A Writer's Tale

Eventually, if you are persistent, you’ll open an envelope that isn’t self-addressed, it will contain a letter of acceptance, and you’ll be a “published author.”

In a period of five or six years, I collected at least thirty rejection slips from Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, fifteen or twenty from Ellery Queen, and numerous rejection slips from other magazines.

They’re not fun to get.

But what you must understand is that a story can be rejected for any of several reasons.

True, maybe it’s just a lousy story. Or not a story, at all. Maybe it’s badly written. On the other hand, maybe the editor had a headache when he or she read it. Or maybe the magazine had recently bought a story with a similar plot. Or maybe your piece is too violent for their taste. Maybe the editor thinks it is sexist. Maybe your story has a dog in it, but the editor is a cat person.

Maybe the editor thinks your main character is too pushy or not pushy enough. Or maybe the publisher has a backlog of stories and just isn’t interested in buying any new ones just now.

Your material might even be rejected because it is too unusual, too original, doesn’t fit the stereotypes or the editor’s expectations of what a story ought to be. Maybe you’ve dared to enter unknown territories and the publisher is unwilling to risk the adventure.

In other words, it ain’t necessarily a bad story.

This is true of any manuscript you submit, whether it’s a short story sent to a magazine or a novel sent to a publisher.

It may be a perfectly fine piece of work.

More often than not, its rejection will have little or nothing to dc with the work’s intrinsic merits.

So be not glum!

Get your work into the right hands, and it might sell.

First, make sure that your manuscript is seen by a wide sampling of editors. If none of them wants to buy it, go ahead and put it away.

But don’t throw it away.

The finished product is an asset.

Time goes by. You keep on writing. Some of your stuff sells. You develop a following.

Down the line, you might very well be able to sell the very same story or novel that nobody wanted at the time it was written.

In my own case, I spent years sending out short stories to magazines. I accumulated scads of rejection slips. After my novels began to sell, however, I rarely wrote or submitted short stories. Soon, editors were asking me for stories for their anthologies and magazines. About half the time, I turned down the offers for one reason o: another. So the situation had reversed itself.

The same situation is true of novels. Once you’ve had a certain amount of success, you might be able to sell some of those old novels that had been rejected when you were a “nobody.”

In many cases, they were only rejected in the first place because you were a nobody not because there was anything wrong with them.

Get big enough, and you can sell just about anything you ever wrote.

You may think you’ll never get that big.

But if you’re good and you persist, you might.

So don’t let the rejections get you down. Keep everything.

And be ready to dust a few things off, some day polish them up a bit… maybe change the price of gasoline, change the character’s typewriter into a computer, replace the eight-track tape player with a CD changer, etc.

In your old, rejected stuff, you may have some good stories, good novels that you’ll be able to sell someday even though nobody wanted them when you were young and unknown and needed the acceptance and money.

On Book Covers

MOST AUTHORS, MOST OF THE TIME, HAVE ABSOLUTELY NO CONTROL over the artwork or written material that appears on the covers of their books.

They’re lucky if they get to keep their titles.

Usually, publishers make all the decisions about such matters without consulting the author.

The writer is at the mercy of strangers in the editorial, sales, and publicity departments.

They decide what is best for the book. Then they do it, never asking the writer’s opinion.

Neat deal.

If they put a great cover on the book, terrific.

Unless the book finds itself spine-out on the shelves of whatever bookstores deign to carry it. If the book is by a “nobody” and gets no special push by the publisher, that’ll be its position. Most bookstores display thousands of books. The important books arrive by the dozens, sometimes by the hundreds, and are stacked everywhere. Also, every important book is placed on the shelf in such a way that its front cover faces the customer.

Meanwhile, two or three copies of the no-name’s book are shelved side by side, spine out.

In such cases, the cover means zilch.

Because nobody will ever see it.

Such a situation would make this little essay an excercise in futility. So we’ll shove the spine-out scenario aside and proceed with the assumption that cover is facing the customer.

If it is a great cover, the book will probably sell like hotcakes.

If it’s an okay cover, the book will sell okay.

And if it stinks?