34: The Rejected Quarterly
Interview with Editor Daniel Weiss, July 14, 2009
Play audio (approximately 30 minutes)
The topic of this installment of Periodical Radio is The Rejected Quarterly, a unique literary magazine. Quoting from their home page, the magazine accepts “Fiction that doesn’t fit anywhere else. To 8,000 words. All fiction submitted must be accompanied by at least 5 rejection slips (Xeroxes okay.) The Rejected Quarterly desires stories that are as unique as possible. We want unusual stories, but high quality writing and a story to tell and/or a coherent idea/ideas to express are the most important criteria. We will consider just about any type of story, but remember, we are looking for originality.” End quote <http://www.rejectedq.com/page2.html>. The magazine also includes poems about rejection, reproductions of rejection slips, and stories about the experience of being rejected.
My guest is co-founder and editor of The Rejected Quarterly, Daniel Weiss.
Steve: Dan, welcome to Periodical Radio.
Dan: Thank you, it’s great to be here.
Steve: Dan, in my brief introduction, I quoted some of the author’s guidelines from your home page to let our listeners know the basic concept of The Rejected Quarterly. But tell us more. Why did you launch the magazine, and what are its guiding principles?
Dan: Well I launched it--it was an idea in my head for a long time, actually. At one point I did a prototype in pen by hand, kind of as something to show friends. Then the motivation was being a writer myself, getting rejections, and the type of rejections I got. I kind of felt a sympathy for writers. What happened is, I had a few agents for novels, and I remember one particular novel of humorous speculative fiction. What happened is I’d get back these rejection slips forwarded by my agent from the publishers saying things like, “This is a really good story, it’s really funny, but there’s not much of a market for humorous speculative fiction right now.” I thought to myself, if they said the characters are not very developed, or the plot is too thin, that’s something I can work on. But if they say there’s not much of a market for it, there’s nothing I could do other than write for a particular market, which is not what I wanted to do. My view is that if I’m going to spend a long time writing, I want to write something I have some passion for. So my theory is that things are rejected often for ideas or reasons other than quality. And that’s the kind of rejections I was getting often. Not always, but often. So that’s why I launched the magazine, to give people who write good stories that don’t happen to sit anywhere a place to publish.
Steve: Just to clarify, this is a literary magazine. You don’t have anything to do with scholarly journal articles, research articles that are rejected by scholarly journals. That’s separate from what you do.
Dan: That’s different, yes. This is strictly for fiction, except for rejection related poetry, and we have a column, “The Art of Rejection” about literary rejection. But other than that it’s all fiction.
Steve: Do you alone make all the editorial decisions for The Rejected Quarterly?
Dan: Not alone. Jeff Ludecke is my co-editor. He usually reads all the stories as well as I, and we usually come to a decision together.
Steve: Now for the stories, they have to accompanied by five rejections, is that correct?
Dan: That’s correct.
Steve: Why five?
Dan: Well, it’s kind of an arbitrary number. We want to have some standards, because otherwise people can just say, “Oh, this has been rejected.” That’s not good enough. People have to include the slips. If you just get rejected once or twice, that could just be that magazine doesn’t have room at the time. But when you get five, you’ve proved that it’s going to be tough to place. Of course you can get twenty, but it becomes tough, and it becomes unwieldy to send in twenty. I can only print a representative number, anyway. I can’t print all five, we don’t have enough room. Five just seemed like a good number.
Steve: How often do you reject submissions? You don’t accept everything that comes in with five rejections, right?
Dan: No. Unfortunately all the time. Even in our magazine, only a small number of submissions get published. That’s been one of the enlightening and interesting things about being on the other side. I never imagined myself as an editor. I still consider myself a writer. I have to reject things, and I have to admit that one of the things I’ve found is that a lot of things do get rejected for quality issues. I get a lot of things that make me wonder why people send them out. We also get a lot of things that are just very well written, and you can’t understand why they weren’t published.
Steve: So speak now to budding writers. We hope here at the College of Saint Rose to have a lot of our own students listening to this program. For an aspiring writer, based on your experience, what would be some of the advice you would give them?
Dan: I would say use your own voice. Don’t be afraid of being different or unique. I don’t think it pays to try to cash in on any trends. People tend to want to follow that vampire stories are in, or historical fiction, or whatever it is. I don’t think you need to write for those areas. Use your own voice, don’t be afraid to be different. It’s okay and positive to stand out. Look over your work. Read it out loud. I think that’s a key. When you read out loud you can tell if the dialogue sounds natural. Once you’ve read it out loud and you’re happy with it, I think that’s the key.
Steve: What are some legitimate reasons for rejecting submissions? I mean more broadly, beyond the The Rejected Quarterly. What are some of the legitimate reasons why submissions are rejected? You mentioned a few, but could you expound on that a little bit?
Dan: From my experience, a lot of it is people not taking the time to really edit their work. It may seem great as a first draft, read over once. Expounding on the advice you asked me to give, put it aside for a little while, then read it again, at least a week or two later, maybe a little more. Sometimes people turn in stories to me with bad continuity. Things happen in the end that don’t follow what happened earlier. There’s often--I’m not talking necessarily for an English class--there’s grammar that just doesn’t work. You often have dialogue that doesn’t sound real at all. For me, those are the big issues. The story has to seem real, and for that to happen characters have to talk like they’re human beings, and you have to view them as individuals, not as mouthpieces for the author. For me that’s a big one. I see a lot of those kinds of stories.
Steve: What about really basic things like spelling and punctuation?
Dan: Once in a while. A lot of manuscripts have a misspelled word here or there or a little bit of punctuation. If it’s really bad obviously I’ll edit that. But every once in a while you’ll see someone who doesn’t have a command of it. It’s not that common, but right away you start thinking, “Why did this person send this in?” It should have been proofread. If the author doesn’t have those skills, then have someone else read it who does. Because that kind of a thing just stands out, it’s something that makes you . . . .the story would have to be very strong to get by that sort of thing. It just seems amateurish.
Steve: Let’s turn to the rejections themselves now, and the art, let’s say, of rejection. You’ve seen a lot of rejection slips from your authors, so is it fair to say that you’re something of an expert on rejection notices?
Dan: I think that’s fair to say.
Steve: What are some the characteristics of a good rejection, a legitimate one?
Dan: One characteristic is a personal note sent to you from the editor. It’s true that that’s not always possible, and it’s true even for myself. You get so many manuscripts, and you only have so much time, and to spend as much time as each manuscript deserves isn’t always possible. But I will say that for me, the more well written the story is, if I can’t use it, it may be really well written but there’s something about the story that didn’t quite click, or vise versa, the plot idea is great but there’s something about the writing that’s just not quite up to what I want, I’ll endeavor to write a better rejection letter. It inspires you, actually, the writing. Otherwise, I always write something personal on every rejection slip. But that’s different from writing a real letter or note. Any time you have a form rejection slip, no matter how well written it is, it just doesn’t do it for the author who put so much work into this fiction, just hoping for so much, and then you get back a form letter that everybody gets. It just doesn’t seem fair.
Steve: I was going to ask, how common in your experience these form rejections are. How many publishers and editors go that route?
Dan: Oh, probably eighty or ninety percent are pure forms, maybe with a signature on the bottom, or “Thanks” or “Sorry” or one word. But basically they’re all forms. Then I would say the next step up would be the magazines that use a format that looks like it’s a real note written to you. It has your name and it has your story’s name in it. But then it will have something like “This story just doesn’t grab me” or “Alas, it just didn’t work for me” or variations on that that I see time and again from the same magazines. There may be a few words changed, but they’re basically the same thing. Or you get these form rejections with check boxes, where they’ll check a box off about why they rejected it—the plot, or the grammar, too cliché, whatever it is. Sometimes they’ll have a few lines written underneath it explaining why they ticked that box. Of course anything that you get that’s personal and pertains to your story directly is an improvement over a form.
Steve: And a good rejection would also address the content, and not say just because the market doesn’t sell this right now, is that your point of view?
Dan: From my point of view. But it’s just like refrigerators. We went looking at refrigerators, and I say well, this Amana, Kenmore, Whirlpool, Maytag, it’s all the same company, basically. It’s the same with the books now. If you have somebody in the corporate office saying this is what you need to do, the editor really can’t do much more than say that, although they could address the writing and say why they liked it and express sympathy. But if that’s their criteria, that’s their criteria. And often more and more editors don’t have the freedom to actually decide for themselves.
Steve: Is it a threat to good literature that it’s become so corporate, and the independent publishing houses are having such a tough time surviving? I know for magazines and books, too, that the independents are having a bit of a tough time. Is that a threat to the genre of literature?
Dan: I think it is. It’s the same with the consolidation of the large chain bookstores. It’s not that they’re bad, but the more choices you have, the better. The more editors you have, the more independence, the more points of view you have. Even if you have a large company that let’s say has consolidated five or six book companies, even if the large company is enlightened and gives the editor full choice, and even if the editor is a good editor and well meaning and does do a good job, you still have their one point of view instead of the six different points of view you had when it was six companies. I think that can be dangerous. It’s definitely limiting. It tends to make for sameness, and it tends to make for trends that everybody tries to jump on the bandwagon. It’s like TV or sitcoms where you have to appeal to millions, and it’s becoming that way with books. You have to appeal to such a large audience that it waters down, I think, what we’re reading.
Steve: You’re fully independent, right? I mean the The Rejected Quarterly is your baby, and you’re not answering to any corporate . . . .
Dan: No, that’s right.
Steve: What are the pros and cons of that for you?
Dan: Well, mostly they’re pros. The pros are that it’s the way I’ve always viewed my writing. Writing to me is fun but it’s hard work. It’s time consuming. I don’t see the point of doing it if I’m taking orders from somebody. I could do it as a job, but I’d rather do other things. It’s the same with editing. If I’m taking direction, that’s a type of job that’s not necessarily bad, but it’s not what I’m looking for. I’m looking to make decisions in my writing and my editing. The cons are, and it’s a big con, is the money. I can’t support myself by it, obviously, so it becomes harder to do because after work I’m often tired, and there’s only so much time and energy. So there are definite cons to it, also.
Steve: So this is kind of the classic kitchen table publication, that’s just what people call it, where you don’t go to some big corporate office or something, you’re producing it on your own.
Dan: Right. My office right now is a glorified closet, actually.
Steve: When you’re independent and haven’t gone into a lot of debt to do this and all that sort of thing, is the challenge more the time rather than the lack of money that comes in from it?
Dan: Well the challenge is the time, and the time to do it right, and to get it out in at least a somewhat timely fashion. I’m the only one who sets the deadlines, but still it needs to be out in a fairly timely manner or it loses value for subscribers or bookstore or libraries, so it needs to have that. The time is the biggest issue for me. That relates to quality. I want to have time to read everything carefully and do my columns well and research interviews. If I’m interviewing somebody, I want to know who I’m interviewing. I may have read some books by them, but I want to be as well versed as I can. It all takes quite a bit of time. Yeah, that’s the huge issue. I haven’t had to go into debt for it, but you know I do invest in it. I love doing it or I wouldn’t still be doing it. I started in August 1998 as far as making a real publication. The con of being independent like this has to do with the consolidation of bookstores. I can’t get into the large chains. Independents are very open to taking The Rejected Quarterly, but every issue it always seems I have to replace one or two because they’re going out of business. I’m in kind of a catch-22 situation because I’m not large enough. There are small press distributors who would be happy to take it, but once the bookstore takes a cut and if I’m mailing them, and then if the distributor takes a cut, I’m losing so much money the more stores I get into, the more in debt I’d go into. It has to be small, it has to be myself calling all the bookstores independently and dealing with them directly. Sometimes they don’t want to do that, they want to deal with one distributor.
Steve: Do you have a lot of individual subscribers?
Dan: Not a lot, but I have some that go all the way back to when we started. We get new ones. They’re pretty loyal. The people who subscribe usually stay subscribers. I don’t get out as much as I used to, but I do a book fair or two a year, and try to get exposure that way.
Steve: That was the next thing I wanted to ask about, how you get exposure and get the word out. So there are book fairs, and calling bookstores. What other things can you do as an independent magazine publisher to get the word out?
Dan: We’re listed in Novel and Short Story Writer’s Market, and listed in numerous online writers’ listings. You know, when I first started out, I went to as many as I could find, and listed the guidelines. A lot of others pick it up from those. It’s gotten a lot of exposure that way, in some of the small press writer’s guides, and book fairs. For a while, especially in the beginning when I had a lot of speculative fiction stories I went to a few science fiction conventions where they had a room where people sold books and things like that. I’m involved in a combined book exhibit at the ALA [American Library Association] convention for libraries. I’m with EBSCO so institutions can subscribe that way. A lot of it takes time, and it depends on how much time I have to pursue that.
Steve: Let me just interject real quickly to explain to listeners that EBSCO is a company that keeps a catalog of all magazines that are available that libraries can order through, so it facilitates ordering.
Dan: Right.
Steve: Just for the record, so folks know what EBSCO is.
Dan: That’s pretty much it.
Steve: How much of a market is there for the back issues, versus current subscriptions? What’s the mix there?
Dan: More for current subscriptions and more for the current issue. When I go to book fairs, that’s when the back issues usually sell, when people are there in person. For whatever reason, they flip through it and see a certain article or feature or the cover. They might like the cover and take that one, and just buy one issue. Or they’re ask me for a recommendation. That’s where the back issues usually go. Sometimes people write in wanting the back issue with the interview with so-and-so or something like that. But the people who order single copies online are people who are writers and want to see if it’s some place they want to display their writing, or if their writing will fit into it. So some don’t really care which issue they have.
Steve: Let’s turn back away from the business end of it to the rejections themselves. You’ve seen a lot of rejection slips over the years. Can you share a few of your favorites with us?
Dan: Oh, sure. There’s one from this issue I though was pretty amusing. It starts off, “Dear Scott, by the time you read this, your manuscript will have already been rejected. There’s no sense in asking me why or what you could have done differently, because I’ve already moved on to other stories. It wasn’t you. It was me. I . . .ah, who am I kidding? It was partly you. You didn’t make me feel like you were really interested in making this relationship work. I didn’t feel any sparks between us. You didn’t make me laugh. This story wasn’t a match made in heaven, but the next one may be. Submit again. If you don’t, you’ll regret it. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of your life.” I think there was a postscript that said “P.S. I’m keeping the ring.”
Steve: [laughs]
Dan: Of course that’s humorous, but the writer expressed to me that he wasn’t at all amused by it. I’ll read some that are pretty insulting, actually. “I don’t care if you waste your time, but why don’t you stop wasting mine. You are a poseur, not a poet.” Here’s another one. “This submission is so bad that it’s not worth wasting paper to respond to.” That was written on the back of the person’s self addressed stamped envelope. “You must drink lots of strong coffee in order to stay awake long enough to arrange these things that literate kids abandon when they stop playing with asphalt blocks.” Here’s one. “No doubt you’re very sincere in what you’re doing, but for my money, there’s no more relationship to poetry than to frying eggs or taking part in round the world skateboard races.” Here’s one that says, “You are not a woman. This a by a woman. Sorry.”
Steve: I wonder what they meant by that!
Dan: You know, I don’t know [laughing]. I don’t remember what the submission was. Let’s see. “The ability to string words together into a comprehensible phrase or sentence is what distinguishes human beings from a dictionary and the lower animal forms. When you have reached that stage in your development, try us again.” So when you get something like that, though you can say they’re not forms, they’re written to the author, but they’re pretty insulting. “Thanks for submitting your work to us, but frankly I don’t know what to do with it. If you write poetry, we’d love to see it.” And that was for a poem.
Steve: So what’s the healthy way for a writer to respond or react to rejection? I mean, no one likes to be rejected. So how should a writer respond? Let’s assume it’s one of the good ones. It’s personal and gives reasons for rejecting it. What’s the best way to respond?
Dan: Well, if it’s a rejection that actually gives ideas, and I’ve had a few of those, and I guess I’ve written a few of those, then I think the best thing to do if you agree with it is to take that to heart and to apply it, if not to that story and resubmit (I actually had someone do that and I accepted a story that way) or to just apply it to your next story if you want to move on. If there’s not direct advice, but they’re rejecting it with an encouraging letter, the best thing to do is take heart. People have enjoyed it and expressed that they’ve liked the humor, or writing, or whatever it is, so keep going. If it just says, “Sorry we can’t use this, we don’t have space because of so many submissions,” it’s pretty hard to take heart from that. I think you can use it as motivation, to say okay, I’m going to do something so good that nobody will reject it, or I’m just going to keep submitting until someone appreciates it. I think that’s the attitude to have. If you really have worked on your story, and you really believe in it, then I think the attitude should be that the editor can’t appreciate it. I don’t mind if someone thinks that about me. People have different wavelengths. Sometimes something doesn’t click with one person but it clicks with another. If one editor doesn’t like it, that doesn’t mean that the next one won’t. In fact, in this newest issue, there was an interview with Daniel Pinkwater, and I thought he expressed that attitude really well. He said, “I’ve always assumed that anyone rejecting my work is jealous or ignorant and to be pitied.” I don’t go that far in my attitude, but I think it’s healthy to believe in your work. It doesn’t matter how successful or intelligent the editor is. If you believe in your work, you’ll find a place. You’ll find somebody who will publish it. In my case, sometimes I’ve turned to self publishing. There’s university presses. It depends on why you’re trying to publish. If it’s to make a lot of money, then your options are limited. If not, you can publish with a small press and perhaps not make money, but at least have your work in print.
Steve: Of course nowadays it’s even easier to get the word out there if one publishes online. Do you intend to continue The Rejected Quarterly as a printed publication? If so, why? Why not just go online?
Dan: Well, you know, I’m a traditionalist. I’m kind of old fashioned. I like the print. I’m online every day, so it’s not like I don’t use the new technology. I love it. But I like something about paper. I like a newspaper, I like paperback or hardback books. I like a print magazine. I don’t find myself going online and reading entire publications. I’ll go online to read an article or a story, but I won’t read a newspaper, say. Or I won’t read a book online. It’s just not me. I’m publishing for people like that, I guess. I like a magazine, and I like something that you can hold in your hand and have and put on a shelf. Obviously there’s a place for online, because that’s the direction things are going. But I don’t intend to go that way. I’ve been updating my web site for a long time, and I’ll probably add some content to it. But I don’t plan on doing an online publication. That’s just not what I want to do.
Steve: Dan, thank you very much for being my guest on Periodical Radio. You’ve been a very interesting interviewee, and thanks for sharing your perspectives on rejections and aspects of having an independent publication.
Dan: Well thanks for having me, it’s been a lot of fun.
Steve: A four issue subscription to The Rejected Quarterly is $19.99 from Black Plankton Press, P.O. Box 1351, Cobb, CA, 95426. Thank you for listening to Periodical Radio. I’m your host, Steve Black.