Why you should aim for 100 rejections a year
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Most publishing houses have a "slush pile" of submitted manuscripts that's always enormous and largely neglected. Usually it's junior staff, interns or fresh grads, who are tasked with "processing the pile" whenever they get a scrap of free time, which is rare. And when they do get around to your manuscript, they'll often just skim the proposal and maybe read a paragraph or two before throwing it into a "review" or "reject" pile. Every time I've seen this scene, it's usually a hundred in "reject" for every one in "review". What is a rejection like this really worth? You've spent maybe years of your life on this manuscript and some kid rejected it in under a minute.
IMO, at this point, it's better to seek rejections directly from the market via online self-publishing. Instead of just putting together endless submissions, e-publishing puts the focus on the things that will make you successful regardless: writing for a real audience, soliciting feedback and building community, working on self-promotion, etc. If you do eventually want to go through a traditional publisher, then "I sold 500 copies on Amazon" is going to speak a lot louder than "I assure you people will love my flowery prose".
I was going to write exactly this. I looked into publishing my book in a traditional manner and found the entire ordeal strange and messy.
Instead, I put a cover image and description on LeanPub, found there were 50+ people interested in it (just posting it on my Twitter account and emailing a couple people I knew), and decided to write an intro and a chapter or two to test the waters.
Two years and 8,000 sales later, I'm glad I didn't stake my idea of being a successful writer (or my motivation) on getting a random editor at an institution that would like to suck out 50+% of my potential profits.
Nowadays, no matter what the type of writing, you can test the waters by self-publishing. The upside is any success you have can result in real dollars/income instead of a stressful and tenuous relationship with a traditional publisher!
Ironically, after my book started becoming successful, I had reps from the major tech publishers start asking if I would like to relicense the book to them in exchange for their marketing, while simultaneously giving up about 40% of the profit margin I currently enjoy.
A non-fiction work can still really benefit from an editorial pass for readability and usability, but I think for fiction we need a much better external editor to tell us it needs more work.
For the first two, it's just a matter of whether you want to/can put in the time to hire out your own editor, do your own marketing, etc.
For the last, it comes down to vanity. For tech books especially (but for many other types as well), the world has moved on beyond brick-and-mortar book sales, and the audience you cut off by excluding bookstore relationships is very small.
Every time I've done a rational comparison of 'should I keep self-publishing or should I go to a publisher?' I find that for money (not that we're talking 'quit-your-job' levels for 98% of writers), for stress management, and for personal brand building, there is no upside to using a publisher.
Thus it allows someone to shape their writing that accords with their own vision. Hopefully a good thing (but no guarantees).
If you self-publish it, you may not know and there is so much other stuff out there.
Also, this is relevant, the author seems to be talking about short stories which you could produce at the rate of 1/day. This is not true of novels.
You know it strikes me that the idea of having one review and pushing out an unchanging copy is a pre-digital idea. We should be able to indefinitely change the works we have out. In the future we will have arguments like:
"Did you enjoy Snow Crash?"
"I liked the 1998 version, it was so well written."
"Nah, I liked the 2016 version when he updated it so it reflected cell phones."
"You're both wrong, the 2005 version was the sweet spot!"
> The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
It's a fascinating question if Gibson would update it if he could. Particularly in light of experiments like Agrippa [1]
It's a fascinating line because of the combination of how quick the change was and how it hasn't become outdated on the surface (yet), but is more insidiously changing the interpretation.
(P.S., nobody suggest this to George Lucas...)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrippa_(A_Book_of_the_Dead)
"The sky was the perfect untroubled blue of a television screen, tuned to a dead channel."
In response to Gibson, of course. But it is also interesting that the author themselves needn't be the one to revise the work.
We already do this in a lighter sense when various editors produce various editions of a book by a writer. It would be interesting if we, essentially, exploded IP claims on characters and let people publish their fan fiction.
I'm thinking of shared world books like Forgotten Realms where various authors write in the same world. Now if they didn't retain the rights to the work itself, you could have other people rewrite it too.
The other thing is to conquer the fear of rejection. There are a lot of people who get stuck not submitting stuff simply because they're afraid of getting rejected. But not trying is as good as a rejection.
You are going to need luck regardless of the quality. Merit is how we expect the world to be, not what it actually is!
The author's point is increasing your chances of success by trying more. Which, if you are unlucky a lot, actually makes sense.
Basically sounds like a way to get to the "10,000 hour rule".
The more you face rejection, the less it stings. But this is a double-edged sword: It's still very difficult to muster up the effort to try again. Not because of pain avoidance, but because it feels like a waste of time.
Trying to game this might be a perverse way to break this cycle, but I couldn't do it. Good luck to anyone else who tries.
Just having that won't necessarily get your talks accepted... but it helps.
The rejection reason I'm always offered (when I actually receive one) is a watered-down remix of the following:
Your talk idea was excellent and highly rated! But we have
previously obligated ourselves to representing the big name
projects in the community, so we're instead going to give
this spot to someone who wants to talk about a trivial
improvement to Drupal or something only relevant to WordPress
freelancers. Also, we already have an all-day security
training and our judges toss cryptography in the same general
category, so we consider it redundant.
There's been a lot of talk about fixing a persistent cultural problem in the PHP community, where it's always the same speakers at every PHP event. And conference organizers pay lip service to wanting to do something about it. But then they turn around and invite the same people to do the same talks/training and then block off entire categories from being spoken about by anyone else.
That's the part that actually annoys me: "We're working on this problem, but not really."
As far as infosec conferences go, I've had schedule conflicts with everything except DEFCON and Black Hat, so being rejected there is probably just, "You're aiming too high. Try again in 10 years when you have real skills."
(That being said, my DEFCON Crypto & Privacy Village talk hasn't been rejected yet, so 20 months might end up being my high score.)
There must be some old HR book out there with an example rejection letter that many corporate HR departments used. It was calculated to let you down easy, to avoid making you mad and miserable.
Point being, it was always rare that you would get actionable feedback from an interview, because it was always risky. Now it is just rare to the point of non-existent.
- you didn't meet our (technical) expectations
- we cannot meet your expectations
- you're qualified but we cannot pay that much
- you're generally qualified, but we need a Foo Expert today
The common letter one gets is "we chose somebody else who is a better fit". Sure, but what exactly fit better?
I don't think this is too much to ask for. Even that kind of feedback is non-existent, and I'm off wondering whether it's one of those or some remark I made or something else.
The most honest feedback I got was in small shops which didn't put an HR department between me and the CTO/CEO.
If after an interview somebody asks for feedback, I'll generally give it to them. The details are fresh in our heads, I can carefully calibrate my answer to the person's mood, and we can discuss anything that is confusing or upsetting.
Once we've filled the positions, though, it's much harder to give feedback. I've got a number of people I'm turning down, so it'd be a lot of work. Details are fuzzier. And often the real reason is something unsatisfying, like, "this person was marginally better in a few key areas; that added up". (If we've done our pre-screening well, almost everybody we interview is hireable, so often the true advice is something depressingly anodyne, like, "keep trying" or "more experience would have helped".)
But really, if you want feedback, I'd find some way to set up mock interviews with people you trust. There's a lot of feedback I won't give because I don't think the person is ready to hear it. E.g., I once interviewed a person who was a bluffer. They failed the pair programming portion of the interview spectacularly, to the extent that I ended it early. When they asked for feedback, I told them that they should definitely work on their TDD skills. But the honest answer would have been, "Go get a therapist and start working on your personal issues, because you have a pervasive character problem."
That's an extreme case, but hopefully you can see the problem. As John Scalzi says [1], "There are a lot of people who, when they say, 'I’d love feedback,' actually mean 'I want a hug.'" Those people can be very unpleasant when you give them actual feedback.
[1] http://whatever.scalzi.com/2007/01/23/what-to-know-before-yo...
For example: my roommate and I both write songs in our free time. He goes for quantity (around 6 songs a month), me quality (1-ish song a month).
I'll spend a week just trying to get a transition to a chorus or bridge. His songs often don't even have choruses or bridges.
It would drive me crazy having a bunch of half-baked songs (or stories) that are almost there but are missing the next step. At some point you will have to put the hammer down and think "hey this idea is strong and deserves a strong conclusion/climax/chorus/whatever art form" rather than quickly moving on.
However if you're just starting out, significantly lean quantity as your earliest works aren't likely worth the time.
"While procrastinating on writing my MFA thesis, I found an ancient wooden desk on the street, pulled it into my apartment, and started shellacking it with hard-earned rejection slips. It became my writing desk."
The first step to success is making it safe to fail.
Having said that, i think this is generally good advice.
Looking back, there are a lot of similarities to the common "failed startup" experience. I worked on the novel for five years (got plenty of feedback along the way) but getting it picked up (traction?) was a bust.
And it wasn't "safe to fail" as someone mentioned up above. It hurt, emotionally, physically (90 hr weeks).
Lesson learned. I try to be comfortable with failure now, it's not a friend or anything, but it'll stop by, a lot.
What do you people think?
When I first met my future wife 35 years ago, she was stunningly beautiful. She worked for a time as an underwear model in fact.
Now her appearance is what is sometimes called "matronly" but she's even more beautiful to me than she was when we were teenagers. And interestingly enough, I'm still learning things about her 35 years later. She is the most fascinating person I know.
Has it always been that way? Nope. Regrettably, there were stretches of years that I neglected to pay attention to her, and it took a toll on us both. In the past five or six years, I have redoubled my efforts to pay attention to the little things, and we're both better off for it, I think.
And to bring it back to the article, she rejected me for a good five years before I really got anywhere with her. Not that I stalked her, but we ran in overlapping social circles and periodically I would try again. I finally figured out a way to gain her trust and interest. (Again, she had no shortage of suitors, so it was kind of like trying to get the New Yorker or Atlantic to publish your piece.)
The rejection never deterred me from trying again when I saw an opening, but I did always change my approach. We ended up in the same college class - again, mere chance, no stalking - and that's when she finally opened up to me a little. Still, it was years later before we married, and we both had other relationships during those years.
Meanwhile, yes, I dated a lot, and was in a couple of "serious" relationships during that time, so there was some quantity over quality there.
I will say that as I've gotten older, were something to happen where I was suddenly single again, the idea of "quality" has changed tremendously from when I was younger. The same is true with my tastes in writing.
If you devote the rest of your life to changing societal perceptions on this issue, you might be able to do it, but you might not succeed until after you're dead. It's not going to help you date--it will probably be counterproductive to that goal. And you probably only will have time and energy to pursue one change of that scale in your lifetime. Is this the thing you want to change with your life?
Ultimately, sure, you're right. It's not inherently only the man's responsibility to make the relationship happen/work/whatever. But that's not a productive truth; there's no pragmatic action that comes out of that. Sure, complain about it on HN if that makes you feel better, but if you actually want to succeed at dating the best thing you can do is suck it up and work around it.
EDIT: To add to this: the basis for this is evolutionary, and it takes an immense amount of work to get societal pressures to override behaviors that are built into our DNA. It's not clear that this will even be possible to change, even if some people devote the rest of their lives to it.
How about a nice game of chess?
Interesting question though - thank you for bringing it up.
Sure, there are people who don't want to go on "practice" dates, but there is literally no human characteristic that someone out there doesn't want. In the long run I want to have kids, so if I could somehow filter out all the people who won't want to have kids in 5-10 years, I'd do it, but it's not realistically possible to do that. Why is "I want practice dating" different from "I want to have kids"?
"I'm genuinely interested in this person, but it is a deal breaker if she doesn't want kids. I'm going on a date with her and I hope to find out soon" and
"I'm not interested in this person at all. But I'm going on a date with her anyway, just so I can gain some experience and courage to ask someone else out"
To me, the second one feels weird, as the other person's intentions might be serious.
Most people do some variation of the second one while looking for jobs, partners, friendships etc. I suppose it is just a personal thing.
I think you're being pretty arbitrary in deciding that one of these is an attribute of the person and one isn't. I don't think that there's any basis for making that distinction.
What I'm seeing here looks a lot more like a visceral reaction that I see from a lot of people who come across some form of intentionality in seeking romance. There's an underlying idea that the only "correct" way to date is to just let nature take its course somehow. Any attempt to metacognate in that area is seen as dishonest, trying too hard, manipulative, etc. Here, you're characterizing the other person's intentions as "serious", implying that dating to get experience dating isn't serious. But for someone who finds their lack of dating experience crippling and yet, as a human, is to some extent unable to find happiness until they can find good relationships, getting dating experience is a very serious goal.
But in the end, dating is just about people meeting their goals. The initial stage is figuring out the other person's goals and seeing if they're compatible with your own. So I don't think we have any obligation to go into dating with any specific goals. As long as we're honest, open, and kind about our goals, there's no harm if our goals don't align with someone else's. Sure, maybe the other person is serious about forming a long-term relationship with you, but it's not your responsibility to meet that need; it's just your responsibility to be honest about your goals so you don't lead them on.
I guess it'd be weird if the sole purpose was for relationship skills, but I think there's a large middle ground
Basically, hit on as many women as possible, with the intention of dating them (not just getting a number to phone/text them), and refine your craft as you fail immensely.