Episode 012 | Rejection Rates

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“I love my rejection slips. They show me I try.” – Sylvia Plath



If you want to be a writer, you want to be rejected. That’s all there is to it. To say that you don’t want rejection is like someone saying that they want to play football without ever being tackled. Or someone saying they want to play baseball, but only if they hit every pitch, every time (and preferably over the fence).



So that’s not gonna happen.



In baseball, the absolute best hitters of all time miss it about twice as much as they hit it. Ty Cobb still holds the top spot, and he failed to hit the ball about 63 times for every 100 he went to bat. (Bear in mind, every other major league baseball player who has ever played has failed even more than that.)



But, remember, sometimes they hit it. And it’s spectacular!



In the September 2016 issue of The Writer magazine, Keysha Whitaker took a look at acceptance and rejection rates in an article entitled, “The Science of Submission.” In addition to tracking her own submissions over the course of several years, she interviewed prolific writers and checked in with Duotrope. The lowest acceptance rate she encountered was 2% and the highest was 22.5%. Duotrope reported that the writers who tracked submissions through them averaged around 5% acceptance rates in a given year.



Those Ty Cobb numbers are looking pretty good right about now, amIright? Only failing two-thirds of the time looks pretty good when you’re looking at getting a “no” 95 times out of 100 on average.



But don’t get demoralized quite yet. For starters. bear in mind that these are averages. Focus instead on the wisdom offered by the Duotrope spokesman quoted in Whitaker’s article:



“We’ve seen time and time again that dedication pays off. From what we see, the authors who are most successful are the ones who just keep submitting no matter what and keep track of all those submissions.”



Resilience generates its own magic. There’s an old saying that a professional writer is just an amateur who never quit. Hang in there. And when you get a little glum about it all, spend some time on some of the links below and remind yourself that everyone gets tackled. Everyone swings and misses. Even the greats.



* Since it was published almost six decades ago, To Kill a Mockingbird has consistently polled as the most beloved book in the English language (occasionally edged out only by The Bible). While you keep that in mind, read this and remember that it wasn...