What to Do When Your Articles Keep Getting Rejected
Learn and iterate, eventually, you’ll be accepted
In less than two months, I’ve been rejected multiple times by different publications such as The Ascent, P.S. I Love You, Noteworthy, and The Brave Writer. But most importantly, I’ve been rejected several times by one of my favorite publications, Better Marketing.
The first article that I submitted to Better Marketing was called “The best marketing strategy for writers and business owners.” I wrote the article at the beginning of June, submitted it to Better Marketing, and it was rejected after a few days. I later made some changes to it and published it on Illumination, but the article didn’t do so well.
Lesson learned: It wasn’t a good story, keep trying.
The second article that was rejected by Better Marketing happened to be my best performing article yet. I’ve gotten about 220 views on it. I only had a total of 94 views on all my published stories before this one, so I’m very happy with that story.
Lesson learned: Keep trying and you will get the results you desire.
The Reason My Articles Were Rejected
Today I went back to Better Marketing’s style guide and I read it word for word. Having done that, I can understand why every article I’ve submitted to Better Marketing has been rejected. First of all, my articles didn’t have proper titles. You have to use AP style to capitalize titles in your stories for Better Marketing. I wasn’t doing this before, which is pretty embarrassing. I mean they have it written in their style guide very clearly and I had that article saved for reference, but I had never read it word for word.
Lesson learned: Read the submission guidelines of the publication you want to submit an article to.
Another reason that my articles have been rejected by Better Marketing is that I’m trying too hard to write specifically about marketing. The first article I submitted to them had the words “the best marketing strategy for” in its title. They specifically say that they don’t like titles like that.
The point is that I was forcing content instead of getting creative with my writing. And you can never force yourself to write the “perfect” article for a publication; you have to let your creativity take over.
Having said that, I might still get from Better Marketing, but that doesn’t mean I should stop trying to publish my articles with them.
When Your Articles Get Rejected, Get Back to Editing Them
I’ve been rejected by some of my favorite publications, but that doesn’t mean I can’t keep submitting new articles to them. When my articles get rejected, I simply get back to editing them and resubmit them. I keep striving to improve my work, knowing that eventually, I will publish my stories on the publications I love.
I see a lot of people who try to publish an article in a publication and give up after being rejected once. But, it’s important to remember that if you’re submitting to big publications, they’re looking for the most relevant and the best stories they can publish. Not to mention, that these publications get so many submissions daily that yours might just not be competitive enough.
Lesson learned: If you get rejected, just keep making the story better and try other publications.
More importantly, when your articles get rejected, there’s always a reason for it, and you need to find out what that reason is. It might have not had a good title that caught the editor’s attention, it might have not had good formatting, you might have even missed one of the criteria on the publication’s submission guidelines. When my articles get rejected, I assume they weren’t good enough and I get back to editing them.
I wrote an article called, “I don’t believe in soulmates” that was rejected by P.S. I Love You. After the article was rejected, I went back to editing it. That’s when I realized just how much needed to change with the article. I rewrote the entire intro and outro, I changed the section headings, I changed the formatting and anything else I could think of. When I was done editing, the article looked nothing like what I started with. Finally, I submitted the article to Hello, Love, where it was accepted and published.
You Can Always Make Your Stories Better
You can always make your story a little bit better, no matter what. If you can’t make your story better the second time, the third time, and in fact every time you go back to it, you’re not improving. And the most important thing in writing is to keep improving.
If your articles get rejected. There’s a reason. Take a breather, sleep on it, go back to it the next day, and start editing. Edit the story until there’s nothing else you can think of that needs to change, and if it’s rejected again, edit even more. The story will get published at some point, and it will be worth all the effort.
Getting rejected is even better than getting published
There are many quotes on why failure is an essential part of success; therefore, it can get somewhat cliche to hear these quotes over and over again. But once you actually take in how powerful failure is, that’s when you’ll appreciate the significance of these quotes.
Michael Jordan said:
“I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”
Thomas Edison said:
Robert F. Kennedy said:
“Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.”
When you get rejected by a publication you get a chance to reevaluate your work and make it better. You learn so much more from failure than you do from success; because each time you fail, you learn something you’ll need to use later to find success.
When your article gets rejected, you need to put yourself in the editor’s shoes who read your work and decided it wasn’t ready to be published yet. Then, you need to think about what you can change in order to make the article better.
Ask yourself if your article is bringing value to the readers and why it deserves to be published at all. Ask yourself why the article was rejected and why it could be rejected again. Think about every aspect of the article and make the changes necessary to get it published. You might have to change your images, tags, titles, or you might have to re-write the entire thing from scratch. Whichever way, you need to do whatever is necessary to make the article better.
Lesson learned: Treat rejections as an opportunity to better your work and learn something new in the process.
Edit Your Work Extensively
Editing is the most crucial part of writing; in fact, Stephen King puts it best when he says, “To write is human, to edit is divine.”
You cannot possibly think that your first draft is good enough to be published, so make sure that you come back to your story and edit it multiple times before actually hitting the submit button. And if your article is still rejected, you just get back to editing once again. No excuses.
Another quote I love from Stephen King is, “Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.”
This is one of my favorite pieces of advice from Stephen King. I used to fall in love with my own writing and try to fit in passages that didn’t belong in the article, instead of simply taking them out. But after coming across this advice, things changed.
I’m no longer fixated on keeping my favorite sentences and passages in the article when I’m editing, instead, I’m brutal to them. I attack them from every angle possible and change them in any way I can or get rid of them completely. Your first draft should look nothing like your final draft, and this simple quote by Phyllis Whitney shows why: “Good stories are not written. They are rewritten.”
Writing is a process and it involves a lot of trial and error. So, don’t be discouraged when you get rejected. Just keep writing and keep editing your stories to make them better.
I’ve shared my fair share of cliche in this article, so there should be no need for more, but here’s one last one; J.K Rowling was rejected by 12 different publications before she published “Harry Potter”. Imagine if she had quit on the 11th attempt.
So, unless you get rejected by 12 different publications, there’s no need to quit. And even then, you shouldn’t ever quit; because you never know which time your article might get accepted.
Keep learning more, keep reading articles from the publications you want to get into and keep writing; you will only keep getting better and that can only help you speed up the process of getting into the publications that you love.
Conclusion
To sum up this article, I’m going to share yet another great quote by Winston Churchill: “Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”
For that reason, I will keep submitting stories to my favorite publications. No matter how many times I get rejected, I know I can make my story better and publish it at some point. I’ll always keep striving to learn more, get better, and write more articles that I could submit to a number of different publications. That’s the only way to get better and to learn from failure and rejections.
I encourage you to do the same thing. Keep writing, keep editing, and most importantly, keep persisting. Your attitude will determine your end results.
