Prepping for Rejection/Playing the Numbers

Something that gets talked about often is the idea that writers need tough skins and have to take rejection as a badge of honor and all that.  I think there's a lot of truth to that.  For starters, all it takes is to look at the acceptance to rejection percentages of anywhere you are trying to send your work to know, right off the top, that you have somewhere about a 1:100 to 1:10000 chance of having your work accepted.  Then look at any writer's blog about writing or read books on writing and you'll find that it is generally accepted among published writers that you will get rejected tons of times before you find your acceptance letter in the mail.  But you know what?

It still sucks.

That's right.  No matter how much prep work mentally you have done to receive rejections, and no matter how much you have read on framing your form rejections and hanging them on your wall or creating a binder of them or whatever, getting a letter (or email) saying "This work is just not for us" is still a rejection of your work, and, as a writer, it feels like a rejection of you.

Now, I've read plenty of blogs talking about how it may not be you, it may be the market or the agent or the editor or whatever.  But that doesn't help much.  Honestly, chances are you have done a little research (I would hope) before blindly sending your queries or submissions out into the night like lost little sheep, so most of the excuses why it wouldn't be your work seem to be just knocking the idea that you have done your homework.

That said, it is tough to get on the horse and ride again.  So, here is what I told myself last month when I started sending out (lots) of poems again to literary magazines and what not (after about 2 years of not sending anything out - not entirely due to rejections, more laziness) was this:

Play the numbers.

So let's take my poetry submissions as an example.  Going through my *old* version of Poet's Market (yes, I know, I need to update it to Robert Lee Brewer's latest 2011 edition... badly), I noticed that most of the places I was submitting to accepted between 1 and 10 percent of their submissions.  A few went higher than that, and the majority were at the low 1 or 2 percent mark.  So let's say, just on average, that they accept 3%.

That means that in order to get a poem accepted (on average) I need to submit at least 34 poems, so my 1 in 33 1/3 chance would balance out.  So prolific production and submission is key here.

The other numbers trick is diversification of markets.  Let's say that there are prime markets and sub-prime markets (because there are).  So submitting to ONLY the prime markets hurts your chances because your writing may be ninety-fifth percentile writing overall.  So you may think that if places only accept the top two percent you are doomed to never get published (until you learn to write better, which you should).  But in reality, that's not true.  Remember, the cream of the crop authors won't even submit to the sub-prime markets (I feel like a mortgage analyst using that term), which eliminates some of the top competition, and moves you up the scale.  So an article easily overlooked by the New York Times or Washington Post might still get picked up by a local, small town paper.

It is all Supply and Demand.

You can thank your 9th grade Economics teacher for this one.  Remember supply and demand?  And the whole elasticity and milk and gasoline discussion?  No?  That's OK.  I'll give you the writing world recap.

There are lots of writers that write things and some of it is phenomenal and some of it is crap and there is a lot in the middle.  This is supply.  There are a few markets that buy writing, and some of them buy only the best writing and some can't afford or don't have the opportunity for that but they buy the best of the middle stuff, and so on.  This is demand.

In the top markets, the supply dramatically overwhelms the demand.  And the top of the line phenomenal supply is ample there.  In the middle markets, the phenomenal supply has dwindled (though they would love to have some), so they may take a little more lenient approach and take a larger portion of the supply as they still have to fill x number of slots in their production schedule.

So the short net of it is that the worse the market, the better chance you have (and you'll find someone who will accept and post or publish anything - you might avoid them).  That doesn't mean to only send your stuff to lesser markets.  Shoot for the stars!  Just play the numbers, too.  If you're the kid that only applied to two Ivy League colleges and didn't have any "safety schools" then this concept may be foreign to you, but it works.


So in the end...

send lots of stuff to lots of places and your chances improve.  Whether it is by increasing the attempts, dilution of markets, or whatever, increased persistence pays off.

And rejection still sucks, but you won't mind so much when you realize it is all just to justify the percentages that you already knew were there.  I hope.

By now I have probably received at least two rejections from the eight things I sent out last month.  Time to forward those to a few different markets and try again.

How do you handle rejection?  Would hiding in the numbers help for you?