More than courtesy

Hi everyone,

A small vent. Yesterday I was doing some marketing, looking through a list of publishers, reading about who does what, and something struck me as wrong. Some publishers now add a note stating that “Due to the large number of submissions we receive, we will only respond if we are interested.” My response is, “I don’t care how many submissions you receive, writers deserve and need a response, even if it’s a standard rejection, at least some sort of closure. It simply isn’t nice to leave the person who put in the time and effort creating the work dangling out there, wondering if the long silence from the publisher indicates an interest or an unacknowledged rejection.

When did this breach of courtesy begin? I’m sure there are numerous contributing factors: fewer sales per book, reduced staffing, more submissions, heavier workloads. But many times over the years I have learned valuable information when editors told me why something I submitted didn’t fit their niche. An editor’s editor will sometimes suggest how a manuscript might be made more acceptable for that house, and issue an invitation to review the result. There is a special two-way connection between writer and editor. For a publisher to cause an editor to break that connection is more than bad manners. It’s bad business. Granted, editors are extremely busy. So are teachers. Linemen. Wait staff. Writers. And yes, too many writers submit woefully inadequate material. In earlier times, a printed rejection note was slipped into the manuscript when it was mailed back to the writer in the self-addressed, stamped envelope that was standard procedure. I hated those things. But they were something. They were closure. They freed me to move on.