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While writing is a creative process, it is also a business. When your work is finished and polished and packaged, it becomes a commodity that you are taking to market, like a Mars bar or a Snickers. Publishing is a business; editors are out there to make money to pay wages and overheads; so publishers are going to accept what they think will sell.

Suppose you choose a Hershey bar over a Snickers, what does Snickers do about it? They take action.

They get out there and promote their product; or they come out with a new, improved Snickers. It's the same with writing, you have to keep coming out with new and better product and keep promoting it in the marketplace. But why would any editor in their right mind choose somebody else's Hershey bar over your Snickers?

Well, there are a lot of reasons, not all of them have to do with the quality of your work. When an editor chooses someone else's work over yours, it is often because the other work better suits their current editorial needs. For editors, quality is a given, they have stacks of excellent manuscripts on their desks. How do they choose between them? Choices can be based on the writer's reputation, on current trends, on compatibility with other material, and a zillion other factors.

Rejection is part of writing, just like rain on picnic day is part of life. Expect it and be prepared for it. It is important to be professional in your dealings with editors. If you buy a Hershey bar, you don't want to get an angry letter from Snickers telling you what an idiot you are.

Every editor is different and has different criteria on which to make judgements. I had a friend who had tried to break into a particular literary magazine for years and was always rejected. When the magazine changed editors, my friend resubmitted and was accepted right away.

Once I sent a humorous story to a magazine and received a handwritten reply from the editor that said, "We don't publish this type of material, and even if we did we would not publish this." That sounded pretty negative to me. I later sent the story to another magazine and they loved it, even asking me to make it longer to use it as a featured story and they paid me $200.00. Remember that being rejected one place does not mean being rejected everywhere.

In a recent article in the Chronicle (quoted on Bookninja.com), literary agent Susan Arellano, who has worked as an editor at both trade and university presses and now commands six-figure advances for academic authors,

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