I've often wondered if I might find nuggets of wisdom if I asked for my ms back.
James, you said you send out a returned ms immediately. What if there were comments from the last editor hidden in there, somewhere? Seems to me the new editor, like Ms Snark, would not be amused.
Does anyone get comments often enough to make the cost of rerturn postage worthwhile?
historian
An agent or editor will normally only mark up a manuscript if she thinks the changes will make the manuscript acceptable to her. When this is the case, she'll say so in the letter she sends back with the manuscript. The mark up will never be hidden. When this happens, you do not send the manuscript out to a new agent or editor, you make the changes and send it back to her.
The thing is this. If there are no mark ups, no request for changes, then you send the manuscript back out immediately, and usually for less cost, and certainly with less effort, than printing a new copy. If there are markups and requests for changes, then you've just achieved something every new writer is seeking, which is advice and possible acceptance from an agent or editor.
I don't know how often new writers receive comments. Probably not often because your story and writing usually must be pretty good. Good enough, with a few changes, for an agent to take on, or an editor to buy. An agent or editor will usually take the time to mark up a manuscript only if they really like it, and see solid potential. So agents and editors reserve such work for manuscripts that are close to what they want, but that still need a bit of work.
Now, I'm probably not the best case to illustrate this because I've always had an agent, but I have never wanted an agent to touch one of my manuscripts in any way. But I do want editors to touch them, and I've had a fair number of editors go through a novel manuscript, mark the hell out of it, and then send it back to me through my agent and ask if I would be willing to make the changes.
I also handle my own shorter length fiction (With the exception of something short going to a market that's really only approachable by an agent), and I long ago lost count of how many short stories, novelettes, etc., came back full of editorial changes and requests for a rewrite of this or that. Sometimes the editor would simply go through with a slash and burn policy to get a story down to a length he could use, and ask if I could still write a smooth story with this much cut, and sometimes and editor would go trough and actually edit a story just as he would for publication, and sometimes the changes would just be notes all through the manuscript that suggested this or that.
I can only say this has always worked for me. But I can also say that even I am giving in to the trend of not asking for a manuscript to be returned because so many agents and publishers will accept a CD along with the hard copy, and if they really like the story, they make the changes on the e-version and return it, or they don't return manuscripts at all unless they're pretty sure they will want them after a rewrite, at which point they pay the freight.
But unless an agent or editor has some restriction about returning manuscripts, or accepts a CD along with the hard copy, I can't see where it harms anything or anyone to have it returned. Even if it should cost you a couple of bucks extra, so what? Don't you have enough confidence in your writing to invest a couple of extra bucks? Maybe having the manuscript returned will never pay off, but if it happens only once in twenty tries, doesn't this make all the times it didn't happen meaningless?
