Why Rejection Doesn’t Mean Your Story Is Bad

As a slush reader for various speculative fiction magazines, I’ve learned one fundamental truth: taste is messy. It’s subjective, inconsistent, and often deeply personal. If you’ve ever submitted a story and been rejected in the first round, you’re in good company—and you might be surprised to know how many of those rejections have less to do with quality and more to do with the unpredictable Venn diagram of reader taste.

The slush pile is the entry point for nearly all unsolicited submissions. Most magazines use a team of slush readers—volunteers or junior staff who read and recommend (or don’t recommend) stories to the editors. We’re the gatekeepers, but not in the sense that we all agree or have a unified standard. In fact, quite the opposite.

I’ve read stories that made me pause in admiration, only to find another slush reader dismissed them as “not working” or “too slow.” I’ve seen pieces I passed on become finalists elsewhere. I’ve seen stories I didn’t connect with at all move forward to publication because they deeply resonated with someone else. Sometimes it’s about structure, pacing, or prose. More often, it’s just… vibes. Did the story hit something in us? Did it feel fresh? Did it come at the right moment, when we were in the right frame of mind?

What this means is that the early rejection you got might have simply missed that crucial overlap in taste—between your voice, your themes, your pacing—and that of the particular slush reader(s) who saw it. And even when it makes it past that first level, it still needs to align with the editor’s sensibilities, the magazine’s tone, current issue themes, and the broader landscape of what’s already in the pipeline.

It’s important to remember that magazines receive hundreds, sometimes thousands, of stories for every open submission window. A lot of good stories get passed over not because they aren’t working, but because they didn’t hit the exact right mix of right reader, right time, right tone. The process is subjective and imperfect—beautifully human, really.

As writers, it’s easy to take rejection as a judgment of our work’s worth. But slush reading has taught me how arbitrary that judgment can be. That story you love? It might get bounced in the first round by one reader and go all the way to publication at another venue.

So please, if you’re submitting your work, don’t let a rejection—especially an early one—convince you it’s not good. Maybe it just hasn’t found its readers yet. Maybe the person who will love it, who will advocate for it, hasn’t opened that file. Yet.

Keep submitting. Keep writing. Trust your voice.

There’s chaos in the slush pile—but there’s also magic.

How do you keep rejection in perspective? As always comments welcome below!