E-Journal

Rejection Letters
I thought it might be interesting to list all the rejections letters that my students and I received during the 10-week course I teach at UCI titled Get Published, Get Paid as a Freelance Writer.

Here’s a rejection I received recently from Playboy magazine about an article I pitched on Tony Tetro, a friend of mine who’s willing to share with me all the secrets of his trade as a former art forger.

“Scott, thank you for the query about Tony Tetro. I don’t think it’s quite right for us. We have just published a long, long story about the theft of the Scream and that’s probably enough from the art world for a while.”
Chip Rowe, Senior Editor
Playboy Magazine

Scott,
While the letter from Playboy is amusing, doesn’t it highlight the need to target the right material to the write outlet? Without seeing your query letter it is difficult to ascertain how you pitched this piece, but let’s face it, despite using some top writers for a story or two to bolster its pretensions to having some socially redeeming value, Playboy editors know that most readers of Playboy don’t peruse the mag for the well-written articles, or esoteric info on the art world. While Playboy probably pays well for a story, perhaps the lesson to be learned is to better target whom you pitch to. E.g., did you try: New York Arts Magazine, Art News, Smithsonian, The New Yorker, Art in America, Art Forum and Modern Artists, the latter publication particularly looks for well-written pieces about art and the art world? I’d be interested in seeing your pitch and the response from a magazine whose readers are either art dealers/buyers or artists and who would probably be much more interested in the mechanics of forgery. What do you think?
Comment by Solange

Solange,
I don’t necessarily agree with your assessment that Playboy readers wouldn’t enjoy an
“esoteric” article on the art world. Yes, it’s true that the magazine focuses primarily on scantily clad women. But so what? It’s still a well-written magazine. Thanks for the suggestions, though, on other magazines I might consider pitching my story idea on art forger Tony Tetro.
Comment by Scott H.

Solange,
I appreciate your interest in this discussion. It sounds as though you understand the freelance market fairly well. Question: What’s your writing background? And for the record, yes I read (read!) Playboy magazine every month. And the photo-to-written-word ratio this month (excluding the cover) is roughly 35 pages of photos in a 164-page book (roughly 20%).
Let me think about posting my query letter. You’re right, that might be helpful.
Comment by Scott H.

Scott,
I was doing some research on an idea I have about rejection letters which is how I found my way to your website. I think a rejection letter is only truly useful as a learning tool if one has the query letter and/or the work itself to review in comparison. Nonetheless, here’s a link to the first rejection of a novel by Ursula K. LeGuin that she posts and which is interesting in highlighting just how wrong editors can be. http://www.ursulakleguin.com/Reject.html
Also, you might find it fun to check-out http://rejectioncollection.com/rcollection/index.php3.
Comment by Solange

Solange,
Wowser! The rejection letter Ms. LeGuin received seems too weird to be real. What kind of person would take the time to write such a review? But the website you suggested rejectioncollection.com is engaging on several levels. Thanks for the tip. Students who bothered to read this far should definitely check it out. Dealing with rejection is a big part of the freelance world.

And here’s the query I sent Playboy:

Dear Mr. Rowe:
Would your publication be interested in the preparatory drawing of one of Rembrandt’s most famous etchings, Naked Woman Sitting on the Mound, worth in today’s market somewhere in the neighborhood of $5 million?
The paper of this particular preparatory drawing can be carbon-dated to the early 1630s. The black chalk used is that preferred by Rembrandt through the mid-1630s.

The signature of Pierre Mariette, dealer in prints and drawings, scrawled on the back of the work, is rendered in a cocktail of bistre and iron gall ink: today’s technology cannot determine the age of the ink, common for that era, but can identify its composition. The signature is indiscernible from the Mariette signature inscribed on the back of authenticated works. Even the collector’s stamp of Nicolas Flinck’s on of Rembrandt’s favorite student, and a drawing dealer who traded with Pierre Mariette is identical in ink and mark to the Flinck stamp on several authenticated Rembrandts.

All this will prove compelling evidence that the drawing is “authentic.”

Of course, it’s a forgery created by Tony Tetro, the man Los Angeles District Attorney Ira Reiner dubbed “the single largest forger of artwork in the United States.”
Tetro’s “retired” now, but he’s set about creating the definitive art forgery, one that could even pass the MET’s curator of old master drawings. And he’s prepared to send the Rembrandt drawing to you, to afford you the opportunity to show it to your friends in the art world, and to an expert in old master drawings.
Trust me on this one point, they will find this quite interesting, a “major find” if it were real.

Tetro is an artistic prodigy. Instead of developing his own original style and work, he chose a career as an “emulator,” rendering lithographs, drawings, and watercolors of Chagall, Picasso, Miro, and the old masters, that were either indistinguishable from an original, or seamlessly slipped into an artist’s oeuvre, down to the aging, discoloration, and distress of a work subjected to hundreds of years of stress.
What started as simply a sideline eventually mushroomed into a multimillion-dollar business, one that threw into question the distinction between a “masterpiece” and a “reproduction.” As Larry Steinman of the Carol Lawrence Gallery told the BBC, “there’s probably a Tony Tetro in every major museum in the world.”

Arrested in 1989, Tetro today is the only living American artist slapped with a court order mandating he clearly sign his name to the back of every work he creates, so that no Tetro may again be passed off as an original and sold for an outrageous sum.
Naturally, Tetro has no intention of selling his final definitive “masterpiece”—that would be illegal. But he is interested in sharing with your readers his knowledge about his former trade. And he’s willing to allow me the opportunity to write a story about the process by which a former convicted art forger creates the perfect art forgery.

I can have the Rembrandt’s preparatory drawing shipped overnight to your office.
I look forward to hearing from you.
Comment by Scott

Scott,
Thanks for putting-up the query, I do think it’s useful to compare the “offer” and the response. In looking at your query, I wonder why you thought that this was the right pitch for Playboy? I don’t want to step on your toes on this since you’re the one who teaches this class and have far more experience than I do at queries and writing for a variety of pubs– I have been freelancing on and off for about 15 years– but, one of the things that I was told when I was starting out was to try as much as possible to tailor each query to the publication and your query letter seems pretty generic, e.g. it could go anywhere. I was also told to check back issues to make sure they hadn’t already done something that in the fevered brain of an editor would seem too similar–which is one of the reasons given by this editor for rejecting your story–a recent piece on “The Scream” hence in an editor’s mind, another artistry think piece. I once pitched a story about the surge of new haute cuisine restaurants in Ireland to a well-known travel editor only to receive the response that they had recently done a story on England—not even on food–just on a nearby country and that was enough to nix my piece. Go figure!

The other thing I was told was to give them a taste of the actual story–a bit of your writing right up front so that the editor can sense if it’s a fit. For this story, I might have pitched something like: “Faking it. Most women claim that they have done it at one time or another, but there’s only one guy who did it so well he got arrested!” Maybe that would catch a Playboy editor’s attention?! Also, rather than pitch showing how to fake a painting–I went onto Tony Tetro’s website and it seems he faked a vintage Ferrari Testarossa–now that might be more interesting to Playboy readers–how to fake a vintage car!

Anyway, I hope that this information is useful to your students. As for your story, I have some ideas for angles/pitches, but this doesn’t seem the forum. It’s often easier to see how to help others than your own stuff. If interested, you have my email.
Comment by Solange

Chip,
Doubtless your words will carry a lot of weight with the students who read these postings. Thank you for the feedback. Lesson learned: never try to mine for deeper meaning in an editor’s rejection letter, just move on to the next publication.
Comment by Scott

Scott,
A few thoughts:
As a former editor at Men’s Fitness and Men’s Health, I absolutely agree that you can’t take rejection letters personally. Nor can you take a lack of a rejection letter personally. I mean, I have a freakin’ National Magazine Award, and I’ve never heard back from a couple of editors I pitched. It’s not about you; it’s about the editor and how you catch him or her on the day you pitch the story.

One general tip: Avoid pitching “wheelhouse” stories to major magazines. In the case of Men’s Health, for example, you don’t pitch an “abs” story unless you know someone on the inside and know that you have an angle the magazine hasn’t seen before.

Remember also: Even if you read a magazine cover to cover for a year, the editors are still working six issues beyond the last one you’ve seen. Right now, for example, March issues of magazines are on newsstands. April issues are off to the printer. May issues, for the most part, are in the final stages of fact-checking, if not layout and design. June copy is in from writers, and is in the back-and-forth stages between writers and editors. July, August, and September copy has probably been assigned, or at least decided upon. I’m already talking to one magazine about a big editorial package they want to do in 2006.

As Chip Rowe said, it helps to look at what you can do for a magazine, as opposed to what the magazine can do for you. Those little front-of-book items are the hardest for editors to find. They don’t pay much, and they often don’t carry individual bylines, but if you can supply a few to an editor, you’ll find yourself with a grateful friend on the inside. Also remember: The editor who does the front-of-book sections is often a rising star at a major magazine. He or she will probably move up to editing departments and features in the next few years, at that magazine or another. (At that level, they jump around fast.) Make a couple friends like that, and front of book assignments this year could very well turn into department assignments in the next year or two, and then features soon after.
Hope this helps!
Comment by Lou Schuler

Everyone,
Here’s a recent rejection letter from David Granger, editor of Esquire magazine. This particular letter has the standard rejection line, “It is not quite right. . . “, although he did specifically mentioned the story idea ("artwork forger Tony Tetro").

Dear Mr. Hays:
I have your letter proposing an article about artwork forger Tony Tetro. I am afraid it is not quite right for Esquire, but I thank you for thinking of us.
Sincerely,
David Granger

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