Your rejection isn't right for my line. How 'bout THEM apples?

[ladytairngire]

I just got a rejection from an agent for a picture book I sent her yesterday. It was very nice but still industry-vague - the ubiquitous "not right for us

Comments

[momma_lizzie]

Speaking from the point of view of someone who is going through submissions, I can only imagine how many hundreds (possibly thousands) of submissions they must go through in a short period of time. In the short amount of time that I've been open to submissions for my anthologies I've recieved hundreds of stories. I had to force myself to send many impersonal cut and paste rejection letters. If I sat down and wrote someone a letter explaining why their story didn't work for me I wouldn't be able to get anything done. *shrugs shoulders* Probably not what you wanted to hear but that's just the honest truth. :/

Unfortunately you can't take it personally (as much as we all would love to). When the right agent or publisher reads your story and falls in love with it that's when it'll be the right time.

[ladytairngire]

Yes I realize how many queries these people get every day, but so do the nice magazine editors or publisher slush-sifters, and some of those spend the extra minute to say "bla bla bla, but thanks anyway."

Honestly it doesn't take that much extra time to say "Your story is too long and wordy to be commercially viable" or "Your story is not unlike a thousand other stories I see in a day" than it does to cut and paste.

And while I can sympathize with the plight of the slush-shoveler, given the number of personalized rejections I see from editors in other genres - including some of the most competitive markets - I can't help but conclude that agents (at least those in the kid-lit field) aren't making that tiny bit of extra effort, since I haven't received a single explanatory word for all the submissions I send out.

[sara_super_id]

In most businesses, the boss will pile up addresses for the administrative assistant to mail form letters to. The admin assistant doesn't know you from Adam, wouldn't have time to even glance at your book between answering phones and all his or her other work, and wouldn't be qualified to critique it anyways. The assistant prints the letters, signs or stamps their boss's name it it, seals it and runs it through a postal machine.

The boss, is busy reading the next pile of submissions and brokering deals with printers, authors, and so on.

[ladytairngire]

but how is that different from a publishing house or competitive magazines? Some of the personalized rejections that I get are from assistant editors, some from the big whig. Whoever's job it is to filter the mail...

rejections

[oregonnerd]

I didn't know there WAS anything but a form rejection anymore. I had 500+ rejections on Words... Whereas on my first novel I had a three page rejection letter from the head editor of Scribner's. I'm an absolute ahead in some ways, if you hadn't realized, and it started long ago. I did throw the letter away.
--Glenn