I have yet to attend a writer’s group of any kind without someone fussing about submitting and only hearing crickets in return. They’d prefer an acceptance, but if that’s not in their cards, they want a rejection, and on top of that, they want to know why they were rejected.

My questions then become:

– Are you willing to pay for that critique of your work, which is what it takes for someone to give you the reasons why?

– Or, on a lesser scale, are you willing to pay a fee when you submit, in order to assure yourself of a response, whether acceptance or rejection?

Nobody does. However, on the other hand, you are expecting a publication/editor/agent to take time away from time they could be spending earning an income, just to tell you they cannot use you, or you did not win, or you don’t fit their needs at the moment. You are expecting them to pay an employee to reject you with no gain out of it whatsoever. With some publishers/freelance markets/agents, considering the number of submissions they receive, that would take a fulltime employee.

Let’s assume this is a minimum wage employee just sending out rejections, without the reasons why. Stuffing envelopes with form letters and metering postage. That’s $15,000 a year plus benefits and unemployment tax. That’s also another employee for Human Resources to handle reams of paperwork. That employer is out, say $20,000 on the low side for that position. The employer gets zero benefit from having that employee, doing what they do, except to gain the respect of writers who will probably never work for them.

Now, let’s assume you want feedback. Why were you rejected? Now you need a higher paid person with experience enough to make such reasoning. Maybe they only spend 10-20 percent of their time doing this task. Let’s take a $50,000 salary and $10,000 in benefits/HR costs, and take 20% of that total. That’s $12,000 invested in, again, delivering a letter to writers who will likely never work or be contracted for them.

But what if you want THE judge of the contest, THE literary agent, or THE editor to send you a rejection? Double that cost.

That’s financial outlay with zero return. When you consider sending a rejection costs money, takes time, and restricts income production, why in the world would you expect anyone to send you a rejection?

On top of that, when someone takes the time to send rejections, they spend less time processing acceptances, which could ultimately mean less acceptances, which then lowers the odds of you being considered in the first place.

Be happy when submissions are open. Send in your best work. Then move on. Don’t watch your rearview mirror in this job. Keep pitching. Keep querying. Keep entering. Keep submitting. The time you take away from moving forward, the time you spend worrying about what someone will say and why, is time stolen from your own writing.

Don’t expect rejection. Instead be extremely thankful for even receiving it. Someone went out of their way to notify you, and it cost them to do so.