I hate to say it, but that's definitely a form rejection. I get rejections that say pretty much exactly that all the time. I'm pretty sure you're joking about sending a response back to the editor, but, just in case, never do that. But I sure can relate to the feeling and what you're going through.
Thanks for the tip. I never meant to imply it would be easy. I just stated it was my plan in the relative near future to embark on the journey. And yes, reading literary journals widely is the research I plan to do. I just don't have time right now between school, work, a five-year-old, and an eight-month pregnant wife. I have no expectations as to the outcome of my mission. All I know is that I'm going to do it. I'm not going to worry about success rates, whether or not beginner's luck exists in publication, how hard it is to sell literary fiction. I'm going to put my best foot forward and reach my goal as best I can. To get hung up on percentages and numbers in this field, I think, is a fool's errand (not saying you are hung up on that). To understand them is one thing, but to go into it with the knowledge that I'll probably fail and hang my hat on that fact is just not how I operate.
probably...although the form rejection was written above the personal rejection. Maybe form rejection is with the attachment of a personal form rejection, I suppose. I dunno
A couple of years ago I got: [something like] Dear crazy writer of the absurd and surreal, you are the beans...etc I was dancing round the bedroom, 'at last they have recognised my majesty.' It was a form rejection.
Oh.. I did respond, we had a chat. I've done that a few times... I say 'oh fanks, ho ho, ha.' he says 'hey bud, and a joke, all the best..' ...just manners, I thought.
The only mag I fell out with was Mcluskys or Mackenzies - American 'humor' website, I fell out with the [on-line, reckon most junior] editor of that one - the only time I've done it for real - everybody should do it once in their lifetime, just be a worm towards an editor. He said my writing was the 'wrong sort of humor for his magazine.' I said I failed to locate 'any humour in his rag...' It was a meal for one moment. ... McSweeneys
Sympathy, @deadrats. I have put out about 35 queries, and just got another polite but negative rejection yesterday that oddly rattled my usual optimistic outlook. If you hang in there, I promise I will!
Nope. Not sure we are going for the same channels, but for agents, I understand they get around 500 queries a month, and out of that they pick less than 50 a year, maybe a lot less then that, to push, which is their big time commitment to find you a publisher. So a lot of rejection may be just because they already have a couple things on their plate and cannot take another project. At least they are nice letters, even almost apologetic (and probably a form response anyway, but at least it is polite). Still it is getting tedious. Bourbon helps!
Most agents will take on fewer than 10 new clients a year, unless they're very new. Most agents have fewer than 50 clients overall... the odds are really, really against us. (That comforted me rather than depressed me, because it made it less my fault when I was rejected, but pretend I never said it if it's depressing ).
And being a mathematically inclined engineer, if the acceptance rate is 1%, and I have sent 35 out, the probability of success is 1-(1-.01)^35, or just 30%. By the time I hit 100, it will be up to 63%. So maybe I am not doing so bad
Thanks @Tenderiser ! That .002 acceptance rate revises my odds right now down to just 7%, and 100 queries down to 21%, my 50% breakpoint around 750! At 5 a night, only 140 days away from probable success. Hmm... maybe that is a better way to look at it!
The real number (at least, the most logical calculation I saw) is 1 in 4,000 queried manuscripts end up represented. Obviously your odds of being the 1 in 4,000 go up drastically if it's a publishable MS.
The odds are crazy against us. I keep thinking it shouldn't be this hard. But it is this hard. I want to call the world unfair and be granted three magic wishes.
Would be nice, but stats don't tell us much about individual cases. I could send something horrible out 1,000 times and the chances of it being accepted aren't going to improve much. If you send out something brilliant, the changes could be quite high on the first few submissions if targeted properly. The chances for any given work? I don't think you can calculate it.
I agree with @Steerpike - it doesn't work to pretend that all manuscripts are equal and that the same odds apply to all of them. The odds are stacked against you if you write something difficult/impossible to sell; they're significantly better if you write something easy to sell.
I seem to remember reading that the odds of a quite good manuscript eventually getting published are better than 50/50. I'm assuming that there was an unstated clarification of "quite good manuscript with a type, size, topic, etc., that is regarded as publishable." But the problem is the "eventually". I assume that that involves a whole lot of submissions and rejections.
If you write a 17,000-word comedy novel about violent child abuse, written to the level of a five-year-old who isn't very bright, your chances of being published are 0%. If you're JK Rowling, your chances of publication are 100%. The rest of us lie somewhere in between, and each of our manuscripts probably has a different % based on various factors. We would drive ourselves mad trying to turn it into a numbers game. For me, the important thing to take away from the numbers is that: 1) The odds are really against us. 2) Much of it is outside our control. 3) The longer you try, the more your odds go up.
I agree with the first part, so I cut it out. I only re-post stuff I disagree with, apparently? And I agree with most of the last part, except for the "The odds are really against us" part. I think that the statement, restatement, and overstatement of this idea is a big part of what drives a lot of people to self-publish when really they don't want to self-publish. They believe they have no real chance of finding a publisher so they don't even try. I'm not a great writer, and honestly, I'm pretty lazy - I don't sweat over every word or do a million rewrites or any of that - and I don't have trouble finding publishers. Big Five is hard, but smaller-but-still-reputable publishers? Not a problem. Now, that's partly because of the sub-genre in which I generally write (not literary shorts!), partly because while I'm not a great writer I'm a naturally good writer, partly because I've been scrupulously reliable and professional with the publishers I've worked with so they're happy to work with me again, etc. There are lots of factors other than "Oh, getting published is easy!" It's not easy. Not at all. And I'm certainly not reliably getting published (or selling) at the levels I'd like. I haven't mastered this publication game at all. But I'm at least playing the game, and it's not because I'm a super-star. I think part of it may come back to the writing vs. publication issue being discussed in a different thread. If someone wants to write something really specific, and has their own artistic vision and isn't interested in compromising that, then I think they're likely to have a much harder time getting published, even if their writing is solid. For them, the writing is the more important part, and I think that's totally valid. For others, like me, publication is equally or even more important, so I'll write to the market, whatever market I think is most likely to work, and if I do a solid job of the writing I'll likely get published. There are caveats to that, of course - I won't really write to any market, so I'm lucky that there are a couple markets that are easier to sell to that are also good matches for my writing style. And "solid" writing, by my definition, is several notches higher up the quality scale than a lot of what I see being self-published, so those authors were right to think that they didn't have good odds of finding a publisher. Whoa. This was meant to be a couple lines of reply! Got carried away. Executive summary: Almost pointless to talk about the odds, but if we're going to, we should be careful not to overestimate the difficulties of publishing, at least for some writers in some situations.
I agree with the first part, so I cut it out. I only re-post stuff I disagree with, apparently? And I agree with most of the last part, except for the "The odds are really against us" part. I think that the statement, restatement, and overstatement of this idea is a big part of what drives a lot of people to self-publish when really they don't want to self-publish. They believe they have no real chance of finding a publisher so they don't even try. I'm not a great writer, and honestly, I'm pretty lazy - I don't sweat over every word or do a million rewrites or any of that - and I don't have trouble finding publishers. Big Five is hard, but smaller-but-still-reputable publishers? Not a problem. Now, that's partly because of the sub-genre in which I generally write (not literary shorts!), partly because while I'm not a great writer I'm a naturally good writer, partly because I've been scrupulously reliable and professional with the publishers I've worked with so they're happy to work with me again, etc. There are lots of factors other than "Oh, getting published is easy!" It's not easy. Not at all. And I'm certainly not reliably getting published (or selling) at the levels I'd like. I haven't mastered this publication game at all. But I'm at least playing the game, and it's not because I'm a super-star. I think part of it may come back to the writing vs. publication issue being discussed in a different thread. If someone wants to write something really specific, and has their own artistic vision and isn't interested in compromising that, then I think they're likely to have a much harder time getting published, even if their writing is solid. For them, the writing is the more important part, and I think that's totally valid. For others, like me, publication is equally or even more important, so I'll write to the market, whatever market I think is most likely to work, and if I do a solid job of the writing I'll likely get published. There are caveats to that, of course - I won't really write to any market, so I'm lucky that there are a couple markets that are easier to sell to that are also good matches for my writing style. And "solid" writing, by my definition, is several notches higher up the quality scale than a lot of what I see being self-published, so those authors were right to think that they didn't have good odds of finding a publisher. Whoa. This was meant to be a couple lines of reply! Got carried away. Executive summary: Almost pointless to talk about the odds, but if we're going to, we should be careful not to overestimate the difficulties of publishing, at least for some writers in some situations.
