Anyone else out there breathing a sigh of relief when a standard submission response hits the inbox?

It’s so good to get a rejection.

• No more need to steady yourself for the kind of comprehensively critical appraisal beta-readers tend to provide. You look better without that fake frozen grin, and you know it.
• Bye bye style sales pitch, welcome back limitation awareness. You’d love your stuff to read as smoothly as the books you adore and admire, but oh well…
• No opportunity to declare your plot the best idea since the invention of croissants or jollof rice (or sliced bread, if you insist).  “Holes? That’s nothing but plenty of opportunities to use your imagination!” Never a fine moment…
• No need to get all defensive about your cast. This is 2018. Every civilised person is fine with non-white, non-straight characters frolicking around in non-OECD  locations. Of course they are. Yes. I insist. This can’t be the reason for the rejection. Or can it? No, impossible. Not in 2018. That would be a really bad sign. No!

Rejections are great. They spare you a lot of tension.

But there can be too much of a good thing, even of stress avoidance.

Look at this submission query for a 70 k words novel to a publisher requiring a minimum of 80k for this format, and the corresponding rejection:

Submission of „Guilty until proven“ (Science Fiction)

Dear all,

thanks for a submission policy providing a newbie with a chance to shine, or make a fool of myself.

„Guilty until proven“ is an imminent future tale taking place in rural France, Lagos (Nigeria), Djibouti, Agadir (Morocco) and a virtual reality used for penitentiary purposes.

Depending on how you look at the cast, it’s either boringly familiar, as in plenty of well educated English speakers, or can be considered pretty diverse, as far as biographies, lifestyles, gender, race and sexual orientation are concerned.

There’s quite a lot happening, including some romance and occasional mentions of violent events, but this material would be hard to turn into an action or adult movie, too many thoughts and ambivalent emotions.

As you will have noticed by now, the style is on the peculiar side, thanks to my very fluent third language English polished over twenty years of scientific writing. No idea if this bug can be declared a feature, as in ‚refreshingly unorthodox‘, ‚outside the native speaker box‘ or even ‚as addictive as junk food‘, as one of my beta readers once kindly put it.

Last not least: Apologies for falling short of your 80,000 words threshold. „Guilty until proven“ was already nearing completion when I came across your call for submissions and I’m lousy at padding.

Thanks a lot for any feedback you might be willing to provide,

Kind regards,

Troim

Pretty badly written. Itch to splice some of those long sentences. Typical evening me deciding to give conventional submission a quick try, following a prompt in the fediverse, before going my usual Smashwords. I recall the rationale sounding roughly like this:

“They don’t require the agent I don’t have. Nothing to lose but a little time. Not even that, if I submit for copyright protection in parallel (which of course I did, tend to hedge my bets).”

Nothing to lose? Well, now look at this rejection:

Very professionally courteous, reads real nice.

Most probably their standard answer, however hopeless or promising the material. My output is bound to be on the drop-it side. I’m ultra niche, in many ways. Let’s just forget the episode.

Or is this supposed to be an encouragement? It’s definitely longer than the others. But in the age of copy-and-paste, that doesn’t mean anything. Well aware of how I proceed in my day job. Save as new version, copy a bit here, rephrase a bit there. This associate editor is a fellow professional, bound to proceed in exactly the same way. Time to move on.

Rejections are great, mostly.

Anyone out there who recognises the wording and can please confirm it’s a certain publishers standard rejection? Please?