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Why Do Editors Reject Stories and Poems?

I took last week off from writing a blog because I was busy with stuff for both After Happy Hour and Scribble House—things like getting ready for the return of the Send It! group next week and wrapping up the Issue 27 reading period, but mostly finishing up a workshop I did yesterday through Chill Subs about common mistakes made by submitters. Doing that has made me think a bit more deeply than I usually do about why we reject work for After Happy Hour.

People have asked me this question before, of course, mostly during events like AWP or other conferences when I'm at the AHH table wearing my Managing Editor hat. I feel like they're usually a bit annoyed by my answer, because the truth is, the best way to get an acceptance from us is the same generic advice you get from every journal: Send us your best, read what we publish, follow our guidelines. And, yes, this is stuff every writer has heard before. But there's also a reason editors keep saying it over and over again: Almost everything that we reject at After Happy Hour, it's because the writer didn’t do one (or more) of those things.

I took some notes on why I rejected things at AHH this past reading period. In a big-picture category sense, my “no”s broke down like so:

Interpreting that a bit: “process errors” are those simple-to-fix mistakes that writers make during the actual process of sending us their work. In our case, these are pretty much all folks who attach the wrong file to their submission—there are other mistakes writers make during this process, like sending their stuff using the wrong form, but these rarely result directly in a rejection. The only time they do is when the form is for something with a limited call, like during our recent reprints-only issue—we had a few submitters send unpublished work for this call, and rejected it out of hand because it's simply not what we were reading.

Guideline errors is fairly self-explanatory: Rejections that could be avoided if the writer follows our guidelines. I think the main thing writers need to remember here is that each journal has their own specific things they want to see. Yes, there are some things that are likely going to be true everywhere, but there's always an exception—for instance, while you'd be right to double-space prose 99% of the time, you'll find those rare journals that ask for it single-spaced. The point is, it's always worth taking the time to find and read each journal's guidelines before you send work to them, but that's usually more a matter of getting in the habit than writers not understanding what they're supposed to do.

With the other two—sending your best and reading what we publish—they are a bit more vague, and I can see how writers who are fairly new to the process of submitting work might not completely understand what journals mean when they say this, or why they're saying it in the first place. So here's a bit of a deeper dive of what After Happy Hour means, at least, which may not be exactly the same as what you'd hear from every publisher but should hopefully at least provide a bit of insight and context to help writers get their work published.

What publishers mean when they say “Send us your best work.”

I'll admit, publishers could phrase this in a better way—”best” is a highly subjective term, which does make it a bit useless. I can think of plenty of times in the past when I've genuinely thought I was sending a journal my best, not realizing the piece still needed more work until after it got rejected and I re-read it. I tend to give submitters the benefit of the doubt on this point when we get submissions that aren't what I would consider to be publishable. I don't assume the writer is sending us unfinished work on purpose—they likely thought the piece was ready when they hit submit. I just don't happen to agree with that assessment.

Now, within this broad category there are a lot of gradations, so what editors actually mean when they say “not ready to publish” could be a few different things. It could mean:

...the pieces that fall into those last two categories are the ones that are the most painful to reject as an editor. Sometimes, we love the core elements of the piece, but it just needs too much work at the sentence level for us to publish it.

And that's really what it comes down to when we say “not ready to publish”—it means that the piece still needs more substantial editing than the folks who run the magazine are able or willing to invest into it. Usually this comes down to the “able” rather than the “willing” part of that.

I think some submitters who haven't seen the other side of the process think that all literary publishers have massive teams of people. This is often not the case. University-run journals often have entire teams of slush readers at their disposal in the form of students (though, ironically, they're often the slowest to reply to submissions, and often no more likely to accept work that needs substantial editing). There are other larger, well-known publications that may have full teams, some of whom might actually get paid for their efforts. Spots like the Paris Review or the New Yorker, for instance, probably do have the hands available to undertake significant back and forth edits, but those are the same markets that get thousands of submissions a year and don't really need to work with something that isn't ready, so you're really back to square one as a writer.

For the rest of the publishers out there, their teams look a lot like After Happy Hour's: a handful of people who love words enough to volunteer arguably excessive amounts of their time reading through unsolicited submissions, communicating with authors, and doing all the other work required to put each issue into production. If we really, really love something that isn't quite ready, then we'll work with the author to get it there. But, realistically, we don't really have time for this even when we do it, and we definitely don't have time to do it for more than one piece in a given reading period.

I will say there's no one type of editing or writing problem that leads to a “no”—when I kept track of the issues I saw during the most recent reading period, it was fairly balanced across a few of those issues I already mentioned above:

So the next question is: how do you get your piece publication ready? There's no easy answer for that one, either, but it comes down to lots and lots of editing. It definitely helps to get some outside eyes on it, too. That doesn't need to mean paying someone, and in fact I wouldn't say you should ever feel like you're required to hire a professional editor for short fiction unless you're aspiring toward those Paris Reviews of the world. It is definitely a smart move to get some kind of feedback from other writers, though, whether that's an in-person critique group or posting it to an online feedback site. Just a word of warning on that latter option: Make sure you're using a site where only other members can see the piece, to avoid having it accidentally be considered “previously published” when you're trying to send it out to places.

Why should you read a journal before sending to it?

On that graph earlier in the post, there's a fairly sizable chunk labeled “Market Fit”. These are submissions that are fairly well-written, and I could see getting published somewhere—and might have even enjoyed reading it, even as I know it's definitely not something we're going to publish.

On the poetry side, this often comes down to a matter of form and structure. The After Happy Hour crew across the board isn't a huge fan of rhyming poetry, and will rarely publish it even when it's well-done. We also aren't likely to publish any blackout or erasure poetry, and our poetry editor specifically gets annoyed by two-line stanzas. We don't reject these out of hand, of course, but we get a whole lot and only take a small percentage of them.

On the prose side, this usually comes down to the type of tension or conflict in a piece. For realistic genres, we look for either high stakes, high emotion, or humor—a quiet story about a breakup isn't likely to catch our eye unless it's told in a really unique way. That “unless” part is why we don't just say “no breakup stories” out of hand. We have published them, and likely will in the future, but it needs to be well-written and to do something new with the well-known tropes. The only way you'd know that, as a submitter, is to read the relationship stories we've published in the past.

We're more open to pieces with a quiet, low-stakes plot if they're set in a slant reality or completely made-up world, but we still want work that has strong forward momentum and compelling characters. An intriguing world or plot set-up isn't enough. There's one journal I like whose guidelines say they don't want “HAITE” stories, which stands for “Here's an idea, the end”, and I've thought about stealing this language for AHH's guidelines because we get a decent amount of these, too—speculative stories that have a solid concept but haven't yet fully turned that concept into a story.

These are all fairly subtle distinctions, which is why we don't call them out in our guidelines. We don't want to be too prescriptive to the point we stop someone from sending us a piece we'd actually love. But that does mean, to get a true sense of what fits with us, you probably first need to do a bit of research into what we've published before. This is why reading a journal before submitting to them is a smart idea. You get a sense for how to match the style, tone, and content they gravitate toward, and that increases your odds of getting a “yes”.

Any time I write a post like this I feel the need to add at the end that writing is subjective, and every editor approaches the publishing process in their own unique way. But hopefully this sheds some insight on how editors think about the submissions they receive and what leads our team, at least, to turn something down.

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