The Flawed Art of Literary Rejection

In early December 2009 I submitted my lengthy essay “Indecision Over Michigan” to the Cooperative Press, a branch of the group Michigan Writers that helps emerging writers publish a chapbook in the literary genre of their choice. It’s a program intended to educate new writers on the entire publication process. As it says on their website, “Selected authors share the publishing costs and marketing responsibilities with Michigan Writers in return for the prestige of being published by a press that prints only carefully selected manuscripts.”

I thought it sounded like a great idea, and I was totally willing to foot the $250 for the actual printing of the books. I even rushed to cut my essay down from almost 12,000 to just under 10,000 words, to stay within their submission guidelines. I printed and mailed the literary spawn, and I waited patiently. Then on Sunday night I got an email notification that my essay was rejected. They received 14 submissions and had picked three for publication.

Here’s their email:

Dear Nick,

Thank you for your submission to the Michigan Writers Cooperative Press. Our readers evaluated fourteen manuscripts for this round and chose three for publication. Although your manuscript was not selected, we cannot emphasize how much we appreciate your participation. Receiving so many quality submissions for this fifth year of our publishing project bodes well for the continued success of the Cooperative Press. We hope that you will try again.

Please check the website for further updates. Again, thank you for sharing your work with us.

Sincerely,
Marcy Branski,
Co-President
Michigan Writers, Inc.

Denise Baker
Co-President
Michigan Writers, Inc.

Michael Callaghan
Chair, Cooperative Press Committee
Michigan Writers, Inc.

The rejection itself doesn’t bother me so much as the the nature of the rejection. Here’s a group that charges $35 in membership fees and claims to exist in order to help budding writers. Yet because I my essay was turned away, I didn’t learn a thing about publishing — except what I already knew about it: it’s an extremely flawed process.

You may know that Supraterranean was founded in part to present an alternative to the current state of the publishing industry (more info on the About page). But what I soon realized is that letting anyone publish whatever they want isn’t the perfect solution. There is some kind of value in having to overcome obstacles, if it helps make someone a better writer. But there should be many more avenues to publication than there are currently. The literary world is way too stagnant and stale, partly due to the nature of writing (it’s a slower process than other creative work like music or painting), but partly due to the extreme level of control that currently exists in the industry.

In the coming months I will be thinking often about this topic, trying to identify ways to build upon the current model for Supraterranean. And I’ll be looking for other venues to publish my essay. For now, here’s my response to the Cooperative Press rejection. I’ll be sure to inform you if they write back.

Dear Marcy, Denise and Michael,

I would really appreciate further explanation. According to your website, the Cooperative Press is meant to “help emerging writers” and teach them about the publishing process, and the mission of Michigan Writers is to “[provide] opportunities for networking, publication, and education.” With that in mind, it would seem appropriate for you to provide some feedback to the writers whose submissions were not selected, including but not limited to:

- Suggestions for improving this specific piece
- Recommendations for building our craft in general (which could be as simple as pointing us to reading material)
- Connecting us with a writing mentor
- Pointing us to suitable publications where we could submit our work

I also have a proposition for you. We are at the dawn of a new age of publishing. Print is giving way to the e-reader and the computer screen. Perhaps Michigan Writers could help produce, offer, and/or distribute e-books. If you’re not willing or able to provide help with editing or creation of PDF files, you could at least create a “Self-Published” section on your website, assist us in submitting our work to Amazon’s Kindle store (and other such e-book stores), and offer some kind of promotion services.

Forgive me for being straightforward, but I was expecting Michigan Writers to be a sort of incubator, and not return a bloodstained 10,000-word essay with the same generic two-paragraph denial as any other publication.

Best,
Nick Meador