I can totally see that. But it makes no sense. I’ve almost never seen a rejection that takes on an author personally. Professionals know that an editor’s opinion on a story isn’t personal, and often is just that editor’s opinion. Pulitzer prize winning stories have been rejected several times before finding a home.

@brad I think it’s part of the “internet age”. I can’t imagine anyone taking the trouble to fire back an angry “letter”. People need to think before pressing the send button in every scenario, but especially when responding to a rejection letter.

Nothing personal. It’s just business.

I think a lot of aspirant writers don’t enter the arena with the correct frame of mind. You have to come into this game with your shield up and your helmet on. Let the rejections roll off. Don’t take it personally. Don’t let it get under your skin.

Same rules apply in the military. Time and again at different stages I’ve seen people around me in the U.S. Army let things — people — get under their skin. It never turns out well.

Best thing to do is just file the rejection and move on. Firing back an angry response is about 0.00% likely to yield a sale.

Unfortunately, there is no such thing as an entry-level ABC 123 class for aspirants, educating them to this reality. So lots of aspirants come to the table with the wrong attitude and get their feelings hurt too quickly, and then it sort of all goes downhill from there.

There might be a difference in short ficiton, but in novels? Hard to say, since nearly every major publisher is based in New York, anyway.

Compare say Weird Tales and On Spec and there is a difference in the flavour of it (mmm … bacon).

Of course, I have no scientific evidence but reading a large number of Tesseracts stories has pointed me towards that conclusion.

This is like when I said we’d never accept another werewolf piece, and Mike Turner took that as a personal challenge. Now we’re podcasting Silver Shells, which is an amazing…werewolf story.