Why I'm Aiming for Fifty Rejections in 2026

Gotta catch 'em all!

Been getting some good mail lately!

Last summer, a friend sent me Naomi Kanakia’s seductively titled interview with Irina Dumitrescu: “How to Review for the New York Times.” It’s full of good insights about reviewing, and there’s a bit where Dumitrescu talks about joining a Facebook group for writers who were trying to collect one hundred rejections.

I was intrigued.

I tried and failed to find the Facebook group, but I did find the piece in Lithub by Kim Liao, “Why You Should Aim for 100 Rejections a Year,” which apparently went viral in 2016. At that time, I was stuck in the thicket of my PhD research and pretty much exclusively reading content for my dissertation, so I missed it, but it’s likely that some of you read it.

Liao isn’t the first person to come up with this idea of collecting rejections, as she acknowledges in the piece, but this approach is so brilliant.

When I was maybe a sophomore in college, I submitted a poem to my college’s literary magazine. I checked my campus mail one day and found my poem returned with a few lines of anonymous feedback, quite possibly from a fellow student who had taken English classes with me and hated me, stating that it was terrible, full of clichés, and that I needed to work on finding some original imagery if I wanted to get published in Kodon.

I’m sure that poem was terrible. I’m pretty sure it was a sonnet about a guy I knew in high school who was a compulsive liar and included a line about chains of death or something equally mortifying. I never submitted poetry to Kodon, or anywhere else, again.

Instead, I became a critic.

Just kidding, kind of. Even when I’m writing reviews, submitting my work can feel pretty vulnerable. But the rejection goal is a phenomenal psychological trick: If I flip the outcome from getting accepted to racking up failures, I submit way more work in more ambitious places. And of course, rejection goals are a way to play the numbers game. More submissions mean, hopefully, more acceptances, too.

During my search for rejection groups last summer, I found a little subreddit where writers were collecting rejections, and I decided to shoot for fifty rejections for the second half of 2025.

There are two ways that I’ve counted rejections since then : 1) when a publication replies to say “no thanks” (this doesn’t happen very often) and 2) when I don’t get a response (this happens a lot). I have a rule that, if I don’t hear back on a pitch within a week or two, I have to send a follow-up email and wait another two weeks before calling it a rejection. Or sometimes publications have a helpful note on their submissions page to the effect of “if you don’t hear from us in x weeks, assume we’re passing.”

Pitching feels lower stakes to me than submitting a fully drafted piece, because it’s basically a way of saying, “hey, here’s an idea — you interested?” And probably they’re not. That’s fine. I get way more nervous when I submit my copy of a piece that an editor wants. I worry about how everyone will judge me when they read it, or that I’ll make some huge factual mistake and accidentally spread fake news or be called out as a slapdash idiot and someone will take away my keyboard. But by the time I’m submitting, the piece is basically accepted, and all I have to do is entrust it to the editors’ hands and hope they take decent care of it. (Pieces can get killed, but this hasn’t happened to me yet.)

In 2025, I only ended up with twenty-odd rejections, but I also had reviews published or forthcoming in a half-dozen publications. I also wrote a few reviews that initially didn’t get picked up but that I was able to publish through Medium. Two of those reviews were “boosted” and got a lot of reads. Because Medium pays partly based on the amount of time people spend reading your posts, I made some decent money (for book reviewing, anyway).

Based on my rate for 2025, I decided to shift my 2026 goal to fifty rejections for the year. Book reviewing is just one part of my workday, and submitting a pitch or two a week is about what I can handle.

The other big change for me this year is that I am only pitching reviews to venues that pay. It narrows the field of publications considerably, but I am getting enough gigs that it works for now.

I’d love to know if you collect rejections, either as a writer or in life more broadly. (Remember the rejection therapy guy?) I’m always curious to hear about how other people think about failure.

Next week, the April book poll!

For fun, a few of the places that have rejected me so far this year:

• Atlanta Journal-Constitution

• Christian Century

• Creative Loafing Tampa

• NPR

• Shelf Awareness

The Work This Week

Reviews out now!

• My review of Rashauna Johnson’s Sweet Home Feliciana is already live on the Washington Independent Review of Books website — record time!

• My review of Meggan Waterson’s The Girl Who Baptized Herself was published in the Christian Century’s April issue. I was assigned this book to review back in August, I think. I had many issues with it. It made me sad, even frustrated, because the project had so much potential — but the execution left a lot to be desired. (Shame on Penguin, again, for letting authors down in both developmental and line-editing. The problems with the book aren’t just Penguin’s fault, though.) I am not sure whether CC will ever let me review for them again, but I am glad for the byline.

Current reviews-in-process:

• I am reading Martin Dugard’s The Long Run, about the history of the marathon. It’s full of intriguing little factoids and would make great Father’s Day gift if you have a dad who’s a runner. I was approximately yesterday years old when I realized while reading this book that my name and Nike have the same etymology (from the Greek for victory). I am struggling to think of ways to pair The Long Run with the Mary Cain memoir, so I might email the Runner’s Life editor to see if he has a preference for pieces on these books.

  • Some tea: Mary Cain’s book, which is extremely critical of Nike’s running program, is titled This Is Not About Running. One of the main Nike coaches has a book coming out this fall. Want to guess what it’s called? This Is About Running. This Is Not About Running. It is already landing in search results before This Is Not About Running. Apparently, Chris Bennett, the Nike coach and author, has been using this as his tagline for years. So, it’s gutsy of Mary Cain to scoop him, and also super interesting because he does not appear in the book at all, from what I can remember, but Cain is sort of implicating him in this very abusive coaching culture she experienced.

  • I guess it’s obvious that I should review those two books together. I’m small potatoes, so I doubt I’ll get on Nike’s blacklist, right?

What else I’m reading:

• Still working through Stoner and To Ride a Rising Storm.

In other news:

• About a month ago, someone found the Medium article about my summer 2025 Artist’s Way group and asked if I’d be leading another one this summer. I’d been on the fence but took this message as a sign to go ahead with it. The group will meet on (most) Tuesdays from 8-9 PM Eastern from May 19-August 18. More info here. Registration is open if you or someone you know would like to join. You’re more than welcome!

The novel WIP as of 3/26/26: 17,828

Rejection count for 2026: 7/50

A note: whenever possible, I use affiliate links from bookshop.org. If you order books from there using my link, your favorite indie bookstore can get a cut, and I will make a tiny amount of money so that I can buy more books.