A field guide to common rejections we see from publishers

Not all of them are avoidable, so go easy on yourself.

Even the most successful literary agents deal with rejection every day. We reach out to authors who turn out to have an agent already—BOO. (No but yay for them.) We vie for the same novelist 8 colleagues are going after and end up losing the beauty contest, probably because we’re just…too talented….for that author to even know how to handle. :erratic Judy Garland-style sobbing:

If you’re an author, however, those rejections are probably less interesting to you than the specific types of rejection we get when we’re submitting clients’ projects to publishers. So that’s what this newsletter is about!

Spoiler alert: rejection is inevitable.

Agented projects get rejected by a number if not most editors on a submission list 100% of the time. One hundred percent of the time. That is true no matter who you are and no matter who your agent is.

It is very, very rare for even half of the editors on a sub list to be interested in a project. This is true in every genre and at every financial level. You’re gonna get rejected. Period.

Much of this rejection is outside of our control: perhaps the editor has a similar project on their list already. Perhaps the book is called A FULSOME AND REMARKABLY GRANULAR TRIBUTE TO BANANAS, and unbeknownst to us, we have sent it to an editor whose father was killed by a banana.

Maybe there is some challenge presented by the author’s platform or the current zeitgeist of which we are already aware, but the author and we can’t do anything about it, so we’ve decided to go to war with the army we have.

However—

Certain kinds of rejection are predictable and therefore worth anticipating and addressing in edits.

Editors commonly pass on projects for one of just a handful of reasons. I’ve listed all of them I can think of below. (I will probably remember a huge one as soon as I hit “send” on this newsletter, though, because of course.)

I can’t remember the last time an editor passed on one of my projects for a reason that wasn’t one of these. Which means that prior to submission, I always think through them one at a time and consider whether I should be stage-momming my author around some of them.

I recommend that you do the same with your work. Remember, however, that you cannot “fix” everything about a project, and PS, if you even try to do that, what will result is a snoozer mayonnaise blob of a proposal. The point of this exercise isn’t perfection; it’s making sure you and the author have placed the author’s glittering strengths in the most beautiful possible setting.

I am hoping the below helps you to do the same. But I am not giving you the list yet until I reiterate once more that—

FOR REAL, REJECTION IS INEVITABLE.

Do NOT look to this field guide as a way to avoid rejection altogether. Not only will there be rejections when you submit your project—some of them will involve things that in hindsight you might have been able to do something or other about somewhere, had you only realized. Oh well.

Because you are human and do not have the panoptic ability to inhabit and predict the thoughts of everyone you meet, you will be able anticipate every single rejection you get only in hindsight. IT IS OKAY.

If you’re trying to avoid pain by being a Super Smart Anticipatory Thinker—or worse, you’re going to beat yourself up with regret and self-reproach over any kind of rejection you fail to anticipate—that’s your prerogative. But please recognize that it’s also willful self-harm borne of your own need to perceive yourself as someone who is Not Good Enough.

To reiterate: perfectionism is not actually about the quest for superhuman achievement. It’s about an individual’s subconscious need to ice bucket herself over and over with poisonous emotional reproach that she is NOT superhuman. It’s a form of addiction/compulsion, not achievement. You stop that, Debra!

Anyway, here are the common rejections we get.

NONFICTION