TFTSP: Top 3 Reasons I Mark Your Submission for Rejection
Posted on: September 30, 2026
It’s that time again, my friends.
TIPS FROM THE SLUSH PILE!
As you may (or may not) know, the window for unsolicited manuscripts opened for the first week of September. When it closed, I logged in to see over 300 submissions.
When I went through these new submissions, I kept a tally. And friends, the results were not what I expected.
The Top 3 Reasons I Mark Your Submission for Rejection:
#3 – Already published. Maybe you self-published it a decade ago and want to attract new readers or maybe your publisher recently went under. Still, the book was published, placed for purchase, and may even still be available online. We won’t take those.
#2 – Wrong genre. We don’t publish that genre currently. Y’all. We don’t take sci-fi. Mark as “fantasy” all you want, but when I open the document and see your spaceship battles and robot uprisings, I’m gonna know this is sci-fi. It could be the most magnificent story ever written, but if it’s not something we publish, I’m marking it.
#1 – Word Count Too Low – Fully half of the marked rejections! I’m not talking about “barely misses the low end.” I’m marking stories that are a third of the word count they should be. Your YA Fantasy that’s only 15k? That’s a short story, my friend. We received a manuscript that was 35 words. Thirty-five. The query for it was longer. (And no, it wasn’t a picture book, which we also don’t accept so it would have gotten marked for that anyway.)
But hey! There wasn’t a single submission that didn’t attach a file or attached the wrong file! So gold star for you there!