Let’s Talk About Rejections

Let’s face it, we all hate receiving the words, “Thank you for sending in your submission, but we didn’t accept it.”
You might get an explanation for the reason why, or you may not. If you received the reason then check it over carefully. Do you understand what they are trying to tell you about your story? Did you try to make sense of it, or did you just get mad and throw it away?
Hopefully you didn’t get mad and throw it away. At least save it. Put it with a copy of your story and put it away for now. Here are a few tips to help you with rejections.
• Take a deep cleansing breath and GET OVER IT! Don’t let it take over your every thought. Don’t let it stigmatize your thoughts and fingers to continue writing. Don’t speak negatively to yourself. Think positive thoughts… “That’s just one person’s opinion.”
• Did you follow the instructions to the key? Did they ask for a Cover Letter and you didn’t comply? You must make sure you follow instructions that each publisher requests. Now all publishers are the same. Maybe it was rejected because it didn’t fit their magazine/ezine. Did you see if they have a theme you must write about?
• Think positive. You’ve rewritten your story and it’s perfect. Now look for a home for it. There are many online paying markets you can find. Here’s one for freelancers: https://allfreelancewriting.com/writers-markets/ If you want fiction markets: http://www.fictionfactor.com/markets.html I like Fiction Factor because they have a plethora of different genres to choose from.
• Send to more than one publisher the same story. But make sure the publisher will accept submissions to other publishers. You can probably bet that someone will like your story or article. If not, keep submitting until one does accept it, or you write a new story/article. Sometimes, it’s just getting it in on the right day, when the editor is in a good mood. *smile*
• REJECTION – Is just a nine-letter word that can either stunt you from your writing or push you to better heights. I’m betting you’ll be pushed to your highest level and move on. Don’t fear that word, but learn from the editor’s that may take the time to give you great feedback. We can only hope!
Keep writing and submitting. You’ll forget that nine-letter word when you receive a better word, ACCEPTED.

Writing in English is difficult, because it's an ever-disintegrating language.

Jonathan Swift, writer and dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, complained to the Earl of Oxford in 1712: “Our Language is extremely imperfect. Its daily Improvements are by no means in proportion to its daily Corruptions; and the Pretenders to polish and refine it, have chiefly multiplied Abuses and Absurdities.” He went so far as to say, “In many Instances, it offends against every Part of Grammar.”

It was the lingual wild-west, untamed and out of control! So, in order to tame our wildly evolving language, a group of clerks and clerics in the eighteenth century who wanted a more orderly language developed the rules for the “Queen’s English.”

Unfortunately, they used the rules they were most familiar with, and being men of the church, they borrowed them from Latin.

Doh!

Nevertheless, these rules have been consecrated, hallowed, and immortalized in hundreds of books on style, and repeated by guru after guru who ignores the scabrous history of our English language. These hard-and-fast rules have been passed down by generations of schoolteachers in a vain effort to keep the language pure, when everyone knows English was brought to Britain by the Saxons—those intrepid dark age settlers whose homeland is now the Netherlands, and who long ago went a-viking to the British Isles and stayed. Quite frankly, modern Dutch is incomprehensible to a modern English speaker, unless they were born there.

Oddly enough, so is Latin.

So—a bunch of smart guys in Victorian England applied the rules of a dead language, Latin, to an evolving language with completely different roots, Frisian, added a bunch of mish-mash words and usages invented by William Shakespeare, and called it “Grammar.”

Despite the pox-ridden history of the English language, it helps to have a framework to go by when writing, so yes—I use a book of rules, the Chicago Manual of Style.  This helps me to remain consistent in my writing, and smooths the narrative for the reader.

You can use any style guide you choose, but you must remain consistent.

My biggest complaint when reading indie novels is that some authors don’t realize how critical consistency is, and so many small errors could have been solved without too much trouble, if an editor had seen the manuscript prior to publication.

That is where an external eye is SO handy. I feel that a good relationship with an editor is the most important investment an indie can make in her career. Even if you have an editor, it's a good idea to examine every sentence yourself for consistency, and make a usage-list for yourself, using the first instance of how any made-up word is used in the manuscript. That is what an editor will do for you.

This is so that your own usages don't evolve as the story does, and made up names remain capitalized or hyphenated as you originally intended.

I do recommend you print out each chapter and go down it using an envelope to shield everything that is below the sentence you are looking at, or even do it backwards, starting at the end and going up.

I have editors, because even with these precautions I don’t always get it right.

But I do make the effort.

It’s one of the hardest parts of being a writer, don’t you think? Editing your own work, running over the same pages over and over again…and still, if you’re human, it’s inevitable that you’ll miss a quotation mark here, an extra space there, or worse, a typo.

You know that reading your own words is the most difficult scenario for proofing, don’t you? Your big, beautiful brain is so good at translating what you physically “see” on the page into what your mind “knows” you “meant” to type, that it usually will glide right over an extra “the” or a missing “a.”

Yes, it purposefully corrects the errors, without even notifying you!

You can read the same sentence a hundred times, and it’ll look great to you. Your mind interprets it as you intended it. And when the first person to take a look at your book finds a glaring omission, or an extra word in that lovely prose, you may feel like an incompetent idiot.

You thought you were careful. Right? You worked so hard to catch those typos.

When it first happens, it's embarrassing. But over time, you’ll learn you cannot catch all of the errors by yourself.

I’ve written twenty-two books, so I’ve been through this process a few times. (you can see them at www.lazarbooks.com, including my newest release, Betrayal.) Over the years, I’ve had publishing house editors go over my manuscripts. They found errors, I fixed them. And I tried not to make more errors when I made the corrections, which is all too common.

We had the first and second edits, then copy edits in the end to make sure we didn’t miss anything. Once in a while, in spite of our best efforts, an error would creep through. Humiliated, I’d beat myself up for this one stupid error and swear it would never happen again. 

As time went on, I learned that beta readers were an amazing asset. Not only were they excellent at finding and spotting typos, but if you found talented readers or writers with a knack for literary insight (like my beta readers!), they would point out inconsistencies in a scene or even mention when they thought a character went beyond their natural boundaries. My beta readers have helped my books become the best they can be, and I love them. ;o)

Over the years I’ve developed friendships with writers and readers, and I’d offer them the job of beta reading my manuscripts before I submitted the book to my publisher. It worked out very well, and I always felt better when they’d read through my books. On average, I have 10-12 people read the manuscript before I consider it “close to done.”

Of those twenty-two books, I’ve published fifteen through a traditional small press since 2007, and have recently moved on to self publish (through Kindle Select) seven more that were waiting in the publishing queue in the past year. Polishing and proofing all of these manuscripts was a real challenge, and my beta readers did me proud. But believe it or not – they didn’t catch all the typos.

I have discovered there is one more essential step to proofing one’s manuscript: reading it aloud.

Yes, it’s something you can do yourself. It might take you a whole weekend to get through it. But it’s worth the effort. Better yet, if you have a narrator who is recording the audio book version, this is where the final catches will be found. 

I have found that my best narrators (actors, really, with great attention to detail) have consistently isolated a couple of leftover “extra or missing letters/words” which are the hardest to find. Sure, with a real typo, like a misspelled word, MS Word underlines it for you in red. Those aren’t too hard to find. It’s harder when you have an extra preposition in a sentence, or a misused word like “here” instead of “hear.” MS Word doesn’t often catch those mistakes.

I find these errors creep in at the end of a work in progress, when I’ve gone through to beef up a sentence or make changes in general. Then I don’t always “cut” fully or “paste” fully and that’s my downfall! Creating typos because you’re fixing another typo is annoying, but pretty common.

Does that happen to you?

Here’s my advice on how to produce a typo-free book.

1) When creating your book, try to find a writer or reader friend who will swap chapters with you as you write it. You read their stuff, they read yours. You help them, they help you. It’s all good. They can help you cull out that first crop of errors, right off the bat.

2) When you’re done writing the book, go through it until you feel you are satisfied. This may take multiple read-throughs. It all depends on how careful you were the first time around when creating the story.

Even with this painstaking approach, once in a while something slips through. It’s disappointing if it happens, but it’s probably God’s way of keeping us humble. ;o)

Let me know what you think in the comments below. And remember, if you love to write, write like the wind!