotionals. My son then went to military academy for awhile, and suddenly the 'poetry spigot' got turned on. I started churning out poetry, though I'd never written anything other than a limerick or two before.

The book still isn't published, but I got other things published fairly quickly, starting with a filler in a woman's magazine. (I color-photocopied the check and framed it.) I'm fortunate to have found some markets for my writing, but I've gotten my share of rejections, too. I was okay with that--not everyone is going to click with my style of writing, especially in the poetry genre. Rejections haven't particularly discouraged me--only the non-responses. (I had an editor request a full manuscript at a writer's conference in 2004, and they still haven't accepted or rejected it. I ran into that same editor last year at a writer's conference; she basically told me it was in the 'maybe someday' pile! :Shrug: ) Rejections are at least results; non-responses make my interest start to wane, though.
 

rugcat

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I've previously related my experiences elsewhere on the boards, but basically I had easy success when I first started writing novels. When I returned to writing after a very long hiatus, I expected no less.

Poor, naive me. As rejections piled up, my feeling was not so much depression or anger as it was complete disbelief. How can this be? I'm a better writer now. I mean, what the f**k???

*Cliche alert!* Yes, even minor success really is sweeter when you have to struggle for it.
 

Jamesaritchie

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Success

*Cliche alert!* Yes, even minor success really is sweeter when you have to struggle for it.


You know, I keep hearing this, but I'll take sour, quick, easy success over sweet, slow, struggling success every time.
 

rugcat

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Well, to tell the truth, I would too.

But still,there's a reason hundreds of books and movies are made about people overcoming incredible odds and triumphing in the end. Books about silver spoon children who glide through life until they reach the pinnacle of achievement--not so much, unless hubris produces tragedy. The autobiography of George W. Bush, anyone?
 

xanthalanari

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The only success I've ever had was being shortlisted for a short story competition. I was so excited I bounced around the office for the rest of the day.

Other than that I've not submitted much, and all of it's been rejected or not placed. Rejection still hurts, and can leave me depressed for the rest of the day, so I imagine it would be worse if I had some actual successes behind me.
 

ChunkyC

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The first thing I ever submitted was accepted. It was for the job of writing a weekly movie review column in my local paper, back in August of '01. I've been writing them nonstop ever since and will be filing my 300th column in about a month or so.

As for fiction, that's another story. *bada-bing*

I've toyed with writing fiction since I was a kid, but didn't get serious about it until after I landed the reviewer job. That rekindled the spark. I've been rejected steadily since I finished and submitted my first and second novels. I wasn't prepared for how much the first rejection hurt. Since coming here, I've gained much perspective on how the biz works, but it still stings every time an agent or publisher says, "Thanks, but no thanks."

I have been fortunate enough to have two of my short stories picked up; one in our own AW Stories of Strength anthology released in the fall of '05, and another in the next issue of Coyote Wild, due out this month.
 

Jenan Mac

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Once you started submitting, how quickly did you have something accepted? Were you paid for it? What form did payment take?

If you met with early success, were you prepared for rejection later on?

The first thing I submitted was solicited (for a webzine), but unpaid. The second was accepted and paid, and the third was accepted and paid, and then there was a column in a small and very limited journal that lasted a year. After that...well, the novel is about to get trunked. Maybe I need to stick to essays and shorts, or maybe just she-was-out-sick-because notes to the teacher.

So I guess the answer to the second is pretty clearly "intellectually, yes, emotionally, no".
 

Namatu

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Weatherfield's post reminds me that a speech I wrote back in tenth (?) grade made runner up in a competition, and an essay I wrote in twelfth grade earned me my high school's biggest scholarship.

I've received a lot of rejection from authors refusing work I've offered them, not always pleasant. This, I hope, helps make it easier when agents or publishers reject me. Eventually, I always found an author. Eventually, I'll find an agent and publisher. (On my optimistic days.)
 

Ms.Write

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It's fascinating hearing everyone's stories on acceptance and rejection. Intelligent topic, too (esp. being prepared for rejection)!

I started out writing sun-sign feature articles for horoscope magazines; I still remember my excitement when I received my first cheque for $105. I ended up writing articles on assignment for one magazine for 8 years while I worked full-time. Then I started writing short stories (confessions market - True Story, True Experience, Personal Romances, etc.) and sold my third story out. Here again, I got into something regular - an editor in New York bought ALL my stories (True Romantic Confessions) and I couldn't produce them fast enough. Then they re-organized and the magazine eventually folded. In total, I sold 34 short stories.

I expected to be able to sell novels and the rejections were difficult to take. I wrote three women's mainstream novels before the rejections did me in. On the last one, I had a good literary agent, too, Sheil Land Agency in London. Her niche was crime fiction and I was told my novel lacked a hard edge (it was about three women dating a serial killer through an anonymous phone system).

At that point my day job got very busy so I turned to poetry and became an award-winning tanka poet published in literary journals and anthologies. Circumstances forced me to ditch the day job and then I got into coaching and giving workshops before I returned to fiction. Hadn't written story for over 6 years but last year sold a new story to True Experience first time out. Now I'm in first draft of a paranormal romance. I haven't written a novel for ten years.

In the ten years I wasn't writing novels I dated over 200 men (coffee dates mostly), probably to distract myself from what I was missing. At least now I have loads of material for my novels!

In conclusion, rejection CAN be very difficult especially if you don't believe enough in yourself.

Sometimes you need to gain the confidence from other areas of your life. I joined Toastmasters and received my competency certificate last year - the ego boost that gave helped me get back to novel writing. I also gave over fifty workshops encouraging people to follow their passions and their dreams. Eventually it came back to me, too.

I've been a long time away but come to novel writing now with a more professional attitude and a better understanding of what is required. I am ready to give it my best shot.
 

Clarice_S

Well, I sent in two different submissions to the same place...the first short story was rejected, but then the second one was accepted. I can say that the second time around, I had a better story too tell. There was no feedback given, but I knew that there was better to be done after I got the rejection....I'm currently shopping around a novel and have already got three rejections :( but one said that basically said the summary of the story was more exciting than the first few pages...So that means some fine tuning has too be made...So yeah, I appreciated the comment...loved that it gave me an idea of how to tweak it, but I had my own moment and now its time too move forward...

J Mac said it best, we can deal with rejection intellectually because technically--rejection is just a normal part of life, but it still hurts...
 
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