“Never sleep under the same roof with a rejected manuscript. Send it out again as fast as possible!”
Rejection is always hard to take, no matter how long you’ve been writing or how often you’ve been published. So, to reduce the sting of rejection, get that manuscript back in the mail as soon as possible.
The easiest way to get your manuscript back in circulation is by having a list of places to send it before you start the submission process. Go through your marketing guides and pick the places you think your manuscript will fit. Find as many as possible and list them in the order in which you’d like to submit. It can be by amount paid or by prestige of the publisher, but it shouldn’t be “alphabetical.” You may not agree with this, but I firmly believe in sending out a short manuscript to only one place at a time. A book manuscript is different, but if you’re subbing a short story or article, one place at a time is best. I’ll explain more about this concept in Pam’s Pointer #9.
My policy of sending out the rejected manuscript as soon as possible doesn’t mean that you never look at it again or edit it again. If your rejection came with comments, evaluate them. Are they reasonable? Would they only apply to that particular publisher? If the comments make good sense, then revise your manuscript. Just don’t work on it for days. That’s the problem. When we get a rejection, we don’t want to deal with it. We want to suffer, eat chocolate and Cheetos, cry, veg out in front of the TV. We file the manuscript in the drawer, thinking that we need time to absorb the pain and the possible revisions. What often happens is that the manuscript stays in the drawer, never to come out again.
So, reread your manuscript when it comes back. Decide if it needs any revision. If it does, work on it immediately. Then send it out to the next editor on the list. Sleeping with it will only give you bad dreams. Don’t allow it to stay in your house.