Kelly McCullough weighs in on his opinion of rejections, so I thought I’d share his thoughts from the SFNovelists blogroll.
Seems like McCullough has a similar approach. We both have spreadsheets to keep track of submissions and rejections, and both of our numbers are in the hundreds. I would take a moment to highly recommend keeping track of who you query and submit to this way, because not only does it help you not send in duplicate queries to the same agent or editor, but it also provides you with an ongoing and growing list of agencies that you can send your next project to, without having to do all that hunting and researching all over again.
McCullough does make one very good point. Avoid rejectomancy. This is the addictive and rather depressing habit of scrutinizing a form rejection letter in the hopes that the agent has somehow hidden a code that tells you exactly what to change or do better to ensure an acceptance next time. Ain’t gonna happen. Agents use form letters because their business is so subjective that they’d need at least a hundred variations of it if they wanted to provide explanations for why they rejected each author’s project. (And one of them would be: “Haven’t had my coffee yet.”)
If you go back to the snowball analogy, that’d be like getting smacked in the face with slush, then scooping it up and trying to study the dirt-to-snow ratio that composed the snowball to try and figure out why your opponent threw it your way. Not gonna be all that helpful, and will only distract you as further missiles sail your way.
So, go read the rest of his thoughts. Then keep on fighting.
I see that smile.