"This is not our customary rejection letter"

Writers trying to get journals to publish their work are always trying to read tea leaves. Does the fact they've held onto my work so long mean they're seriously considering it? Will I have a better chance getting published if I change my cover letter to something more personal? One of the things writers who get rejected a lot (which is everyone) often find themselves wondering is this: "Is that rejection letter I just got a standard rejection, or an "encouraging" or personal rejection, one that means I was close and should try again?"

There's a whole wiki dedicated to the rejection letters of literary journals, trying to determine which are the form rejections and which mean they actually liked your work but just couldn't use it. It's kind of a big deal to get one of these personal rejection, especially from a higher-prestige journal. They don't give them out like candy. (I know, because I've gotten a lot of the form rejections before I started getting the personal ones.)

Some form letters are easy to identify. The formula goes something like, "Thank you for submitting, but it's not right for us at this time." If that's all it says, you got a form rejection. But there are some letters that leave you guessing. The contain phrases like "but we encourage you to submit again," or "we enjoyed your work." Those could be form rejections or they could be meant as the encouraging kind of rejection. (And of course, even a second-tier rejection that encourages you to submit again is often still going to be written using a template, so that might be why some of these phrases are still impersonal.)

One magazine, however, makes it completely clear if you got the other kind of rejection letter, as I've just discovered. Agni just sent a rejection that said this: "Thank you for giving us the opportunity to read X. The manuscript isn't right for us just now, but please consider sending other work in the future. The is not our customary rejection letter. We hope you'll keep us in mind."

What an excellent response! Rather than leave the writer guessing if her work resonated at all, they make it very clear. I wish every journal did that, or something similar to it.

I've had over a year now of getting these personalized kinds of rejection letters, after many years of mostly only getting the standard rejections from everybody. It's nice to know I've gotten better, but I think I've already made the big improvements that allowed me to make easy improvements. From here, it's all going to be greater grinding to make increasingly smaller gains in order to make it over the hump to get into the better journals. It's so insanely competitive. And for the last few months, I've really been leaning toward feeling like it's not worth the effort. So I'm simultaneously encouraged and discouraged. But it's not even a bad form of discouragement. It's more like I've been far enough down the road to know what the landscape is really like, and I'm kind of thinking it's not for me. That's different from the kind of giving up that leaves you with regrets. It's the kind that's informed. It's more like a 26-year-old semi-pro tennis player with bad knees giving up his dream of joining the pro circuit than it is like a high schooler giving up after not qualifying for state one year.