Constant Content

Five years ago or so, I left CC due to getting impossible rewrites. I already made a post about this, but to make a long story short, the editor wanted me to use less of a formal tone. Doing that, however, would have cost me my regular buyers who were professionals in the field.

I really want to come back. Before I sink serious time into new CC articles,however, I was hoping you guys could tell me roughly what percentage of your rewrites come back to you for opinion-based issues on the part of the editor rather than actual spelling/grammatical errors.

I'm not the most prolific author, so my experience may not be typical, but I get very few articles sent back purely due to an editor's opinion. I had a rejection recently where I'd described an article as "informative" in the short summary and the editor thought this was breaching the rules on promotional content. I could have argued with that but it was quicker and easier just to change the short summary. A while back I had a query over the way a sentence was punctuated so I sent a note to the editor explaining that I was using a subordinate clause and that the punctuation was correct; the article was accepted almost immediately. But if I do get rejections, they're usually because I've redrafted when I'm tired and there is an actual grammar or punctuation mistake.

For me, it's a pretty low percentage, like low single digits, but it does happen. Ironically, I sometimes get dinged for not being formal enough. And, as with your example, the advice runs completely counter to what my clients want.

Fortunately, it seems to be just one or a few bad editors, so it hasn't been too much trouble to just pull those rare pieces and resubmit them later to have them approved without comment.

I've been on the platform for about a year and no opinion-based rejection so far. It's usually about links or a few silly typos that I made.