Dear John letter · 4:03am Nov 24th, 2013
Today I got a rejection e-mail from Equestria Daily. MLP x Ghost Trick: Death Wish will not be featuring on their blog.
I'm trying my best to make myself not care. I submitted it just to see what would happen, really, so it doesn't matter to me whether it gets on or not. However, traditionally I'm not good with having my work disregarded or being ignored when I'm actively trying to get attention.
Of the six bullet points of rejection reasons in the e-mail, four were basically results of my adherence to Ghost Trick in terms of presentation, namely the centered thought portions and [Fate Averted!] being noted as an example of an "immersion breaking scene transition," which indicates that they did not follow my suggestion of having the pre-reading done by a pre-reader who played Ghost Trick before. Comments aren't always the best criticism, but most of them are positive and love how much like the game it feels; to someone that hasn't played it, it'd probably be a little confusing, but I think I wrote it with fans of Ghost Trick in mind.
The other two points were "Needs more detail when he's possessing her (when the cores are mentioned; what's going on?)" and "Talking heads." On the former, yeah, I didn't really explain what cores were, I guess. A lot of the details of the mechanics of the powers of the dead were skipped over since, well, it's from Sissel's point of view. I suppose repeating them to himself would make sense were this a fangame and I needed to provide a tutorial, but as a fanfic, it felt sorta unnecessary, especially since, again, my target audience basically consists of people who were fans of Ghost Trick already.
As to the latter... well, I suppose that could also be attributed to the dialogue-driven nature of Ghost Trick's narrative, but I would be amiss if I didn't point out that this may be a bit of a problem with me as well. Aside from this fic, all my creative writing has been into my script-style riffs, so maybe it's carrying over from that and encouraged by Ghost Trick's style? Hell if I know, but at least "talking heads" is a straight-up valid problem. I'll be sure to try avoiding that going forward.
So aside from that, best I can figure was that I was rejected for being too niche. Which is... not all that surprising, really. Ghost Trick is just one non-mainstream game or series I enjoy, as one can tell from half the references I make in my riffs. In the end, I call it their loss.
Bah...
I still wuv it. 
EQD is notorious for rejecting crossovers due to the pre-readers either not being familiar with the crossover material, or even worse there was one guy who was rejected because the pre-reader didn't actually like the crossover material. Which begs the question, why are you pre-reading crossover fics of crossover material that you actively dislike?
As with anything EQD, beware of bias, contrivances, shenanigans, unprofessionalism, and overall rudeness.
Glad that you at least got a valid point from them to improve on; that's more than a lot of people can say.
Oh don't let those EQD dudes get to you. Those guys are awfully picky with the fanfics they promote. And the guy below me is right, they don't even pre-read the crossovers properly. Mostly because none of the pre-readers are familiar with the crossover material and they just disregard it as a failed attempt.
You said it yourself. The audience you're going for are Ghost Trick fans like myself, and we very much appreciated your first chapter because you made it feel like the game itself (huh, that's a lot of words ending with -self lol.)
Anyways, there are other ways in promoting your story. The internet is a huuuge place so don't give up just yet
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I've got mirrors of Death Wish on both FanFiction.net and now Archive of Our Own, though of course they haven't gotten nearly as much attention as here.
I suck at promoting stuff, incidentally.