Don’t be tossed to and fro by every editor
Filed under Market Report, Tips & Tools on March 15, 2010
Tagged: editors, rejections, Relvan's Rescue, revisions, submissions
I received another personalized rejection from the editor of Beneath Ceaseless Skies for “Relvan’s Rescue” (return time: ~5 weeks). That’s 3-in-a-row, if you’re keeping count, though, from what I hear on the Internets, Andrew makes an effort to give feedback on submissions.
It’s encouraging–on one hand–not to be receiving form rejections. On the other hand, personalized rejections can serve as bait that lures unsuspecting writers into the nasty trap of perpetual revisions. Here are some rules I follow to help determine whether comments from an editor warrant a revision.
Follow the trends
Every editor has their own tastes and preferences. Revising your story based on one person’s input won’t necessarily make it more palatable to the next, and unless the original editor invited back a revision, the market you heard back from should now be considered closed for that story.
If more than one person is seeing the same thing, however, it’s probably something that should be addressed by a revision. The two comments I received about the pace at the beginning of “Relvan’s Rescue” raised a red flag with me, and resulted in some tweaking.
Reassess the market
Though I usually do my homework beforehand, sometimes I submit to a market I consider a longshot. If I happen to get a personalized rejection back, I view the editor’s comments in light of what they tend to publish. Sometimes, you don’t learn about obstacles to a particular market until you get rejected, like I did when Heroic Fantasy Quarterly told me that pirate-related stories were a hard sell.
Stay true to the story
“Relvan’s Rescue” is an adventure fantasy in the sword-and-sorcery tradition, about a mercenary captain who escorts a client across pirate-invested waters, is betrayed, and must rescue them from the clutches of an evil villain. Sure, there are undertones of lost love rekindled and the threat of a larger war looming in the background, but those themes are not the focus of the story. They may be more interesting to an editor than the main plot, however.
I’m not interested in radically altering the story to accommodate that interest. I want to sell the story I wrote. If someone wants to commission me to write the latter, I’m all for that, too.
It’s important as a writer to be open to criticism, but it is just as important to apply a filter to that criticism if you don’t want to spend more time revising than submitting. The above rules are my filters. Share yours in the comments.
