Why do manuscripts get rejected?

Many, if not most, just aren't good enough. They don't necessarily suck, but they aren't sufficiently strong to stand out from the tons of other submissions an agent or editor looks at. And some might be terrific reads, but they're in a genre that isn't selling, or the publisher bought something similar too recently, or they aren't sure what the market is.

My thoughts:

Poor grammar, spelling. Even just a few mistakes can send it to the recycle bin.

No plot.

Characters that are like cardboard. The story lacks feeling.

Not "commercial" enough. Won't sell.

Doesn't hook the reader within the first page.

Too many adverbs.

All tell, no show.

And I could go on, and on....

All of the above.

But there are legions of stories of how editors chase the big fish away. A few editors have a gift for recognizing talent and a few fail to see it even when the super-writer is already under contract and making millions for the publisher. Editors have their own tastes, and what they like gets printed. So take it all with a grain of salt. It dont mean nothing.

I'll give you two from my personal inventory:

Incomprehensible world-building.

Not ground-breaking enough. (Didn't reach for new ideas)

Tri

Try looking up how many times JK Rowling was rejected for Harry Potter (I don't recall, but I know it was many) and then figure that it all comes down to personal preference. One man's trash is another man's treasure. It's not always the manuscript, sometimes it's just bad judgement. Telling the difference between the two? Ummm...

nicegrrl said:

What's "good enough"? Well written? Original? Arguably marketable? Probably all those things, but I just wonder why some stories make it and others dont. Looking at our crit forums, I cant really pick the ones that stand head and shoulders about the rest when it comes to novel drafts.

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Maybe it's because none of them are "good enough" or stand out head and shoulders above the rest. I have posted on those forums but personally if I had something I believed even remotely publishable I wouldn't post them there.
I don't want to offend people who post there (as I say, I've done it myself) but you couldn't imagine JK Rowling or Stephen King asking us to critique their work. I recall someone (could be uncle Jim) remarking that the work on the critique forums is fairly indicative of rejected slush. That's probably why it doesn't stand out

Siddow

You got it. Editors do not crap marble or pass perfume. Theyre more like loan officers.

In my case, the words on the manuscripts appear to suck. Or maybe it's just the letters. Maybe if I rearrange the letters into different words . . .

caw.

nicegrrl said:

What's "good enough"? Well written? Original? Arguably marketable? Probably all those things, but I just wonder why some stories make it and others dont. Looking at our crit forums, I cant really pick the ones that stand head and shoulders about the rest when it comes to novel drafts.

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No one else has popped in with the slushkiller link yet, so I'll do it:

http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/004641.html

Teresa Nielsen Hayden(an editor at Tor) has compiled a really great list of why most mss. get rejected.

Also if you can't differentiate between the decent and the awful at the crit forums, you need to do some more reading. Some of it you'll find has real potential, while others still have a little way to go.

I've seen a couple of really interesting things at the crit forums recently and popped off a rep point to let the writers know.

Peggy, looks like you and I were firing off our posts at the same time

Here's a couple more reasons:

Lack of genre focus. Agents get queries all the time saying that a book might be this genre or that genre because the writer has utterly no clue what it is. Um, if you wrote the book, shouldn't you know what it is?

Too long/too short. One agent says that if he sees a book that's 150K, his first thought is that the writer isn't finished writing it because they didn't edit it.

Rehash of existing ideas. One editor said he would like to find another "Harry Potter" and had to quickly add that he wanted a book with the same kind of magic for readers--not books about brooksticks and magic schools.

Nothing happening. It's very common to see a book where the writer spends fifty pages just trying to settle into the story--all the while, no story is happening.

Don't know what the story is about: You'd be surprised how many don't really know. This one is actually pretty obvious in the query letter. The writers will start talking about events and backstory but never get into what the story is about.

Pitching the wrong kind of story: If the agent takes sci-fi, don't send him a romance. If he only takes non-fition, don't send him fiction. Yet, people do it all the time.

Not paying attention to the rules: This was from an article on POD. The writer packaged her entire manuscript up, sent it to a publisher, and got it back unopened three days later (at which point she gave up and went POD). If she'd done her research, she would have known that she shouldn't have sent the entire manuscript to a publisher.

Gimmicky: Sending a shoe for "foot in the door," black paper with red ink for horror, etc.

(Editor hat on)

Most common for me:

Not reading the publisher's guidelines.

Ignoring proper manuscript formating. (C'mon, how hard can it BE?)

Spelling/grammar goofs. (Tell me again why you not only slept through 5th grade English but can't find the spellcheck button?)

Stinky writing. (Still vital.)

A writer convinced that his story is so wonderful that I'll forgive the above gaffs to buy it. (Where's that recycle bin?)

Any writer making threats as humor. "Publish this or my serial killer will come after YOU next!" (Hm, wonder if that FBI guy I know would like to check on this moron.)

IMHO there are not reasons why manuscripts get rejected so much as reasons why they get *accepted* and the residual. Any press has limited slots and they pick those that meet their requirements and then grab them in some way. There may be nothing specifically wrong with those not selected.

It doesn't fit their current need.

Bad

nicegrrl said:

What's "good enough"? Well written? Original? Arguably marketable? Probably all those things, but I just wonder why some stories make it and others dont. Looking at our crit forums, I cant really pick the ones that stand head and shoulders about the rest when it comes to novel drafts.

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The vast majority are rejected because they're lousy in every possible way. Most of the rest are rejected because they're the same thing an agent or editor has seen a hundred times since last Sunday.

You can usually tell a bad novel in the first page or five, but you often have to read the complete novel to find a good one. Depending on genre, anywhere from 1-3% are good enough to publish, and maybe one in five or six hundred really stands head and shoulders above everything else that comes in.

Sometimes a novel gets rejected because the genre is frozen stiff, and a novel must be spectacular to break through the ice.

Sometimes a novel gets rejected because no one has a clue how to market it.

Sometimes a novel gets rejected because it's simply wrong for that agent or publisher. This is more common than some might think. It isn't always a mistake when a publisher rejects a novel that goes on to be a bestseller for someone else.

Sometimes a novel is rejected that may be good, but just not quite good enough, and the editor doesn't know what should be done to make that particular novel better, or doesn't believe that particular writers has teh skill to do whatever needs to be done.

But the large majority of novels are rejected because they're bad in every way it's possible to be bad.

It took 11 posts before someone linked to Slushkiller?

What is this board coming to?

Jamesaritchie

How do you explain all of the crap that gets published and becomes remainders? Even the local newspapers are filled with hacks and mediocre writing.

Mayor of Moronia said:

How do you explain all of the crap that gets published and becomes remainders?

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I'm not James Ritchie, but I'll try to answer that:

Those were the best books that had crossed those editors' desks. The rest were worse.

Mayor of Moronia said:

Jamesaritchie

How do you explain all of the crap that gets published and becomes remainders? Even the local newspapers are filled with hacks and mediocre writing.

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Yeah, and if that gets published, imagine the crap that's getting slushed!

Seriously, that's kind of a false dichotomy. Just because most stuff is rejected for being out and out terrible, doesn't mean that mediocre work will never get published. Mediocre work is indeed published all the time--but I'd lay you good odds that that mediocre work is STILL better than 99% of what's in the slush pile.

Mayor of Moronia said:

Jamesaritchie

How do you explain all of the crap that gets published and becomes remainders? Even the local newspapers are filled with hacks and mediocre writing.

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These days marketing has the final word, and marketers are usually morons without a clue. That's where the books that get rejected by the readers come from. Those readers don't understand what they should buy, say the marketers.

As to hacks and mediocre writing in the papers. Some of those hacks are there because they are dependable hacks who always turn in their copy and make no waves for the overworked editors. If everything in the newspaper were of stellar quality and with pure shazam, then we would just adjust our definition of mediocrity, wouldn't we?

Regards,
Scott

James

I wish editors wouldnt give the marginal stuff a pass. In fairness, though, I was reading some Hemingway stories the other night, and was bored out of my mind.

Scott

I read Kenneth Roberts biography, WHY I WRITE, and was amused to learn he made his newspaper column up when he worked in Boston. But the readers loved his blarney...and so did the publisher (the managing editor hated him).