Rejection

[Maggie]

How do you deal with rejection over and over? How do you keep your spirits up?

[Aidana WillowRaven]

Artists & illustrators who are trained formally, learn to deal with it early...lol... nothing is more humbling than a professor stepping on two weeks of work calling it crap while moving on to the next victim/student.

I would assume an author's skin needs to grow just as resilient.

Knowing what I have learned from the inside looking out, a PH needs to be almost psychic to determine ho your particular book will do in their particular market.

Your work gets analyzed for more than your writing skill, but for it's marketability (are enough people buying your kind of book to show a profit big enough to justify print costs), it's genre (do they have the space for another book of your genre, or are looking for another genre right now to fill some unknown goal/quota), or even your notoriety (are you a recognized author with a already existing following large enough to attract instant sales), and I am sure countless other factors go into the decision such as budget.

Once you you realize that rejections often have little to do with your writing ability & even about you, I would imagine rejection would bess bothersome... in theory...lol.

I for one have no patience, I would never make it as a writer. Hats off to all that stick with it!

Aidana WillowRaven

[Lea Schizas]

Maggie, if you want to survive in the writing world you have no choice but to toughen that outer shell of yours. Rejections are only a part of the process and you MUST get used to it.

For me, I use the rejections as a power tool of emotion...I get pissed and want to prove to them I can do it. However, one thing you need to do is this:

If you keep getting rejections for the same ms, and if none have offered any notes to help you pinpoint why they rejected it, make sure to get another pair of eyes to look over your ms to see if there is anything you missed.

Writers at times are not the best people to edit their own work that is why it is crucial to get yourself a critique partner or join a critique group.

Another thing is once you send off a submission, sit down and begin your next project. I can't believe how many writers out there wait to get a contract before they even think about writing another story. Wrong!!! Once you get a contract, at times, they may ask you what else you have going in your writing. What would sound better:

Nothing

Oh, tons of new projects in the midst of setting/writing up.

I think the latter. :)

Hope this helped.

Lea Schizas
http://leaschizaseditor.com

[Vivian Gilbert Zabel]

By remembering the rejections I've had over the years, I do my best to make any rejections from me helpful and not discouraging.

I hate to say, "I'm sorry, but this won't work for us," whether because an author chooses another artist or because we can't market certain books or whether the writing would take too much editing to bring it up to high enough quality.

It's difficult to receive rejections and hard to send rejections.

Vivian