It’s always good to get a bit of perspective

This post discusses my response to being rejected by a publisher.

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Oh well, you win some, you lose some (or in the case of my football team, you lose some, you draw some). Here’s a message I received from IATEFL today with regard to their international conference selections:

Dear Presenter,

I regret to tell you that we have not been able to include your report for publication in IATEFL Conference Selections 2010. We had a large number of submissions this year, space was extremely limited, and there were some difficult decisions to make.

To outline the process, all reports are sent ‘blind’ to an editorial committee of three experts in various aspects of ESL/EFL. The reports are evaluated and assigned a grade; these are then returned to me. I look at the comments and grades I have received and base my final decision on this feedback.

In many cases, the word limit simply did not allow writers to do justice to their topic. In such cases, I would strongly recommend that the paper be reworked into a larger piece and submitted to a different publication (perhaps a SIG newsletter, for example).

Some other reasons for denial are as follows:

(a) The paper promoted a particular product or institution.
(b) The paper was excessively long. A few words can be trimmed, but several hundred cannot.
(c) The paper was not clearly written, or the presentation of ideas was disorganised.
(d) The paper did not seem to offer any new perspective on the issue being discussed.
(e) The paper was of very local interest and not transferable to a larger context.

I do understand how disappointing this is, and I encourage you to resubmit elsewhere. I thank you for taking the time to submit your paper, and I hope you will consider doing so again, if you are presenting in Brighton.

Best,
PERSON WHO SENT THE EMAIL

Truth be known, this isn’t the first time I’ve had a piece of writing rejected and it won’t be the last. I’ve had enough stuff published to know that I’m not a terrible writer. I would like to know if my crime was a, b, c, d or even e, though. Oh well, what are you going to do? In the immortal words of the Turkish football coach Fatih Terim, ‘What can I do… sometimes?‘

The moral of this story…

If you intend to write to get published, you’re going to get knocked back from time to time. Don’t let it worry you. Remain passionate about your subject and people will enjoy reading your work.

PS: The encouragement to resubmit elsewhere was taken to heart, and has already born fruit. In your face IATEFL!

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