The Daily NO – Halloween Special

Today on The Daily NO, we’re celebrating Halloween by looking at all the rejections I’ve received on the spookiest day of the year. However, to my shock and surprise, in over 12 years and nearly 1,000 submissions, I have received exactly ONE rejection on October 31st. The only reason I can come up with for this bizarre anomaly is that I submit to a lot of horror markets, and, well, it makes sense that horror editors are not working on horror’s holiday. 🙂

Anyway, let’s take a look at my Halloween rejection.

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Halloween Rejection

• Story: “Things That Grow”
• Length: Flash Fiction
• Genre: Horror
• Publisher: Cemetery Gates
• Publisher Tier: Pro
• Submitted: 8/27/20
• Rejected: 10/31/20
• Type: Personal rejection

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Hey Aeryn,

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As personal rejections go, this one is short and to the point. It’s almost like a form letter in its brevity, which is fine with me. It simply says they liked the story, but it didn’t make the cut. This was for an anthology called Campfire Macabre, so I’m sure spots were limited. There’s no feedback here, so it’s important not to read into a rejection like this. They could have passed on it for a dozen reasons. They might have accepted another story with a similar theme, they might have needed something longer or shorter to fill out the anthology, or, hell, they might have just liked another story a little better.

This rejection did tell me I had a good story on my hands. This was the fourth personal or close-but-no-cigar rejection “Things That Grow” received, and I sold it on its next submission to The Flame Tree Fiction Newsletter. The takeaway here is if your story is getting rejections like this, it’s probably not a matter of quality; it’s more about putting that story in front of the right editor.

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