Hi. I bet this one has been covered elsewhere but I wonder if there is a different experience between agents in different countries and the chances of getting read? I read the story below about the writer who submitted Jane Austen to publishers and got rejected by them all and it says an Australian bestseller was rejected when a paper tried the same thing. Is there really a chance of getting read as this is what worries me when we put so much time and effort in? Is it a numbers game like the last one says?
Last year, The Weekend Australian pulled a little stunt in which they sent off chapter three of Patrick White's Nobel prize-winning novel, The Eye of the Storm, to 12 different publishers under the pseudonym 'Wraith Picket'.
They got back 10 rejections and two didn't respond. The little stunt turned into a literary tempest...
Now, over in the UK, a similar experiment was carried out with the work of Jane Austen - or 'Alison Laydee' to be precise.
The Guardian reports that David Lassman, director of the Jane Austen Festival in Bath, sent off opening chapters of Austen's three most famous books - with some changes of course - to 18 of the biggest UK publishers.
They all came back as rejections.
The reason publishers rejected Austen
Publishers are everyone's favourite whipping post, writes Andrew Franklin, publisher and managing director of Profile Books. Franklin is responding to the news that publishers rejected a retyped books originally written by Jane Austen.
"The real reason that publishers miss good books is no secret, and it is nothing to do with literary judgement, knowledge of first lines or acquaintance with the classics. It is the same reason that film companies miss great scripts and record labels fail to sign up the most interesting bands. It is the numbers game - the sheer volumes of paper (and now, worse still, the email attachments), that cross our desk every day. Every year 200,000 books are published. This is far too many, and really the first duty of every publisher should be to publish fewer, rather than more, new titles."
Franklin continues: "So publishers use euphemistic - all right, let's be honest, weaselly - phrases when rejecting manuscripts, like "not quite right for our list" or 'would not fit our publishing programme'. The clear subtext is that the manuscript is unpublishable and the writer should consign it to their bottom drawer. For ever."
This topic post 'First Impressions' is what the Austen writer called the book to give an added hint as apparently it was the original title intended for the story!
Last year, The Weekend Australian pulled a little stunt in which they sent off chapter three of Patrick White's Nobel prize-winning novel, The Eye of the Storm, to 12 different publishers under the pseudonym 'Wraith Picket'.
They got back 10 rejections and two didn't respond. The little stunt turned into a literary tempest...
Now, over in the UK, a similar experiment was carried out with the work of Jane Austen - or 'Alison Laydee' to be precise.
The Guardian reports that David Lassman, director of the Jane Austen Festival in Bath, sent off opening chapters of Austen's three most famous books - with some changes of course - to 18 of the biggest UK publishers.
They all came back as rejections.
The reason publishers rejected Austen
Publishers are everyone's favourite whipping post, writes Andrew Franklin, publisher and managing director of Profile Books. Franklin is responding to the news that publishers rejected a retyped books originally written by Jane Austen.
"The real reason that publishers miss good books is no secret, and it is nothing to do with literary judgement, knowledge of first lines or acquaintance with the classics. It is the same reason that film companies miss great scripts and record labels fail to sign up the most interesting bands. It is the numbers game - the sheer volumes of paper (and now, worse still, the email attachments), that cross our desk every day. Every year 200,000 books are published. This is far too many, and really the first duty of every publisher should be to publish fewer, rather than more, new titles."
Franklin continues: "So publishers use euphemistic - all right, let's be honest, weaselly - phrases when rejecting manuscripts, like "not quite right for our list" or 'would not fit our publishing programme'. The clear subtext is that the manuscript is unpublishable and the writer should consign it to their bottom drawer. For ever."
This topic post 'First Impressions' is what the Austen writer called the book to give an added hint as apparently it was the original title intended for the story!
