People sometimes ask me, usually after a drink or two at industry events, what we actually say when we reject a manuscript. They’re expecting something dramatic, or at least something revealing. They imagine that rejection letters contain coded messages, hidden cruelties, or secret formulas that, if deciphered, would unlock the mystery of what publishers want. The reality is both simpler and more complicated than that. Our rejection letters are, in fact, carefully written documents that say a great deal, just not always in the ways that the recipient expects.

Let me start with the numbers, because they provide necessary context. ScrollWorks receives roughly 1,200 to 1,500 unsolicited submissions per year. We accept between four and six manuscripts for publication. That means we reject approximately 99.6 percent of what we receive. I’ll sit with that number for a moment because I think it’s important. If you’ve submitted to us and been rejected, you are in the vast, vast majority. The rejection says almost nothing about you or your writing. It says that we had very few slots and an enormous number of submissions, and the math didn’t work out in your favor.

This is, I realize, cold comfort when you’re sitting with a rejection email in your inbox. I know this because I was a writer before I was a publisher, and I received enough rejections to wallpaper a small bathroom. The experience of being rejected is always personal, even when the rejection itself isn’t. So I want to take you behind the curtain and explain exactly what our rejection letters mean, what the different versions signal, and how to read them as usefully as possible.

We have, roughly, four tiers of rejection. I’m going to describe each one honestly, because I think writers deserve transparency about this process even when the transparency is uncomfortable.

The first tier is the form rejection. This is a brief, polite email that thanks the writer for their submission, states that we won’t be pursuing the project, and wishes them well in finding the right publisher. It’s standardized, which means every writer who receives it gets essentially the same language. We send this response to about 80 percent of our submissions. It goes out within four to six weeks of receiving the manuscript.

I know that form rejections feel impersonal, and they are impersonal. But here’s what I want writers to understand about why we use them. At 1,200 submissions a year, if I wrote a personalized response to every one, I would spend my entire working life writing rejection letters and never actually publish any books. The form rejection is a necessary concession to volume. It is not a statement about the quality of the writing. Many submissions that receive form rejections are perfectly competent manuscripts that simply aren’t right for our list. Some are quite good. A few are excellent but duplicate something we’ve already acquired or are planning to acquire. The form rejection carries no information about quality. It carries only the information that we’re not going to publish this particular book.

The second tier is what I privately call the “warm form.” It’s still a standard template, but it includes one or two sentences of genuine, specific feedback. Something like: “We were impressed by the strength of your prose and the originality of your premise, but ultimately felt the manuscript wasn’t quite the right fit for our current list.” This goes to about 10 to 12 percent of our submissions. If you receive a warm form from us, it means your manuscript made it past the initial screening, was read with attention, and was discussed internally before being declined. It means we think you can write. It means that with a different manuscript, or with this manuscript after further revision, you might well be someone we’d want to work with.

I want to linger on this tier because I think it’s the one that frustrates writers the most. You get a letter that says something nice but still rejects you. The niceness can feel like a consolation prize, or worse, like a cruel tease. But from our side of the table, the warm form represents genuine respect for the writer’s work. We are explicitly choosing to acknowledge something good in the manuscript rather than sending the standard form. When we say “we were impressed,” we mean it. Publishing is too exhausting and too poorly compensated for anyone in it to waste time being dishonest in rejection letters.

The third tier is the personalized rejection. This is a letter written specifically for this manuscript by the editor who read it, offering detailed feedback about what worked, what didn’t, and sometimes suggestions for revision. These go to about 5 to 8 percent of our submissions. If you receive a personalized rejection from us, pay very close attention to it. It means your manuscript was seriously considered for acquisition. It means at least two people on our team read the full manuscript and discussed it in an editorial meeting. It means we see real potential in the work and are investing our time in explaining why, despite that potential, we’re passing.

Personalized rejections are, frankly, the hardest letters I write. They require honesty about the manuscript’s weaknesses, which feels uncomfortable when you know how much effort the writer put into the work. But they also require genuine engagement with the manuscript’s strengths, because a personalized rejection that’s all criticism is just a mean letter. The balance I’m aiming for is: “Here’s what you did well. Here’s what prevented us from moving forward. Here’s what we think would make this manuscript stronger.” Whether the writer acts on that feedback is up to them, but the feedback itself is given in good faith and based on careful reading.

I want to share some of the most common reasons manuscripts receive personalized rejections at our press, because I think these patterns are useful for writers to know about.

The single most common reason is voice. The manuscript is competent, sometimes very competent, but the prose doesn’t have a distinctive enough voice to carry a full book. The writing is correct without being compelling. The sentences are well-constructed but could have been written by any of a hundred different writers. At ScrollWorks, where we publish literary fiction, voice is the thing we care about most, and its absence is the most frequent reason we pass on otherwise strong manuscripts. I’ve written dozens of rejection letters that essentially say: “The craft here is solid, but we’re looking for something more idiosyncratic, more personal, more surprising in the prose.”

The second most common reason is pacing. Many manuscripts we receive have strong beginnings and strong endings but sag in the middle. The writer had a clear sense of how to start the story and where they wanted it to end, but the 200 pages in between feel padded, repetitive, or insufficiently structured. This is a solvable problem, and when I flag it in a personalized rejection, I’m genuinely hoping the writer will revise and resubmit. Some of our published books, including The Cartographer’s Dilemma, went through exactly this arc: initial submission, personalized rejection with specific pacing feedback, revision, resubmission, and acceptance.

The third common reason is what I think of as “familiarity.” The manuscript is well-executed but tells a story I’ve read too many times before. The troubled marriage. The family secrets revealed at a funeral. The coming-of-age in a small town. These are not bad premises, and I’ve published books with all of these setups. But the execution needs to bring something genuinely new, some angle or insight or structural innovation that makes the familiar feel fresh. When a manuscript competently treads well-worn ground without surprising me, I find it very hard to champion it through the publication process, which requires sustained enthusiasm over a period of one to two years.

The fourth tier of rejection, the rarest, is the revise-and-resubmit invitation, commonly called an R&R. This is not technically a rejection at all. It’s a letter that says: “We are very interested in this manuscript but don’t feel it’s ready for publication in its current form. Here are the specific changes we’d like to see. If you’re willing to revise along these lines and resubmit, we will read the revised version with serious intent to acquire.” We issue maybe two or three of these per year. They represent our highest level of engagement short of an offer.

An R&R is, in a sense, a vote of confidence. We’re telling the writer that their book is good enough for us to invest editorial time in before we’ve even decided to publish it. But I want to be honest: an R&R is not a guarantee of publication. We’ve issued R&Rs that didn’t result in offers, either because the revision didn’t address our concerns sufficiently or because our editorial priorities shifted between the initial letter and the resubmission. Writers who receive an R&R should treat it seriously and work hard on the revision, but they should also maintain realistic expectations about the outcome.

Now, let me address some of the things that writers read into rejection letters that aren’t actually there.

“Not right for our list” does not mean “your writing is bad.” It means what it says: the manuscript doesn’t fit with the other books we’re publishing. Fit is a real consideration. A press that publishes literary fiction about the American South is probably not going to acquire your speculative novel set in space, no matter how good it is. When we say a manuscript isn’t right for our list, we’re often genuinely recommending that the writer look at publishers whose catalogs more closely match their work.

“We didn’t connect with the material” is another phrase that gets over-interpreted. It doesn’t mean we hated the book. It means that the subjective, personal element of editorial enthusiasm, the feeling that you absolutely must publish this book, wasn’t there. This is the most honest thing I can tell you about how acquisitions work: we don’t publish books we merely think are good. We publish books we’re passionate about. Books that keep us up at night, that we can’t stop talking about, that we can imagine championing for years. The gap between “this is good” and “I have to publish this” is the space where most rejections happen.

“We encourage you to submit future work” is not a throwaway line. If we say this, we mean it. Our form rejections don’t include this phrase. We add it deliberately to signal that we want to hear from this writer again. If you received a rejection from us that ends with an invitation to submit future work, please actually do that. We’re keeping an eye out for your next manuscript.

One more piece of advice for interpreting our rejections, and rejections from any publisher: the speed of the response is informative. If you hear back from us within two weeks, your manuscript was likely filtered at the initial screening stage. If it takes six to eight weeks, it was probably read more carefully. If it takes three months or more, your manuscript almost certainly went through multiple reads and internal discussion. A slow rejection is, paradoxically, a better signal than a fast one. It means people spent time with your work, and time is the scarcest resource in any editorial department.

I want to end with something that I hope is genuinely comforting, or at least genuinely useful. The publishing industry’s rejection rate is staggering. Even the most successful authors alive today have boxes full of rejection letters. The rejection rate at any reputable press, including ours, reflects the simple mathematics of limited capacity and unlimited submissions. It does not reflect a judgment about the value of your work, the seriousness of your commitment, or the viability of your future career.

What I hope our rejection letters actually communicate, beneath the polite language and the standard phrasing, is this: we read your work, we took it seriously, and we’re grateful that you trusted us with it. The submission itself is an act of courage that I respect enormously. Not everyone who writes a book is willing to send it out into the world and risk being told no. You did that. Whatever our letter says, that matters.

Keep writing. Keep submitting. And if the letter from us includes a personalized note, read it twice. We meant every word.