We’ve all had it happen. You open your email and see a response to a query or a request for an interview or review and click on it and… then the floor feels like it drops out from under us as we realize they’re turning us down. Honestly, it’s almost worse than getting turned down asking someone on a date because we’ve invested so much in our books.
Because of my neurodivergence, I experience something called “Rejection-Sensitive Dysphoria” which is basically a terrible, almost extreme, response to feeling rejected. I don’t even have to be rejected to react like that. As you can imagine, it is not a fun experience. I say this because when I tell you I understand what rejection feels like, I know it deeper than many people ever will experience. My suggestions come from many years of working on how to cope with those feelings.
Understanding Rejection
The first thing we need to look at in terms of rejection is understanding why it happened. This can feel like an impossible thing when a rejection letter for your book is a “thanks for your interest, but no thank you” form letter. That doesn’t mean we can’t gain insight into the reasons why, however.
When I was doing acquisitions for the first indie press I worked for, there were many reasons I might pass on a manuscript. It could be everything from someone not following our query guidelines to that book just not being something we could represent effectively. Many of the reasons I rejected manuscripts had nothing to do at all with the quality of the writing, in fact.
That is a key part to all of this: the majority of rejections you receive may have nothing at all to do with you.
Just like with dating, there could be a billion reasons someone might not be interested in another, and it’s very rare that it’s just because someone isn’t “good enough.” The reasons may be varied and complex, but they’re almost never personal. Books are the same.
One book I had to reject I felt was incredibly powerful. It was the story of a woman living under Taliban rule who wanted her story told to the West. As incredibly powerful and important as the story was (and still is), I only published speculative fiction. I wound up having to turn her down because I just plain was not the correct publisher for her. I lacked the connections, tools, and ability to effectively position her book to the market.
If you do receive feedback that tells you the book just isn’t ready yet or has issues, give it deep consideration and take a look at what those people are saying. However, if you aren’t receiving that kind of feedback from folks, don’t immediately become disheartened and assume that it’s a you problem.
Feeling The Emotion
Rejection hurts. It just plain does. Regardless of how much we tell ourselves it’s not about us, it’s still going to sting. We need to accept that emotion. However, there’s a point at which that discomfort and sting can pivot and become something far less useful: bitterness. It’s easy to blame the rest of the world. The number of times I got nasty emails after rejections was significant. I was called many things, including a “sell out” and a “tool of the publishing elite” and other things I won’t repeat here.
That bitterness and anger is just covering up the pain. While I won’t tell you how you are or aren’t allowed to feel, if you allow the harder emotions to creep in, it will color your ability to move forward and handle future interactions. That, of course, is not going to help your career any.
Instead, I advise you have a drink (alcoholic or not), call a close friend, and commiserate with them. You can rage and moan and whatever it is you feel is needed to vent those emotions. Print out the rejection letter and burn it, even. Whatever allows you to experience those feelings and get them out without lashing out at the source. Which brings us to our next point.
How To Behave Following A Rejection
Our world is surprisingly small. The writing and publishing world is both huge and also phenomenally tiny. If you lash out and get nasty, word will spread about you. Authors talk to authors; publishers and editors talk to each other, too. Every time someone has sent me an unkind response, my response was always, “Wow, we dodged a bullet.”
This isn’t to say you shouldn’t call out people who are, for example, disproportionately rejecting marginalized voices. That’s a different discussion, but this is about personal rejection, not institutional bias.
If you respond to the rejection at all, and you are by no means expected or obligated to, be gracious. Thank the person for their time and tell them to have a good day. That kind of thing engenders good will and may bring you to their mind again when they encounter you “in the wild” in the future. Let me tell you, the people who were rude to me when I rejected them? I remember their names, and when I see them elsewhere, I tend to bristle.
This also includes not whining in public. You’ll see my above segment about feeling emotion suggested you have a 1-on-1 bitch session with a good friend, not a meltdown on social media. Social media is public, and that kind of behavior will earn you a reputation. And not the kind of reputation that will help your career move forward.
Picking Yourself Back Up
There is no set timeline for bouncing back from a rejection. There just isn’t a universal answer to this. However, I recommend not languishing in your feelings for longer than a couple days if you can avoid it. The longer you let it live in your head rent-free, the less likely you are to press forward. Just like falling off a horse, you need to dust yourself off and get back to it as swiftly as you can. If you don’t, the anxiety will build until it makes itself far larger than it ought to be.
Once you are through the first barrage of emotions and have had the opportunity to vent them, start again. Regardless of the project, seek alternatives or start the work of correcting the thing(s) that prevented you from being accepted in the first place. If it’s a matter of editing or writing quality, you can start doing self-edits, consider hiring a professional, or seek out beta readers. If it wasn’t the right publisher for your work then start finding who is the right publisher for your work. If the reviewer declined you, start looking for another, etc.
You don’t need to sit in the emotional soup forever, and you cannot wait forever to keep moving. Sitting still and being trapped in place does nothing to help you further your career, so you cannot stay in that spot forever. Regardless of what “forward” looks like, you need to move that way.
How Rejection Gives Us Insight
Sometimes rejection teaches us where we aren’t meant to be. It isn’t a bad thing or a negative one, but there have been occasions where I was rejected, and it was affirming. For example, before coming out as trans-masculine, I was scheduled to speak at the Women In Publishing summit. After coming out, I agonized and then sent an email to the conference head, Alexa Bigwarfe. She spent a long time thinking about it and eventually decided to decline me as a speaker because I don’t identify with “woman.” (She’s VERY pro-trans folks!) However, she offered me the opportunity to speak to her community in another way.
Being turned down from that speaking role actually felt very, very good, despite the fact that it was still a rejection. Even if it was a very gentle, wholesome one. Alexa is a wonderful human, and she decided that the space wasn’t one for me because I am not “woman.” However, that rejection was tremendously affirming of my identity, and she made space for me in another way.
Rejection sometimes just helps us understand our space in the world and how we fit into it. Sometimes a book isn’t meant for traditional publishing. Sometimes we just aren’t the right fit for a review in a particular literary magazine. Sometimes it’s just that we are trying to squeeze into a box that isn’t for us.
When you receive a rejection, take some time to evaluate what that rejection is teaching us.
Rejection Isn’t Failure
It feels like it is, doesn’t it? However, the reality is that rejection isn’t really a failure. Not in the broad sense. Technically, yes, it is one, but what is it a failure of? It’s like trying to find where a puzzle piece fits in the image, not like burning dinner. The puzzle piece has a place in the grand scheme of things. However, sometimes we don’t have enough of the picture to know exactly where it goes. Or, hell, sometimes it’s a piece to an entirely different puzzle that we didn’t realize we were putting together.
That’s the thing. Regardless of what you were turned down for, it is often the case that we were trying to stick ourselves in a place not meant for us rather than finding the spot we are best suited for.
Rejection is just the start of something else. Don’t think of it as the end of a road, just a signal that you need to take another route. The destination may not need to change, just the means. Your end goal doesn’t have to vanish just because you hit a snag on the journey. The road is full of potholes, and you are going to need to face many of them in order to accomplish your goals, so don’t give up just because you found one.
Some potholes are deeper than others and require repairs after you hit one, but none of these are journey-ending sinkholes. Just bumps in your road. Take a deep breath, reassess, and do what you need to do in order to continue onward. You‘ve got this.
