It’s been a year of firsts for me. My first line editing gig. My first editor-in-chief experience. My first acceptance of another author’s story, and my first rejection too. My first launch of an open novel call, which means next year is going to be my first full blown content editing experience. But nothing quite stacks up to the first experience with the complaining author who has been rejected.
As an author who has built up her own respectable collection of rejections, and who has been called “stupid” by an editor in one of those rejections, I understand the angst, the depression, and the self-flagellation that accompanies rejection. There’s another side to rejection too. Anger, denial. How dare this editor dis my work, my lovingly crafted, brilliant, better-than-anyone-else-has-ever-written manuscript. (Yes, I was that arrogant about my own work when I first started in this industry. I have since learned better.)
When I got an email from a rejected author that, buried amongst its “this is not a complaint” essay, said the author had polished said manuscript for hours, the first thing I flashed to was an episode of “Gilmore Girls” where a badly-reviewed ballerina protested that the review was unfair because she “practices 4 hours a day.” I could practically hear the collective scoff of professional dancers across the nation when that episode (and line) first aired. I certainly scoffed. “4 hours?” I told my SO. “That character is no REAL ballerina. All the dancers I knew in college practiced more than 12 hours a day, in addition to taking a full load of classes.” Which segued into the uncharitable thought that professional authors of any flavor spend more than hours in polishing their manuscripts. But then I stepped back and reread the rest of the email, discussing the unfairness of rejection in more polite tones than I expected.
There are plenty of authors in this world that believe emailing the agent/editor in response to a rejection will either get them reconsidered (because of course the agent / editor didn’t give the manuscript due consideration or the agent / editor were mistaken in their rejection), or will fix the publishing industry in such a way that the authors in question will start getting published. Even when I had an editor calling me “stupid,” though, I managed not to be one of those authors. The editor in question actually sent me some useful critique information on my rejected manuscript, so I sent a polite thank you note for the critique without mentioning that I put that editor on my “do not submit to ever again” list. The name calling was out of line. The rejection, not so much. The story really was kind of … bad. I was able to calmly respond for two reasons. 1) I’d been published before. 2) Veteran writers had mentored me, teaching me the proper way to respond to rejection and criticism.
Point in fact: Accept the rejection and move on. Sending responses other than a “thank you for your time” is never a good idea. In fact, it’s usually better not to send any sort of response at all. Agents and editors receive so many anti-rejection complaints that they tend to react harshly to anyone who sends such a thing (even if it’s your first time). Such behavior gets author email addresses tagged as “Spam”. It doesn’t matter if we authors preface the email with “This is not a complaint.” The truth is that we really are complaining, and doing so in a passive-aggressive manner that expects some sort of new result.
Many agents and editors tend to ignore such complaints, not responding directly to the author in question. There’s rarely anything worth saying, and such conversations tend to snowball into flamewars that get everyone involved in trouble. But Musa Publishing prides itself on assisting new writers with their career, and something about this author made me think the author was new to publishing. So I decided to respond, hoping that my words would make an impact and help a budding career before foot-in-mouth disease destroyed it. It helped that the author in question actually has some talent and made it to our final round before I had to cut the manuscript. I could be honest about the quality of the author’s work. Shortly after I sent my email, I received the author’s thank you, along with a promise to work harder and continue submitting.
I’ve heard a lot of horror stories about these exchanges and am pleased that my first such one didn’t end in tragedy (or tattered reputations). It’s comforting to know that the right words can salvage a bad situation. This experience is one reason I believe that all authors should be editors, even if only for a few months. There’s so much we can learn about our own bad behaviors by seeing them from the other side of the curtain.
