Why I Hate Sending Rejection Letters

It's Soul-Crushing Day! In other words, the day I spend raking through my slush pile and deciding what to reject or pass onto the editorial board.
These are hard days all around, for both a busy editor and some poor author consigned to a day of tears. But I open that slush pile expecting that I'll reject most if not all of it, and hoping desperately to be proven wrong.

Before I became an editor, I had a very different opinion of that faceless reader on the other side, who either had no feelings whatever or gleefully tore through the submission pile with vicious claws looking for lives to ruin.
Now, I have a confession to make. As an editor, I don't like sending rejection letters.

First, on a selfish note, they sometimes make a lot of trouble for me. Angry authors flare up via email to demand why I didn't love them. Some of them call me directly, which makes for a very awkward situation for me. What can I say? The professional response is "We're sorry, your book is not what we're looking for/ready for the market." Trust me, this does nothing to assuage an author who's already got flames on the side of their face.

About 15% of my authors after being rejected.

((By the way, NEVER shout back to an editor about why they did not accept you. It does not make them feel good about you as a potential author, and you may sabotage further attempts at acceptance.))

Second, they're vague. Professional rejection letters are written to hurt as few feelings as possible, and thereby hopefully prevent the above angry-author scenario. But this is never enough, and I don't want to write a time-consuming letter about everything that the submission did to underwhelm me. It's that or be blunt about their writing quality or arrogance in their query letter. And I'd really rather not crush all their dreams.

Third, on an unselfish note, I'm an empathetic person. Having received rejection letters, I know how it feels to open up my inbox and find such a response to writing I spent hours (or years) on. So I can only picture the crestfallen look on an author's face.

Just picture this when you're about to send that nasty reply. Effective, no?

Fourth, what worries me once I press Send is that this author may have had a real talent budding under what was then merely slush, but their disappointment and sorrow will crush that future. I worry that this author, like many others, will decide that after one rejection (or twenty) that it's not worth it anymore. Sure, some people are not writers. But they're not writers now.

Fun as this looks, I'm sure your novel would disagree.

Regardless, it's still my job to send rejection letters.

The way I want my authors to picture a rejection letter is not as a rant of how much I hated them/their writing. I want them to picture it as opportunity.

So an editor didn't like your story. So twenty editors didn't like your story. Find out why!
Maybe you've landed on a genre so overdone every publisher is scared of it. It's not impossible to alter your story to something new and upcoming. Maybe you haven't quite hit the interest and readability of your target audience.

If you are truly serious about writing, get out there and do your research. See what's new on the market, what's similar to your book. Join writing groups and polish your prose. Grow your platform. That one rejection from that one evil, clawed editor happily chewing your work apart cannot hold you down. If you really want to make your book shine, prove them wrong.
Prove me wrong.