You've written a great short story or article. You know it's good because your writing teacher, your critique group, your intuition, and even your dog tells you it is so. You've made a list of all the potential markets for your work and off it goes on its submission journey until every single one of your carefully chosen markets rejects your wonderful piece of writing. Now what? Do you give up on your manuscript and hide it at the back of your filing cabinet where it will lay dormant forever? If you're as stubborn as I am (and I truly believe that as a writer you must be stubborn to succeed), you may not want to surrender so easily.

All right, so you may have exhausted all the "regular" possibilities, but how about creating new ones? Every piece has an obvious audience, but there are sure to be secondary elements inside your writing that may appeal to a very different market.

Here's an example of what I mean. About four years ago, I created a short story for middle-graders entitled "Spinach and Broccoli Pie Surprise." It was about a girl and her bully and had been written as an assignment for a writing course. My teacher loved it and even suggested possible markets for it. But after all seven magazine publishers on my list had rejected it; I decided it was time to take another look at my story.

One element that stood out was that the main character was vegetarian. As I mentioned before, this was a bully story, but what if it might appeal to a vegetarian magazine publisher instead? I thus decided to create a different list made up of vegetarian magazines that also contained material about or aimed at kids. The first publisher on my new list was Vegetarian Baby & Child, which is an e-zine found at www.vegetarianbaby.com. I contacted the editor, Melanie Wilson, by e-mail and got an acceptance the very next day! The funny thing is that I had not realized that they didn't publish fiction at the time. But since my story has been posted (and last time I checked, my story was still up), over a dozen more have been added giving rise to a whole new creative writing section as well as a new market for fiction writers. Talk about an unexpected chain of events. And all that due to the fact that I refused to give up on my story!

So, how far can you stretch this search for secondary elements? I would say as far as you want to! My first-ever published piece was an article, which showed teens how to make their own bread from scratch called "The Wonderful World of Bread." After seven rejections (here's that "lucky" number again), I had exhausted the more general teen publishers listed in the Magazine Markets for Children's Writers, which I was using exclusively at the time. I took a long look at my article, and I mean long! Let's face it, what element can possibly stand out about bread? Then, it hit me. How about God himself? It appeared to me that religion and bread went hand in hand as most religions throughout history have had some kind of link to bread. Yes, I admit that it did seem like quite a stretch of the imagination, but as the whole point of the exercise was to get my manuscript out there again, I was not about to convince myself that it was a silly notion.

To me, the bigger problem was that I was not familiar with religious magazines (Not that I considered myself conversant with vegetarian magazines for the story above, but since I have always had an avid interest in health and fitness, I felt I was on familiar territory.) Allowing my stubborn streak free rein, I forged ahead and sent my article to Susie Shellenberger, editor of Brio since the submission guidelines stated that one of the things published were how-to articles, and bingo! My piece ended up appearing in print as well as on their website at www.briomag.com.

The nice thing about this simple technique is that it will open up new doors for your writing and lead you to markets that you would never have considered otherwise. Now, go find those much-loved-but-much-rejected manuscripts at the back of your filing cabinet (or wherever it is you stashed them) and search for secondary elements. Give your work the shot at publication you know it deserves.