The salon de refuses of publishing
Here’s another of those perennial articles listing the blockbuster books that were initially rejected by publisher after publisher.
I remember I used to own a book that was a collection of editors’ rejection letters for great classic and popular works. It made for entertaining reading—comforting as well, back in the days when I was sending out my own fiction and poetry.
One case I particularly remember, although it’s not on the above list, was that of James Alfred Wright, a man you probably know better as James Herriot. His books of veterinary vignettes are vastly entertaining and really well-written, too, little masterpieces of their genre, and have rightly been extraordinarily popular ever since their publication. But their publication took a while. I can’t find the story online, but they certainly were not grabbed by the first editor who read them, despite their obvious broad appeal and high quality.
The whole thing makes one wonder whether publishers have any sense at all. Perhaps editors are so busy trying to finesse the moneymaking part of it that they lose sight of what people might like to read and why. Like hidebound generals, they’re always fighting the last war, trying to re-create the last best-seller, and have become afraid of their own shadows and of what they perceive as risk.
And no, this isn’t sour grapes. I haven’t sent out any of my “creative” work in over a decade; really don’t even think about it as a rule. It seems so archaic, trying to please the gatekeepers whose minds were running along a different track than mine, and who only accepted an infinitesimal percentage of submissions anyway. And the copying expense, pre-home-computer! And the postage (including the SASE, or “self-addressed stamped envelope”) pre-email! And the waiting time! Some periodicals replied quickly, sending rejection letters back with such force and vigor that I imagined them as having bounced off a springy backboard. Others would sit on things for many months and then finally reply with the ubiquitous form letter, if they even deigned to grace me with the courtesy of a reply.
Worst of all were the near-misses. Somewhere in my musty files I have a series of “we almost took this but not quite, and please send us more” letters from fairly well-known publications. That and a dime (or two bucks and change at Starbucks these days) will get you a cup of coffee, and in fact many of these publications are now either defunct or no longer publish short stories, which was the genre I was submitting.
The worst experience of that type was a publication which had accepted a story of mine pending my changing a couple of sentences, which I promptly did and sent it back. They were going to pay me three thousand dollars, too, which was quite a bit at the time (late 80s?)—or even now, for that matter. But then I got a letter from them saying they had changed editors and were no longer going to be accepting or publishing fiction at all. I seem to have entered the field right on the cusp of the decline of the magazine short story.
It all seems like ancient history to me now. I’ve grown accustomed to having the freedom to write what I want to when I want to, and to publish it myself—and, most importantly, to have an audience with whom to converse. Back then, the few times I got something published (always in somewhat obscure journals), it was like dropping it in a deep and murky well. It sank without a trace, and I have no idea whether people even read it or not, and if so, what they might have thought of it. I much prefer blogging, even though I’m not getting three thousand bucks a pop.
[NOTE: The title of this post refers to this French phrase, which I learned in art history class long ago.]
Maybe a new model might be put your book online and let the people decide. If it becomes popular and enough people request a print version, then publish it.
Steve: yes, a lot of people do that with books online.
But I don’t have a book, although I may write one on political change. My short stories are a bit outdated, though; don’t think they’d make much of a book at this point.
The whole thing makes one wonder whether publishers have any sense at all. Perhaps editors are so busy trying to finesse the moneymaking part of it that they lose sight of what people might like to read and why.
once again… we have the spravka
how about finding out who owns the largest publishing houses? i put up the article a long time ago, by sejna… but i guess you know the facts from it, but forgot.
the article has been scrubbed now..
Alisher Burkhanovich Usmanov
He owns the Kommersant and Sekret Firmy Publishing Houses, shares in the company SUP, which controls Internet website Livejournal.com and internet newspaper Gazeta.ru.
He is a co‑owner of Russia’s second-largest mobile telephone operator, MegaFon, and co-owner of Mail.ru,[5] the largest Internet company in the Russian-speaking world,[6] which owns stakes in popular web portals like Odnoklassniki, Vkontakte, Facebook and others.
maybe thats why facebook competitors died out..
and just look at what they get to peek into being the owners..
Alexander Yevgenievich Lebedev
In May 2008, he was listed by Forbes magazine as one of the richest Russians and as the 358th richest person in the world with an estimated fortune of $3.1 billion.
He is part owner of the Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta[2] and owner of four UK newspapers with son Evgeny Lebedev: the London Evening Standard, The Independent, the Independent on Sunday and the new i newspaper.
and from the CIA
https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/books-and-monographs/watching-the-bear-essays-on-cias-analysis-of-the-soviet-union/article06.html
PROGRESS Publishers. PROGRESS was the main Soviet publishing organization responsible for translating and marketing Soviet books abroad and foreign language books inside the USSR. One large department of PROGRESS dealt with the selection, translation into Russian, and publication of selected Western nonfiction monographs and compendia, which for ideological reasons could not be published in the country openly. In the early 1950s, this department was headed by Georgiy A. Arbatov, who became a major Central Committee functionary and the director of the Institute of the US and Canada
if you want to know the puppet master look up Georgiy A. Arbatov – i have brought him up before, but i guess we have not progressed yet to see that deep into the machines open records.
this process worked both ways… and most americans didnt know that their soviet press books and such came from canada, and from russia…
but hey…
if you dont know what happened to american publishing and all that, then maybe you might think that as capitalists they are dumb
but they are no more capitalist than hollyweird is..
or the press
after all, all three of them could roll in the money IF they wanted to, by making what we want to see, not what they want to force us to see..
i explained that this game had do do with s election
eventually, you see whats selected to print, and other writers start to write that way.
ever think that your poetry and writing may have been turned down, not because it was bad, or poor, but it didnt fit the goals of negating good art, and positive forms and uplifting ideas and replacing that with other things.
the list of goals wasnt just for oil paintings…
“… sending rejection letters back with such force and vigor that I imagined them as having bounced off a springy backboard.”
That is good writing. It is a metaphor that will stay with me.
Have you ever seen the movie Wolf, with Jack Nicholson, that was made in the 1990s? It paints a not very pretty picture of life in the publishing world.
It’s also about werewolves.
But it works!
Really makes you wonder how many great books were missed because of an arbitrary decision by an agent or publisher. Then there’s the dreck from celebrities like Jenny McCarthy that manages to get published. Makes no sense.
At least now authors now have the option of self-publishing, and in some cases it leads to big book deals. See Amanda Hocking: http://tinyurl.com/7o2pm2z
Oh man, do I relate to this. Especially “It seems so archaic, trying to please the gatekeepers whose minds were running along a different track than mine, and who only accepted an infinitesimal percentage of submissions anyway. And…” etc.
I guess it was around 2000 that I came to the conclusion that it was a complete waste of my limited time to send stuff to publishers. It was like buying lottery tickets. Sure, you *might* win, but most likely it was a waste. And their arrogance: “We will keep your ms for 8 months without a word; in the meantime, don’t even think about submitting it elsewhere.”
I do plan to publish at least two books, in e-book and JIT paper. It’s wonderful knowing that when I’m ready to publish them, I can just…publish them. I’m under no illusions about selling a lot, but anyone who has the compulsion to write wants to get the dang stuff out there, with or without compensation.
Science Fiction writer John Scalzi initially serialized his book, “Old Man’s War, by posting each chapter on his Whatever blog. It was only after all chapters had been posted that he got a book deal. (And it’s a really good book – worth the cost of getting it in dead-tree format!)
You really ought to go read Sarah Hoyt. She’s a libertarian/conservative writer and is self publishing and has a lot of rants about publishers.
The world of “popular” books has become pretty dreary; much like the world of TV and movies. Everything seems to be a knock-off. There just seems to be a very limited capacity for originality.
So much space is taken up by the celebrity authors, or the flavor of the year, who grind out book after book in which so little changes. It is so refreshing and almost startling when one breaks the mold. I recently tried a Grisham book after many years of an informal boycott. I thought it entertaining, so I tried another and couldn’t finish. Yuk! Same, same. Different names, same premise. Then he broke the pattern and wrote “Calico Joe”; perhaps to prove that he could do something original if he put his mind to it. I hope he is encouraged. I hope he encourages others.
I’ve worked as a writer. You all here are definitely familiar with the publications I scribbled for.
However, to enter the big leagues ( novels, screen plays, etc. ) you have to know the right people. Otherwise you’re wasting your time.
THE END
There’s a story that a frustrated novelist copied a story by Jerzy Kozinski–author of, among other things, “The Painted Bird”. Typed it up and shopped it. Got noplace. Nobody liked it, nor noticed it was a goof on them.
Traveling with an audio book. The prequel includes lots of scene-setting in conversation between two soldiers–personal stuff–in the minutes before an attack. Then somebody was going to use “det cord” as a fuse. Hint. Det cord explodes. It is not a slow-burning fuse.
After a lot of that–with snappy phrasing of what the soldier was thinking, also scene-setting–we got to Chapter One.
And you read a novel by a big-seller whose character “trodded forth”, and then an agent tells you to buy “elements of style”.
Scroom
There are probably many frustrated writers reading and commenting here. neo hosts a blog that encourages reasoned debate and there are many good thinkers and writers here.
I’m one of the frustrated writers. Got the rejection slips to prove I have no writing ability. So, I published a book myself. It didn’t cost much – $1000. I figured I would sell at least a 1000 copies. (Dream on!) It was listed on Amazon, had a decent cover, and I went to all the book stores in my area offering the book on consignment. Even made some presentations at book stores that had author nights to promote their books. Just sit back and wait for the sales to kick in. Yeah, right. It sold about 200 books. (Sob!) Might have known. A book about a conservative and the life events that shaped his philosophy and values was not going to sell in the People’s Republic of Puget Sound. Unfortunately, few noticed it on Amazon either.
I’m now exploring doing it as 99 cent e-book on Amazon. It’s not as easy as just putting it in the word processor and sending it off to Amazon. But I don’t think there are too many technical issues I can’t figure out. At least it might catch on and it’s already written. Just make a few updates and edits, then off to the huge market that is Amazon e-books. Well, I can dream can’t I?
Oh, yes – I went through the submissions drill in and around 2004-2006, only my chore was trying to find an agent who would take me on, on the strength of a historical novel which I had also posted chapters to on the milblog SSDB. I actually got as far as having two or three of them read it entire, and say very nice and flattering things about it … but that it just wasn’t ‘marketable’. (Whaaaaattt?) I raised some funds through readers and fans, and published it POD, on the advice of a book-blogger called Grumpy Old Bookman, who had decades of experience in English publishing. That first book is still my best-seller, although I hardly do any marketing for it (mostly because I wrote and released five more historicals since then.)
But it really was horribly discouraging there for a while – it almost ruined my enjoyment of bookstores. Here were all these celebrity authors, and these genre writers writing the same book for the 20th time … and THEY could get an agent, and a publishing deal! Then I got together with some other indy authors and compared notes, and figured out how the traditional publishing world was collapsing in onto itself, and I didn’t feel so slighted. Apparently as some guy pointed out – none of us knew the right people in publishing. It has turned out, though – many of us have worked up a nice readership for our books anyway. Before e-readers and before the POD printing method and Amazon – we wouldn’t have gotten anywhere. Because of all that, there are some fantastically good books out there … although I’m afraid a lot of indy-published stuff is every bit as bad as trad publishing puts out there.
(JJ …. pssst … a secret. Writing the book is only half the job. Marketing it is the other half. 200 copies sold is not half-bad, actually. That’s about what the average book in print sells. Really.)
As a man who was once a senior editor (200+ books on all subjects) and director of trade paperback publishing (a number more of reprints, etc.) at Houghton Mifflin company….. as well as a man whé¸ worked many years as the fiction and senior editor and European publisher of Penthouse and Omni magazines…. I am always deeply touched and at the same time amused by lists such as thé¸se on Cracked. They’ve got five. And five to ten titles is pretty much what these lists always run to. And guess what? Confederacy of Effing Dunces is always on these lists.
And I always think….. “Hey, for better or worse the publishing industry goes through tens upon tens of thousands of submissions every year and these bozos always come back to Confederacy of Effing Dunces. And I say, so…every now and then we miss one. So EFFING WHAT!?”
Trust me when I say that for every hidden gem you or he or she wrote that we “missed” there was a long, long freight trained jammed to the walls of really crappy, stupid, awful, and revolting submissions that we rightfully sent down to the pit.
And yes there are a lot of BAAAAAAAD books published, but that’s a whole other story.
People who would be “authors” seldom understand just how bad they are. After all, your mom read it and loved it, right? Right.
vanderleun: well, of course there are tons of bad ones to every good one, and to every good one missed.
Nevertheless it is very odd that so many good ones ARE missed. I cannot imagine, for example, reading James Herriot’s work and not grabbing it forthwith. And there are many many more examples of good books passed on than that article mentioned. That book I owned had about a hundred of them, as I recall, very famous ones (and A Confederacy of Dunces didn’t appear there, because I think my book was older than that).
Again, the ratio of hits to misses is very high.
“Nevertheless it is very odd that so many good ones ARE missed.”
Not odd at all when you know the level of quality of those that must still dive into the slush pile.
vanderleun,
“People who would be ‘authors’ seldom understand just how bad they are.”
That may be true, but that’s not for a single person with the title of “Editor” to determine. The only time a writer ought to come to the conclusion that he doesn’t have it is when the public has gotten hold of his stuff and rejected it. The whole problem with having a single point of access is that it takes the judgment away from the public. In matters of taste, your judgment has the same worth as mine.
“…submissions that we rightfully sent down to the pit.”
You didn’t. Only the public can rightfully do that. Thank God for the expanded possibilities of self-publishing, meaning authors can now deliver their books to public judgment as they should be, instead of having to pass single middlemen like you. Your old job was never justified at all, it was only a material necessity of older, pre-Internet times.
What ziontruth said … look, I won’t deny that a lot of indy-published stuff is absolute drek, and that a fully-functioning trad publisher likely spared the reading public great mountains of absolute drek bound between covers and inflicted on the public. But there was a dreadful line being drawn by trad publishers between what is good, and which some portion of the reading public would find interesting/readable/amusing, and that which trad publishers see as potentially hugely profitable. I’ve read a good few indy books as a reviewer – and some of them are just amazing. Like Neo and James Herriot – I can’t see how an acquisitions editor could have given a pass, even if dazed to a coma by the mountains of bad manuscripts.
In my own case, Vanderleun – I had a nice-sized pool of readers who wanted my first book in print, and the opinion of some hardened publishing professionals who had a good opinion of it to go on. But … under the old way of doing things, I would never have had a chance. And so do a lot of other indy-published books who have a chance for readers to judge for themselves. The Amazon ‘look inside’ feature allows readers the same facility to check out a couple of pages and chapters – just about what I was asked to provide when I was pitching my MS to publishers and agents five or six years ago.
The word is among indy-author circles, is that now savvy publishers are looking at indy-books and authors which have good but unspectacular sales records. Now the screening mechanism isn’t the slush pile, or the agencies … it’s actual sales performance.
What can I say? Springtime for self-publishing. Have at it. Pack a lunch. Take a blanket.
I must say that one of the things self-publishing has taught me is that publishing is not as easy as it looks to writers.