Arrows Not Boomerangs: Rejection – Avoiding and Dealing With It

I’m not proud to say that I have enough rejection letters to re-wallpaper my smallest room.  However I do also have plenty saying ‘we will be pleased to publish’ and ‘please find a check enclosed’.  A rejection is always a disappointment but it would be a waste of time, paper and stamps if it wasn’t also a learning opportunity.

To many of us, writing is a beloved hobby as well as a driving need.  The safest way of avoiding rejection is, of course, never to send out any work, but what follows is a collection of tips and wrinkles gathered from personal experience, workshops, evening classes and magazines such as this one, which aims to propel you forward and save your sanity!  We’ll look at both fiction and non-fiction.

Presentation

First things first: be professional and business-like.  Editorial offices are busy places and their staff is hideously over-worked.  They receive hundreds of letters and unsolicited manuscripts (MSS) and one that is hand-written, scruffy or has been used as a cup rest is likely to be dismissed before it has been read, even though the idea in it is the most original since James Dyson’s bag-less cyclone vacuum cleaner.

Equally don’t go overboard with presentation – for example plastic wallets can cause havoc. Imagine the scene: a pile of unread MSS in a frantic office slides to the floor.  The culprit?  Your MSS, beautifully presented in a plastic wallet or folder.

Layout

When sending any MSS, layout is important.  It should comprise a cover sheet detailing the title of the piece, number of words, your name, address, telephone number and email address if you have one.  If accepted this sheet goes to the finance department for payment arrangements to be made. 

The piece itself should be on numbered pages, with the author’s name and address in smaller print at the top of each page, because in the absence of its cover sheet the MSS is lost and alone in a sea of lesser MSS. 

The text should be on plain white paper, in a standard font, size 12, double spaced with wide margins and indented paragraph first lines.  The first page of the text should start halfway down so that notes can be made by the editor.