Slushpile Memories: How NOT to Get Rejected (Million Dollar Writing Series)

By Kevin J. Anderson and Kevin Anderson

Avoid the mistakes that keep your manuscript unread and unpublished, from the New York Times–bestselling author.
 
“Dear Author, Your story does not meet our needs at this time . . .”

You know your story is good, but still it was rejected. Over and over again. What are you doing wrong? Are the odds against you? How can an author climb to the top of a pile of competing manuscripts and actually catch an editor’s attention?

By avoiding the common pitfalls and mistakes detailed in this book, you can significantly increase your manuscript’s chances of making it out of the slush pile, and start turning those rejections into acceptances—and contracts.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Aug 26, 2021
• ISBN: 9781680572971

Kevin J. Anderson

Kevin J. Anderson has written dozens of national bestsellers and has been nominated for the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, the Bram Stoker Award, and the SFX Readers' Choice Award. His critically acclaimed original novels include the ambitious space opera series The Saga of Seven Suns, including The Dark Between the Stars, as well as the Wake the Dragon epic fantasy trilogy, and the Terra Incognita fantasy epic with its two accompanying rock CDs. He also set the Guinness-certified world record for the largest single-author book signing, and was recently inducted into the Colorado Authors’ Hall of Fame.

Book preview

Introduction

I am no stranger to rejection—and I don’t just mean my various attempts to get a date for prom in high school. I vividly remember the day I got my first rejection slip for a story I had submitted to a magazine.

I was twelve years old.

I’d always wanted to be a writer, and I spent every second of free time in my bedroom at an electric typewriter, pounding out drafts of a science fiction novel I’d been writing since third grade. As a Christmas present one year, my parents got me a subscription to Writer’s Digest magazine, and I learned all about manuscript format, markets, and the submission process. I bought a copy of Writer’s Market, a big fat directory of magazine markets and their submission guidelines.

As a freshman in high school, I wrote a short story for history class about young twin boys trying to survive the Black Death in the 14th Century. I thought it was pretty good, and it got an A in history class, so I screwed up my courage, typed a clean copy, and mailed it to Boys’ Life magazine, which seemed the appropriate market. I included a stamped, self-addressed return envelope, added a polite cover letter, and dropped it in the mailbox with a silent prayer. Then I waited … nearly three months.

I went to the mailbox every day, hoping and hoping, until finally the manila envelope came back. My heart fell. I tore open the envelope. Clipped to the front of the manuscript was a printed form rejection slip: Dear Author, We regret that your story does not meet our needs at this time. Please try again. Cold and generic.

I was devastated. All that work, all that waiting—for nothing more than a rejection!

It was the first of many.

Undaunted, I resolved to try again and again—not just with the Black Death story, but with new stories. I would polish each one, make myself better, improve my writing. I vowed that I would get something published.

I combed through the Writer’s Market, found magazines that might be appropriate for my stories. I developed an index-card recordkeeping system in a recipe box to keep track of where I had submitted my stories and which markets had rejected them.

I collected 80 rejection slips before I got my first acceptance—a one-page flash-fiction story that was published in a Wisconsin high school writings magazine. I received no pay, only a couple of contributor copies. I was a junior in high school.

A year later I finally sold a short story for pay—$12.50—to a small press magazine, Space and Time. I was thrilled! I could finally say I had been paid for my fiction.

Seeing the dollar amount, my parents were not overly impressed. It didn’t come close to reimbursing even the postage I had invested so far. But it was a start.

I kept collecting rejection slips, hundreds and hundreds of them. Now, in retrospect, I can see that most of those early works weren’t worthy of publication anyway. But my writing, plotting, characters, and descriptions improved. Practice makes perfect. I studied writing. I read voraciously. I tried to get better and better and better. Those form rejection slips were frequently replaced with personal letters, words of encouragement, suggestions for improvement.

I came close, so close … but not quite.

When I was a senior in high school, age seventeen, I received a particularly encouraging, detailed letter from Dr. Stanley Schmidt, the editor of Analog magazine—the holy grail for science fiction writers.

October 15, 1979

Dear Mr. Anderson:

Thank you for letting me see UPON THE WINDS. It had an intriguingly imaginative idea behind it, and I think the telling shows a good deal of potential. Your ability to visualize an exotic setting, and enable the reader to do so too, is quite good. However, your skills do need some honing (which is hardly surprising); a good deal of