My favorite rejection came to me in the form of an email.
There is this publisher, that deals with certain copyrighted characters. It is my goal to become one of their staff writters, because I love these characters so much. Unfortunatly, this publisher is in Denmark and the stories are published in Danish, than republished about 6 months later in French and German, and than finally about 2 years after that America sees the English reprints. Anyways, if you want to write these stories, you have to send the scripts to the Danish publisher, because they hold the copyright to the characters.
After about 4 months of endless searching, I finally traced their website. I had been looking for their site by their English name, but as it turned out their original Danish name was completely differant, and that was the name they used on their site. I had contacted the publisher (who’s website was not in English, so I had no idea if they could read my email, since I only know English) via what I guessed must have been the email link. My email was one sentance long and said quite simply, that I was interested in writing for their series, and was seeking writer’s guidelines. I had no idea who I was sending the email to, cause I could not read the website.
Low and behold, later that same week, I got an email, back from… OMG!… the editor in chief! (who’s rather famous in the cult circle for these characters). She told me to watch my mail for more information.
It took 2 months for the post office to snail mail, a HUGE submissions package to me, which not only included the guidelines it also included sample scripts to use as guidelines for formating. TONS of legal documents and contracts that I had to sing and send back, before I could send any scripts in, because they did not accept unsolicited scripts, so I first had to get these contracts aproved.
Well, in the end, long story short, I sent them 8 one paragraph plot ideas, 1 sample chapter synopsis from one of the 8, and the first five pages from another of the 8. And than I waited 8 months.
After 8 month of waiting I got an email from a guy who says the EC sent my stuff to him. He said he had it sitting on his desk as he typed. He glorified the good points. Pointed out the bad points. He recommended some books on editing. And than finished with saying that while he loved my ideas, he didn’t think that my actual style fit the company standards, and said he had to reject my work at this time. He closed by saying he looked forward to keeping in contact with me, and told me to send more of my work in, in the future.
WOW! What a great rejection! This guy actually read what I had sent in, and took the time to tell me what he liked about it and what he didn’t like about it. How often do you see an editor doing that? Usually all you get is a pre-printed postcard with a check mark next to the box “rejected”.
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Copper Cockeral
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Copper Cockeral
Publishing Your NaNo Novel?
Do You and I Read the Same Books?
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