Interpreting Rejection Letters

July 18, 2007

My agent sent me a rejection we received for my children's fantasy novel yesterday. It read:

"Laura and I very much enjoyed the story, but in the end have decided that it's not quite right for our list at this time."

A few years ago I might have really obsessed over the meaning of this. They said, after all, they "very much enjoyed the story" so was there a problem, why didn't they accept it? Was it the character? The length? Were there too many typos? Can I change the plot, the setting... the font? How about my name? Maybe if I change my name to something like Joseph Kramer Railing, we can use the name JK Railing. Would that help?

Nah.

Interestingly (or not), the BookEnds Literary Agency has a blog post today about whether they as agents are obligated to write comments on a rejected manuscript.

Truthfully, though, if there were only one or two things that were the problem, then I’d probably offer representation or ask you to make revisions and resubmit. Usually it’s bigger and broader than that. Usually it’s the characterization. Something that can’t be fixed easily. Or a plot issue. Again, usually something that can’t easily be fixed. And often it’s a little of both. Sometimes I just took on something similar or I don’t see a big enough market for it.

So what I’m trying to say here is that the trouble with giving feedback is that it always makes the problem look simple.

Or, in the case of my little rejection note, it's not quite right for their list. (The publisher is Holt, by the way). My son asked me what that meant. My first answer (you'd have to know my son or perhaps have a 13-year-old of your own to completely understand why there's more than one answer) was, "Nothing. It doesn't mean anything."

I think that's probably true enough.

"We enjoyed it very much" I take to mean that yes, as a matter of fact, they did enjoy reading it. They actually probably did read it to the end and enjoyed it. So they said so. Or, perhaps, they hated it and didn't want to insult me (a published author) or my agent (who represents or has represented some of their authors) by saying it sucked dead bears and she should never have sent it to them.

As for fitting into their list, there can be a 101 reasons for that to be true (or not) ranging from "we've published 8 books just like it in the last year" to "we don't publish those kinds of books" to "we're booked up (no pun intended) for the next two years and the book we try to squeeze in is going to be better than just enjoyable."

Frankly, you'll drive yourself crazy trying to parse this sort of thing. I now pretty much take rejections to mean this (and if you're a regular reader of this blog you already know what I'm going to say):

On this given day this given editor declined to acquire this given manuscript. Period.

For any of a million and one or more reasons, it didn't grab them as much as they wanted to be grabbed by a manuscript by me. If I had a track record in children's books, if my last 5 YA fantasy novels (which I haven't written, let alone published) sold 150,000 copies each, then they may very well have been pushed over the edge (by greed and market forces, often the same thing) into "loving it."

Rejection's part of the game, an unpleasant one, although once you start getting published regularly enough the rejections become significantly easier to deal with.

Oh, and that Hebrew writing up there in the top corner? It supposedly means: This too shall pass. (If you speak Hebrew and it says something different, please let me know. It would be quite embarrassing if it actually said something like, "The writer of this blog is a talentless schmuck.")

Cheers,

Mark Terry