Well, well, well, what do we have here? Is this someone writing about the act of writing itself?? How self-absorbed. How pretentious. How arrogant. Yes, it is all of those things, and more! But writing helps me think, and I’d like to get at least one short story published this year, so my goal is also to receive at least 50 rejections this year! I’m writing this series to keep myself accountable to my goal and think through the process.
But before I get started, a disclaimer: To protect the privacy of publications involved in this process, I will not mention specific stories, people, or publications by name in this series. You won’t know what story I’m talking about, you won’t know what publication I sent a story to, and you won’t know any identifying information on individuals (aside from myself) involved in my journey.
Another disclaimer: I typically write these journal-entry-style blog articles in a casual way and don’t proofread them. Please do not use this as a reflection or indication of what my proofread, edited, edited again, and polished works of creative fiction. Thank you.
Okay, away we go…
It’s March already! Ahh! I wanted to start this series back in January but it flew by. Then February came and when so fast I thought it was a dream. Anyway, here it is. I want to kick this off with a brief FAQ about submitting stories to publications.
How do I know when a story is good enough to submit to publications?
I don’t. That’s a long conversation about the writing process itself. I may write about my writing process itself someday, but that’s NOT what this series is about. This is about submitting completed works to be published.
How do I find and log submissions?
After I’ve gotten a story to a point where I think it’s ready to submit somewhere, I go to the Submission Grinder: https://thegrinder.diabolicalplots.com
This is a site that aggregates various open submissions and gives you tools to track and log the state of your submissions. It’s a fantastic resources for any writer — fiction or nonfiction, poem or narrative, short story or novel — to search for, research, and collect data on writing submissions.
Why do stories get rejected?
There are any number of reasons a publication will reject a story:
- The publisher spent all their budget before getting to me in the queue
- My story was too similar to one already bought
- There were some elements of my story that conflicted with the brand/vibe of the publication
- Many other nuanced reasons not worth listing
Publishers almost never explain their reasoning for why a story is rejected — they just don’t have the resources to spend time doing that.
What can I do to make sure my story is selected?
I can never truly guarantee that your story will be purchsed by a publication. In fact, stories are more likely to get rejected than selected. A lot of writers have to make a hundred or more submissions annually to get one story sold, and they still might not get a sale that year. The market is that competitive.
Some of reasons for rejection are within my control:
- Ensuring that I’m submitting a completed work (it’s been edited a few times)
- Formatting my work based on the publisher’s posted submission guidelines (typically modern manuscript format for fiction stories)
- Submitting a story which thematically matches the call of the publication (i.e. Submitting a ghost story to the publisher looking for ghost stories)
- Submitting a story that meets all content guidelines (word count, appropriate languaged used, etc)
But one thing is completely outside of my control:
- A publisher’s decision to buy my story
That’s it for the FAQ, really just a way to provide anyone reading this with context about the process. Most of my future articles in this series will be much shorter, more like what I’ve written below:
My first rejection of 2026 was so fast!
Truth be told, since I’m so behind on my goal already, I’ve only made two submissions this year. I received this rejection a day after its submission. That leads me to believe that they likely didn’t even read my story. They might have read it! But it’s rare for a publication to be able to turn around a story so quickly. This typically means my story was screened out or auto-rejected.
Why do you think your story got rejected?
I actually think I messed up with the formatting on this, which is a pretty rookie mistake to make. I was messing around in Scrivener and couldn’t get the formatting the way it needed to be, so I ‘manually’ formatted the RTF file to match the manuscrpit formatting the publisher asked for, and I think I botched it somehow.
I’ve now figured out how to compile my submission in the proper formatting using Scrivener, so I won’t make this mistake with future submissions! (Yay!)
But, like with most rejections, I’ll never truly know why they turned it down.
What’s next?
I’ve already submitted the rejected story to another publication and will await a verdict.
I’m also trying to polish the first two chapters of a book to submit to a contest by the end of the month. (Wish me luck!)
There are a few short stories that I’m working to complete, the idea is to have at least ten short stories finished by the end of this year that will have been sent out to publishers a few times by end of year. Let’s see how it pans out!
Mutant Pizza 