Mridu Khullar

When a query comes back rejected, what do you do? Cry? Yeah, me too. But what do you do after that? Jot down a quick note in your submission tracker, place the e-mail in a special “Rejected” folder and hope that your luck will be better next time?

How about increasing the circulation?

No, not your dead brain cells, silly. I mean the query. Whenever something comes back to me rejected, I copy the whole query to a new e-mail message, hunt out another market where that article could be placed, edit a bit if required, fill in the e-mail address and send it off. Immediately. How much time did that take? Five minutes? Ten maybe?

I’ll then take a close look at the market it came from. If it’s a market I’m particularly interested in, I’ll probably have a couple of ideas lying around for it already. If not, I’ll browse through the magazine’s website, check out back issues or do whatever I need to, in order to find another idea that would fit into that magazine. Another query is written quickly and sent off to the assigning editor with a note saying, “I’m sorry you couldn’t use that idea. Here’s another one that I think would better fit your needs.”

That’s two queries sent out for each rejection. Not only am I making sure that all my ideas stay in rotation but that I’m regularly pitching to magazines I want to break in to as well. And I just sent two queries. That’s a day’s worth of work that I just ticked off my schedule.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 20th, 2006 at 4:31 pm and is filed under Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.