Writing
An Interesting Tale of Rejection
Are you a writer who is bothered by learning of the rejection of some piece of writing you submitted somewhere? You may have seen the following at least a few, if not many, times:
Dear author,
We have read your submission and unfortunately your story isn’t quite what we’re looking for right now. While we regretfully cannot provide detailed feedback due to the volume of submissions, we thank you for your interest in our magazine and hope you continue to consider us in the future.
This is an actual message I got from a magazine that publishes stories in the horror genre and there’s nothing unusual about it – until you actually read the “story” I submitted to them. So here we go:
Hi, Ernest here – writer, editor, and reviewer. I came across your magazine and like the feel of it. I wanted to ask whether your length requirement (2000 to 6000 words) for stories is carved in stone or do you sometimes consider shorter stories say 1000 to 1500 words?
best,
Now you can see the whole story – or lack of it. I never submitted a story to the magazine; just asked if they were flexible with their length of submissions to their magazine. Obviously they didn’t read the email and sent me what appears to be a stock reply of rejection – which made me wonder whether they would have read the story had I submitted one instead of a query about length requirements.
Since I have no intentions of hurting the magazine’s reputation or damage it (I love publications for giving us writers a platform to present our creative/artistic talent), the name of the magazine is excluded from this post. The point made here concerns the ethics of publishing. How many of these publishers don’t actually bother to read what is sent their way and just hand writers a pre-written rejection note with a single click of a button?
It’ll be interesting to see if the advertisement department of such publications also skip reading messages and lose potential clients. I doubt that they do. Maybe it’s time to find out by taking a moment to send them a test advertisement query.
