Week 25 – in which we reflect on the end of the second round of submissions and inch toward our first title
We’ve now responded to all the submissions from our second round, so if you haven’t heard back, then please check your spam folder, or drop us a line. This took longer than the first round – 114 days versus 71 days – which was mostly due to doubling our fiction submissions cap from 25 to 50. So, still within respectability – in fact, we’ve sped up, in terms of days-per-submission – and especially considering that we responded to every submission with at least some personalised feedback.
We had one submission which, by the time we contacted them, had found publication elsewhere. I initially took this as a sign that we should revert back to a cap of 25 so that we could get through the next round quicker, but then remembered that an author also withdrew in the first round, so such things are not always linked to length of response. And remember, if you submit to us and get an offer from somewhere else, please drop us a line through Duotrope to let us know, and we’ll try to fast-track our decision. Anyway, I think we’ll keep the cap at 50 for now (feel free to let us know your thoughts on this…).
I’ve covered the range of submissions we received this round in a previous post, so I won’t revisit that here, except to reiterate that the quality was generally very high, and that many of those we rejected deserve publication; they just didn’t meet our specific criteria or subjective tastes. In the end, we didn’t accept anything, and only asked two authors to revise and resubmit.
Anyway, for the stat lovers among you, the totals from both rounds of submissions are as follows:
- 90 total submissions (75 fiction, 15 non-fiction)
- 2 withdrawn
- 1 acceptance
- 4 revise and resubmit
So that’s 84 rejections. I realise this makes us look picky – does it? However, bear in mind that a typical agent will take on 1 author for every 1,000 queries. But we’re a publisher, not an agent, so a better comparison is publishing houses, which generally take on 1 book out of every 100 submissions – so 1%. This seems to be in line with our own stats, though we may end up being more generous than that – too early to say yet. Also, it’s not clear if this would change if we had more money or time, given our niche interests. Anyway, in the interests of transparency, we’ll keep you posted on all this – it’ll be interesting to find out.
Whatever the case, this process has certainly given us a new perspective on the submissions and query process, and maybe even a better understanding of the reason why trad publishers and agents trot out those boilerplate responses that every author hates. It’s so much easier to say, “While we admired your undoubted skill, we just didn’t fall in love with it,” than to specify why that was. We aim to provide much more useful and personalised feedback than this, and it’s been immensely pleasing to receive emails from rejected authors expressing their gratitude for this. The reason we take the time to do this is that we are also creatives, and we’ve been where you are, and we know how much it means to have another human respond in a human-like way, er … humanely!
But at the end of the day, our goals as a small press are no different to those of traditional publishers and agents (well, to their stated aims anyway): we toowant to fall in love with something. We will be investing all of our spare time and income in turning our chosen titles into the best they can be, so there are going to be many worthy submissions that simply don’t rise to the level where that feels warranted. So, whatever response you get from us, please bear all this in mind.
As a reminder of what “our spare time and income” actually means, we’ve just finished the developmental edit of the first title, which is the first stage after acceptance. This takes the form of an editorial report that highlights a range of changes that we think would improve the work, and may include big-picture issues such as plot, characterisation, themes, narrative voice and point of view (for our first title, this report ran to eight pages). It may also focus on sentence level things (overuse of filter language, hedge phrases, etc), and some of these are then marked up in the manuscript as examples of the type of global issues we’d like to see addressed.
In order to do this, we will have produced a summary of the text, chapter by chapter, along with general notes and questions for the author, and the manuscript will have already been read by a minimum of three people (one of which is a beta reader outside of the editorial process).
All of this happens after we’ve expressed an interest in publishing your book, but before signature of the contract. This is unusual in publishing, as developmental editing represents a significant investment of time, and most publishers don’t want to do that only to see the author walk away to publish with someone else. But we wanted to be sure that we can actually work with the chosen author, and that they wouldn’t be resistant to reasonable changes. A developmental edit is often the most difficult to stomach, as it can involve large alterations to plot and structure, so we felt this was a good test of the amenability we’re looking for in an author.
Once that’s done, and we’ve worked with the author to address issues with the manuscript to the point where we’re both broadly happy, we start discussing the contract. This can take some time, especially if the author is relying on legal advice and contract vetting (e.g. such as that provided by the Society of Authors), which we encourage.
We then begin the line edit – which is where we are now. This focuses on the manuscript at the line level (duh), and is the last creative editorial input before it is passed to copy-editing (not saying that copy-editing can’t add significant quality, but creative decisions are generally outside it’s scope).
All the editorial stages so far have been done in-house, so we feel it’s important that copy-editing and proofreading involve out-of-house professionals, so that we get a fresh perspective (and pair of eyes – familiarity breeds blindness!). For this title, these roles are already lined up and ready to go. The author will be involved in this process, and they will have a chance to OK the external editor’s suggestions, so it’s all fairly collaborative (I hate it when authors are shut out of this process, which sometimes happens).
Anyway, that’s pretty much where we are now (almost). I’ll leave all the other steps (typesetting, cover design, metadata, marketing, etc) for other posts. But I just wanted to give an outline of what our investment involves, that it’s not just some commercial endeavour, where we stick a cover on your book and chuck it up on Amazon. So, please don’t feel slighted if it “wasn’t for us”. It really comes down to choosing among the many worthy titles as to which can most benefit from our limited time and budget. We’re not elitist, stony-faced gatekeepers. We’re just creative folk trying to share cool stuff that we like.
Right, more news soon – probably to announce the first title. Exciting! Terrifying!*
*Delete as appropriate