One Year of Rejectomancy & Strange Search Terms
Rejectomancy has been up and running for over a year, and I’d like to offer a big thank you to those who have followed the blog here and on Facebook and Twitter. Your tolerance for my blathering borders on the supernatural, and I hope you’ve taken something useful away from all my rejections and dubious writing advice.
Looking back over the last year, one thing I find interesting is what exactly brings people to the blog. Luckily, WordPress saves all the terms put into various search engines that bring people to Rejectomancy. Most of these are what you’d expect: folks searching for info about rejections letters or even searching on my name or rejectomancy itself. But there are a few head-scratchers among all those search terms, so I thought I’d share four of the more interesting ones with you. As with most things on the Internet, these are 75% pornographic.
1) “rejected penthouse letters”
I don’t know about you, but I would kill to get my hands on some of those rejection letters. I can only hope they would be long personal rejections that are overly clinical about the magazine’s particular subject matter. The person who ended up on my very unsexy blog must have been really disappointed.
2) “summon succubus without letter”
Well, you can summon a succubus without a letter, but I wouldn’t recommend it. Demons require at least one formal reference from each summoner and generally eat those without one.
3) “where can i get free wet dream stories”
Uh, not here. Again, I can only imagine the WTF moment this person had when they arrived at my blog.
4) “lunar monkey madness:the legend of korra xxx”
I had to Google The Legend of Korra. It’s an animated fantasy show on Nickelodeon. It does not feature lunar monkeys or deal with the subject of literary rejection as far as I know. I’m pretty sure it’s not rated XXX either.
I hope you’ve enjoyed the blog thus far, and if you have, click the ol’ follow button (if you haven’t already). And if you have any suggestions for future posts, please tell me about it in the comments.
8 Comments on “One Year of Rejectomancy & Strange Search Terms”
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Aeryn Rudel's Rejectomancy 
Congrats on your anniversary! For some reason, I thought you’d been blogging longer.
What to write about… Lunar monkey meets succubus? 😉
Nope, I’m a relative blog newbie. 🙂
Ok, I can sort of see it with the other search terms, but how in the world does #3 lead to your blog?
Your guess is as good as mine.
Happy anniversary, Rejectomancy!
Though I’ve never submitted a letter to Penthouse Letters, I have submitted a few short stories. I even had one published several years ago, and what they paid for it remains the second-highest payment I’ve ever received for a short story. (I also have several rejections from them from when I attempted to duplicate my fluke sale.)
And with that, search engines now have a valid reason to pair your blog with a “Penthouse Letters” search.
May you be discovered by many other interesting search queries!
Yeah, I’ve heard men’s magazines like Penthouse pay very, very well. Stephen King got his start in the pages of mags like Gallery, Adam, and Cavalier, all of which I believe are long gone.
Was the story you sold to Penthouse erotica? Or will/did they take other types of fiction?
And thanks for linking Rejectomancy and Penthouse forever more. 😉
The story I sold Penthouse Letters was more a story with erotic content than true erotica. Essentially, what I mean is that the erotic content could have been made much less graphic and the story might have sold to a different market. Heck, I sold a great many stories to men’s magazines back in the day, and some of them have sold as reprints with the erotic content revised from R+ to PG-13 or even PG.
Erotic fiction can be thought of as a continuum. At one end is work that might be labeled pornographic. Remove the sex from the story and there’s nothing left but a byline (which is probably a pseudonym). At the opposite end is erotica, where removal of the sex damages the story, but it still retains the key elements of plot, characterization, etc.
Somewhere in the middle is fiction with erotic content, where the graphic level of the sexual content is determined more by the market than the story. (Imagine any number of classic private eye stories with a femme fatale walking into the P.I.’s office. You know the P.I. and his client are going to have sex. If you close the bedroom door, the story sells to a conventional mystery magazine. Leave the bedroom door open and the story sells to a men’s magazine. The story itself doesn’t change.)