Unfortunately, this sort of rejection is quickly becoming a thing of the past, and that is definitely too bad.
There was a time in my career when I was quite
resentful of those I saw as the self-appointed gate-keepers in the publishing
industry; the literary agents and editors who seemed to have so much power over
the fate of my work. Why, I wondered, should these people, hanging out
cliquishly on the east or west coast with their snobbish prep-school
predilections and all-too questionable literary tastes, have the ability to
keep me from being heard? What gave them the right to judge me? Who the hell
did they think they were?
More recently, the relative ease of self-publication
in various electronic formats—e-books, websites—has loosened a brick or two
from the elite citadel of traditional publishing. Agents and editors no longer
wield the absolute power of artistic life-and-death. There are other ways of
getting in and breaking out. Amazon’s Kindle and the Barnes and Noble Nook—to
name only two of many platforms—have ushered in a new Renaissance in the once
sleepy world of the independent author.
But every innovation comes with its own share of
growing pains. The difficulty now, is that the market is choked with reams of
un-vetted garbage, amateurishly conceived, poorly written, sloppily edited—if
at all—carelessly formatted cyber-vanity publications, the collective effluvium
of a vast literary sewer. The best you can say about it is that trees are no
longer being sacrificed for pulp, nor warehouses glutted with pallets of
forlorn returns.
Holding my nose at all this, I have found a grudging
appreciation for the role of the gate-keeper. In sitting down with a new
writer, the best agents and editors would always begin by asking, “So, what do
you read? Who are your influences?” This seems almost quaint by today’s
standards, when more and more self-proclaimed authors boast about not reading—sometimes
not reading at all—ignorantly claiming that to be exposed to the work of
another writer might “ruin” them through undue subconscious influence, or
somehow sap their amazing personal wellspring of originality. This, of course,
is absolute and total crap. Good writers read—often voraciously. Good writers
know that there is nothing from which they cannot learn; whether it’s good and
offers an interesting example of how to, or bad and clearly demonstrated how
not to.
But some issues go much deeper. A skilled editor
skimming a manuscript can almost immediately identify an amateur from the poor
spelling alone. This morning I was looking at a sample excerpt from an e-book
by a young woman who was complaining that nobody wanted to buy her title. In
the second paragraph I found, not once, but twice, the bewildering use of the
word “passed” which was, in fact, a careless misspelling of “past.” How could
anyone miss something so rudimentary? The editor would have stopped reading
immediately, circled the error and popped the manuscript back into the mail,
probably not even bothering to include a form rejection. And he or she would
have been right to do so; this kind of dilettante manure is a waste of everyone’s
time, and it doesn’t matter if “the story is good” or not.
A good writer—a real writer—takes pride in her
craft, is aware of every detail in the text, like a competent captain knowing
his ship from stem to stern. A real writer strives to attain professional
standards, even if perfection is theoretically out of reach. Errors like the
ones that made me stop reading that young woman’s sample, ought to have kept
her awake at night; haunted her, shamed her, embarrassed her until she hired an
editor or read a good book on self-editing. That no one was there to discourage
her from going ahead and publishing her title in so unready a state is a sad
thought indeed.
