This is what a rejection letter looks like:
Thank you for your query. I regret I have to pass on many interesting projects due to time constraints. I urge you to query widely of course!
It’s pretty simple, and you can see how it’s been honed through the years to be inhuman enough to discourage you from trying to persuade the person afterwords – which would, of course, necessitate a much harsher shut-down. It feels a lot like a date gone horribly wrong. You know that it’s not really about time constraints. If they really liked you, they’d find a way to fit you in. And you sort of want to know where you went wrong. What can I do so this doesn’t happen again? But you don’t want to be one of those jerks who just won’t take a hint. So you suck it up and try to figure it out on your own. Or you could take the other extreme and rant about how dumb this person was to not recognize such genius! That’s what Gerard Jones does on his site, www.everyonewhosanyone.com. (more…)
I received a response from the publisher I was forwarded to this morning. Very exciting stuff. So exciting, in fact, that before I hurriedly sent off that manuscript, the musician in me, who has been screwed over so many times he’s lost count started to speak up and say, “Hey, this isn’t so different from the music world, and nothing good comes without the feeling that you’ve smashed your head against a billion brick walls.” And so I whipped out my google-fu and did a quick check on this “traditional publisher”. Aha… they are under investigation in Florida and also on at least one “Writer Beware” page. I also found some forum posts from people who have submitted queries to them where the initial responses seemed very similar to the one they sent me. People who went further, were recommended to pay for professional editing. The editors chosen were also associated in some way with this network of companies and were presumably getting kickbacks from referrals. Basically, they seem legit in the sense that they’re not completely scamming you, but more in the sense that you’ll probably end up paying as much as you would if you went the self-publishing route, plus you’d be under contract with them. The warnings also mentioned that the company’s track record of commercial book or script sales is not known. I double-checked on Amazon and found that every title I searched for was indeed listed and they were listed as the publisher, but I wasn’t able to find any book with more than one review, which makes me wonder how much these books are pushed. (more…)
I find myself with mixed feelings about being a writer today. On the one hand, I heard via BoingBoing that poor Harry Nicolaides has found himself in a Thailand prison for the crime of – get this – insulting the royal family. Hell, he didn’t even throw a shoe at them. He just made some harsh remarks in a book hardly anyone had read. Reading the comments I was, on the one hand, inspired by the Western rally cry of free speech, one person after another taking shots at Thailand’s royalty. On the other, I wonder how brave we’d all be if we were in Thailand right now. Hell, even CNN is silent about the actual insults, due to the fear that any correspondents in the country could get similar treatment. And here’s the real kicker. Only fifty copies printed. Fifty. He sold seven. That’s gotta suck. On its own, not so bad. I’ve found that it’s a difficult thing to even write a complete novel, and I remember every so often, between the nail biting of and self criticism that comes with knowing others are (or will be) reading it, to give myself a pat on the back for getting it done. But to write a flop is one thing. To have it come back and bite you in the ass like that (three years in jail!) is insult to injury. Funny thing is, he might very well sell a lot of books this way. I’m certainly interested in seeing what the fuss was all about… and whether it’s any good. (more…)