Why you don't get published.
Thursday, June 29, 2006
Q & A 59 Can I break the rules?
Suppose you indicate in your submission guidelines that you prefer to receive a complete manuscript. A hapless author, realizing that would mean consigning her ms. to 8 exclusive months in your office, sends you a query, short synopsis, and 5pp sample instead. (Which, of course, she also sends simultaneously to all your competitors.)
Do you fly into a rage and blacklist the author for not following directions? Do you understand her pathetic attempt to cut down unneccesary wait time, grit your teeth, and read the query? Or do you send her a silent thanks for not shouldering you with 200 more pages of purpleish prose?
You being you, I assume that all three paths end in rejection. I'd just like to prevent the four-month wait between "no"s.
Make a list of every publisher or agent that handles what you write. Put the ones that want an 8-month exclusive at the bottom of the list. Put the ones that take simultaneous submissions and respond in a week at the top. Most of your list will be in the middle. If you don't want to work with those at the bottom, tear the list at your cutoff point and throw the bottom half away. Feel good about it. Who do they think they are?
Now you have a list of those whose terms you can tolerate. Tolerate them.
Don't submit to all of them at once--you may decide tomorrow that what you're submitting is crap, and you'll want some options open after you fix it.
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6 comments:
Suppose you indicate in your submission guidelines that you prefer to receive a complete manuscript. A hapless author, realizing that would mean consigning her ms. to 8 exclusive months in your office...
Is it me, or haven't I woken up yet (the latter is very possible)?
Since when is sending in a full considered an exclusive? Unless the agent and you, the writer, specifically set it up that way?
~Nancy
Verification: vwrog...exactly how I'm feeling at the moment...
EE isn't an agent, so I took the question to mean the submission was to publishers. My impression was that most publishers do want exclusives on full manuscripts and didn't want simultaneous submissions.
That was my impression, too, Kendall.
Verification: euuuq -- jerseygirl and I must be having the same type of day.
I always decide tomorrow that what I'm submitting is crap.
Malia,
euuuq is the noise my husband makes after guzzling half a two-liter bottle of coke in one go. Actually, it's more like "eeeeeuuuuuuuuuuq!"
There are, to my knowledge, two sf publishers that want to see the whole ms. Others want the first three chapters and a synopsis, and each one of them has a different idea about what the synopsis should look like. Most of them, however, do not want to hear from authors at all, only agents.
So while I'm sending the novel to one publisher at a time, following the most recent iteration of their rules that I can find, I'm also sending qyeries to agents who seem to be representing people whose writing might be something like mine, maybe.
So there's a kind of simultaneous submission going on, but the queries to agents aren't like the submissions to editors. I think.
Jerseygirl, the best advice I've ever gotten about the wait for an answer is to write another book.(and in my experience four months is pretty quick -- I've had up to four years before I decided that the publisher was never going to get back to me. I've decided that after a year or so, if I get no answer to two or three followups, I submit to somewhere else).
Ack, I knew my brain was out to lunch. Or something. :-)
~Nancy
Verification: adykt...the Old German way to spell "addict"...
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