Academic Publishing and The Thrill of Repeated Rejection

For the past three years, I’ve submitted to various peer-reviewed, academic print journals my essay “Media Texts and Textual Memories: Reconstructing the Star Image of Humphrey Bogart through Lauren Bacall’s Autobiography.” And for the past three years it’s been rejected and, well, sort of accepted.

I began by submitting my essay, which took me four months to research/write and a version of which I’d delivered successfully to an academic audience five months earlier, to one well-known and well-respected media studies journal. Months later, I received a decision and the readers’ comments. Two of the reviews are virtually glowing, e.g., “highly readable, erudite, and well-researched”; “well-grounded in empirical examples; it makes a solid incremental conclusion to our understanding of the particular star image of Bogart and a more general contribution to understanding of the complicated means through which star characters are constructed.” Essentially, these two readers said they would print the essay as is. The third reviewer, however, found problems with the piece and offered hardly anything positive, e.g., “the thesis is not supported; it’s written fairly well at the sentence level, but needs reconceptualization and reorganization,” etc. Since this particular journal requires three yeses for publication, my paper was ultimately denied, even though two readers okayed it on the spot. Frustration, Round 1.

I moved on and, over the next two years, sent the essay to at least four other scholarly journals. The first editor rejected the paper outright, claiming that although it was well conceived and argued, it did not fit his journal’s mission quite well enough. Okay, I can understand that. Next, two editors wanted to publish the essay if I amended parts to better fit the scope of their journals. I honored their requests, took into consideration their recommendations, and spent a month revising each. I resubmitted, and after nearly a year of waiting (roughly half a year for each journal), my essay was rejected again. Frustration, Rounds 3 and 4. Finally, I tried one more print publication, and after seven months of waiting, I was turned down with virtually no explanation at all; I received an email containing three short sentences of “peer review.”

My other peer-reviewed publications have come so easily: I research and write the article, submit, wait a few months, receive an email of approval, and then see my work in print a semester later. Even the Shakespeare anthology I’m currently co-editing has been virtually effortless: we put out a CFP, selected the most compelling essays, wrote a proposal, waited a couple of weeks, and received a contract. This Bogart/Bacall essay, however, has been a nightmare — okay, not a nightmare, but a weird dream that has lasted three years. I’ll not spend this space droning on about print publications, their looooooong turnaround time, or their impending demise (people like this writer and this one and this one and these authors do that all the time) because overall, my experience with them has been smooth, easy, enjoyable. I am, however, disappointed that I’ve not found a (print) home for this project and, moreover, that I’ll not be able to add it to my vita.

That said, I have this blog now, so I’m going to post my essay here — all 6,500 words of it — because, like the reviewer above who endorsed my writing, I still think it offers an “understanding of the particular star image of Bogart and a more general contribution to understanding of the complicated means through which star characters are constructed.” So please, take a look at “Media Texts and Textual Memories: Reconstructing the Star Image of Humphrey Bogart through Lauren Bacall’s Autobiography“; your comments, constructive and otherwise, are welcome.
Related Reading: The 5 Species of Journal Reviewers

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