So far I've racked up form-letter rejections from Clarkesworld (" Unfortunately, your story isn't quite what we're looking for right now."), Apex ("Too frequently seen storyline, Fails to hold interest"), and from the very best, Asimov's ("Unfortunately, your story isn't quite what we're looking for right now.")
This is quite an impressive list of venues that have rejected my story and I hope to continue this trend for quite some time!
Unfortunately, I am lazy and haven't submitted it anywhere. Part of the problem is, I don't really like the story and so the rejection that said, well written story about X and y, but not for us kinda summed up my own personal feelings about the story. I do think it is well written, I just don't like it. And hard to keep sending it out when I don't really believe in it. I initially started sending it out cause nothing to lose, not cause I like it and at some level, I don't want this story to be my first publication. Maybe sending it out to someone else should be my goal for this week.
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Nice, it might be fun to see how broad of a collection you could get. Especially with the same story.
My record -- 12. I sold it to that one
Then sold it again to the 13th place as a reprint.
I rather like the story (straddling SF and horror) but it doesn't bother me if it's not a particular editor's cup of tea.
Of course, when my breakthrough novel is published, I will take pleasure in relating how I was rejected by all the big guns when I was first starting out.
I believe that to be a very good strategy to employ.
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After the first thousand it gets a little old...
Don't mind Robert. One thing you'll learn is that, past a certain point, nobody's progress arc matches anyone else's. One person's struggles don't necessarily have to every person's struggles. Write, submit to paying venues, and go write some more. These are the only commandments. Good luck.
I sold one story at sixpence a word to the seventeenth market I submitted it to. And I currently have one story at its 23rd market.
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My method has been to submit to leading venues first - why not? - and to resubmit to the next as soon as I've been rejected by the last.
I do the same. I have a spreadsheet that contains the markets I'm interested in and lists their pay/word, circulation, etc...
I just sort the list by what I care about most and then just go down the list.
Of course, the advantage to the spreadsheet is you can just keep adding rows with each rejection. Very little wasted paper.
(Individual stories and rejections...well, I think one of my poems went up to about forty rejections...as for stories, a couple went up past ten, most not that many. Though with them, I decided that even if new markets opened up I wasn't going to submit my earliest stories. They sucked, I eventually realized.)
((It was the rejection of my good stuff that made me bitter...))
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, YES.
Really makes it worth going through all those "no's," doesn't it?
Actually, it can be worse: in the job hunt, it's often: No, no answer, no answer, no answer, no, no answer, no answer, YES. At least you usually get rejection slips in the publishing world.
Just so long as it doesn't go, no no no no no yes no no no, wait did I miss something?