The Rejection Reversal with Michael Bracken
The accomplished and prolific Michael Bracken reached out to me recently to share a type of publisher response he’d never received before. If Michael Bracken, award-winning author of over 1,200 short stories and several novels, has never seen it, it’s probably pretty unique, right? Anyway, Michael gave me permission to blog about this rare occurrence, so let’s take a look at the letter he received.
Dear Michael,
Re: [story title]
We reluctantly rejected your story because we couldn’t find a place for it; however we liked it very much indeed, and have now created a place for this story in [our next issue], if it’s still available. Please let us know if that suits you.
Sincerely,
[editor’s name]
[publication name]
Michael said he received a rejection from this publisher about six weeks before he received the letter above, which is essentially an acceptance. Pretty cool, huh? Kind of a rejection reversal. If you follow my blog, you’ve heard me go on and on about how editors reject good stories for reasons that have nothing to do with the quality of the story or the writing. This is a sterling example. Michael’s story was originally rejected not because the editors didn’t like it, not because it wasn’t a good story, but simply because it wasn’t a good fit for the issue they were putting together. That story obviously resonated with the editors, so they made room for it in their next issue, reached out to Michael, and he’ll add this one to his impressive list of short story publications.
I’m not gonna hold my breath that any of my recent rejections will suddenly turn into acceptances, but it’s inspiring to know these things happen, and that good stories do eventually find a home–sometimes with the same markets that rejected them! 🙂
Michael Bracken is the author of several books and more than 1,200 short stories. Learn more at www.CrimeFictionWriter.com and follow his blog at CrimeFictionWriter.blogspot.com.
4 Comments on “The Rejection Reversal with Michael Bracken”
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Had Bracken not submitted this story elsewhere in the interim? I try to resubmit within a matter of days of a rejection. Maybe such a prolific short story author feels differently.
Jason, I had. The story had been out and back twice during the six week lag between this publication’s rejection and then acceptance of it.
Same thing happened once in our publication. I couldn’t get a story out of my head that we’d rejected almost a year before, so we wrote to see if it was still available. Fortunately, it was.
We have to reject great stories all the time because there are just too many excellent submissions and we can only pick 6 each month. Sometimes it (almost!) comes down to a roll of the dice.
This is so great!