The Daily NO – Rejection #1

Next up on The Daily No, we’re traveling all the way back to the beginning, to the first rejection I received once I started tracking my submissions on Duotrope. Imagine, if you will, a warm spring day in Seattle, circa 2012. A baby writer waits excitedly to hear back about the perfect, wonderful story he’s submitted to a pro market that is sure to be accepted and published (it’s perfect and wonderful, remember?) only to have his hopes and dreams cruelly dashed by the unfeeling juggernaut of the publishing industry. I know; dramatic, huh? 🙂

Let’s have a look.

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Rejection #1

• Story: “Feeding Time”
• Length: Flash Fiction (995 words)
• Genre: Horror
• Submitted: 4/16/12
• Rejected: 5/5/12
• Type: Standard Form
• Publisher: Daily Science Fiction
• Publisher Tier: Pro

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Aeryn,

Thank you for submitting your story, “Feeding Time”, to Daily Science Fiction. Unfortunately, we have decided not to publish it. To date, we have reviewed many strong stories that we did not take. Either the fit was wrong or we’d just taken tales with a similar theme or any of a half dozen other reasons.

Best success selling this story elsewhere.

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That, friends, is a sterling example of a standard form rejection from a pro market. It’s a boilerplate rejection, but a nice one, and it’s long enough that it doesn’t sound terse or brusque but not so long that it starts to feel patronizing. Like all good rejections, it gets the business out of the way first by telling you the fate of your story. Then it has a couple of lines about why it might not have been selected that are generally true. Although, in my case, the story just wasn’t good enough. I just didn’t have the experience to tell at the point. This form rejection gets an A from me.

Over the next ten years, before they went on indefinite hiatus in 2022, I sent twenty-three more submissions to DSF, all of which resulted in this exact same form letter. Look, folks, I’m a pretty good flash fiction writer, and I’ve cracked some really good markets with my flash, and I only say that because sometimes you run into a market that, for whatever reason, you and your work are just not a good fit for. That’s just how publishing works sometimes. I like to think I would have eventually cracked DSF, but I might not have, and that’s okay, too. Of the twenty-four stories I sent them, I went on to sell fourteen of them, some to other pro markets. The other ten, well, uh, see below.

All that said, I would like to apologize to the editors of DSF. I definitely sent them some stuff that was not ready for primetime in the early days of my submission efforts. “Feeding Time” was a great example of that, and they rightly and I might even say righteously rejected it. 🙂

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Thoughts on this rejection? Tell me about it in the comments.