Week 19 – in which we finish submissions, find our first title, open for more, and think about when to show and when to tell
We’ve now finished working through the first batch of submissions. Because of the low submission rate for non-fiction, we’ve decided to keep that window open indefinitely (at least for now). But given that the previous round of fiction submissions reached its cap in under two hours, we’re raising that cap to 50 for next time round and opening it at a more geographically neutral time. So, fiction submissions will reopen on…
6pm BST, Saturday, April 4th, 2026
Saturday means fewer people will be at work, and 6pm BST translates to 10am PDT and 1pm EDT, for our US friends. So, together with the increased submissions cap, that should hopefully give everyone who didn’t make the first window a better chance to submit.
Oh, and thank you to everyone who did submit – it’s been a very educational experience! The submissions were diverse, in all sorts of ways, and it really was reassuring – as we always thought – that the standard of unpublished work out there is pretty high.
For those of you who like numbers, and in the interest of transparency, here are our stats so far:
- Non-fiction: 14 submissions; 14 rejections.
- Fiction: 25 submissions; 22 rejections, 2 revise and resubmit, 1 acceptance.
Which means that we’ve found our first title! More on this shortly, but first, let’s unpack all this.
Our lower rate of non-fiction submissions is quite normal, according to Duotrope (who run our submissions portal), and they estimate non-fiction to make up about 8% of all submissions across all types of publishing, where fiction accounts for about 9 out of every 10 submissions. So, if we hadn’t capped fiction submissions at 25, it looks like we might by now have received about … 161 submissions? At least. (Please check my maths.) Anyway, as I say, we will be raising the fiction cap to 50 next time round, but I think this just proves that we’re right to cap them, otherwise we’d have no time to evaluate and respond properly.
Of the 14 non-fiction submissions, a few were fiction in disguise (naughty people), which was an easy no. The rest were either too academic, not speculative enough, too long, too short, or memoir. Perhaps I’m being picky, as my own background is in popular philosophy, but we’re still looking for that sweet spot of an accessible, entertaining, substantial work of fact-based writing.
Fiction was much better. As I’ve said, the quality was reassuringly high, ranging across a wide selection of genres: horror, fantasy, romantasy, sci-fi, dystopian, historical, YA, time travel, literary, erotic fantasy. Some of these genres just aren’t for us – romantasy and erotica in particular – but even these were decently written. But each of these received personal feedback (well, apart from the fiction posing as non-fiction). This was quite arduous, if I’m honest, but worth it. No one wants rejection, a velvet glove is little different from an iron fist when it’s slapping you in the face: it’s still an affront to your self-esteem. But when the disappointment subsides, hopefully there’ll be something useful that the rejectee can salvage from our going the extra mile in terms of critique. (Though someone did complain that there was too muchfeedback, which is proof – if any were needed – that you can’t indeed please all of the people, etc.)
Of the remainder, we found one that we think we’d like to move forward with (a uniquely themed post-apocalyptic dark comedy), and two that we’ve asked to revise and resubmit (a horror fantasy and a YA historical fantasy). To clarify, “move forward with” doesn’t mean publication, necessarily, or a signed contract. Let’s use a dating app analogy: we’ve admired your pic and liked your profile, and discovered that yes, we too like walks on the beach and cosy evenings in binge-watching The Rookie, and we’ve swiped right (is that the correct way?). So next step is to meet up and see how things work out. Well, given the possible geographical distances involved, meeting up isn’t perhaps a feasibility or even a necessity, so perhaps we’ll Zoom or just email, and generally discuss what can be improved. This is a period during which we find out if we can work together, how amenable you are to suggested changes, and generally decide if we want to alter our Facebook status. Perhaps this is where the dating analogy breaks down – “I liked her, but she wasn’t amenable to suggested changes” – but you get the idea: we work on your manuscript and try to figure out if we can turn it into something that we can be proud to publish and that people will enjoy reading. Just to be clear: how photogenic you are doesn’t matter, nor how many social media followers you have, and if you want to conduct all author interviews while wearing a Sia-type wig, then that’s fine with us, or even do no interviews at all. You are not a commodity, and we won’t treat you as such. It’s just about the book and whether we’re compatible (editorially speaking).
“Revise and resubmit” also has no dating equivalent, that I’m aware of (perhaps there should be one…?), but you can think of it as, “Almost. Would you like to make some changes and have another go?” If a “yes” means, “We think your book’s pretty much there, but we’d like to work with you to make it ready for publication,” then “revise and resubmit” means, “We like your book, but there’s too much needs doing for us to consider it for publication yet, so we’d like to give you some pointers and then read a revised draft”. This also isn’t a guarantee of publication, but it’s a sort of waiting room such as job applicants are forced to sit in. That may not sound very appealing, but we try to make it more bearable by offering the equivalent of “tea and biscuits” – that is, a sample of more detailed line edits to suggest the type of changes we’d like to see, and broader notes on structure, character, plot, etc.
As to why we turned down the particular fiction submissions that we did (aside from those that were of genres we don’t publish), there were a number of reasons – e.g.:
- pacing of the story
- weak or problematic premise
- lack of world building
- too much exposition/backstory
- problems with narrative point of view (e.g. distance and filter language)
- problems with dialogue
– and most often a combination of the above, and more. I’ll perhaps touch on some of these in future posts, but this week I’ll say a bit about “showing and telling”. If you’ve spent any time at all reading about the craft of writing, then you’re probably already sick of this advice – though it is often misunderstood. “Show don’t tell” doesn’t necessarily mean “go into more detail”, and nor does it mean that everything should be shown rather than told. The basic idea is that information should be conveyed – where possible and appropriate – in a way that engages the reader and makes them feel like they are experiencing events closer to the character’s/narrator’s point of view. This is primarily done through using sensory images and language.
For instance, in The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zöet by David Mitchell, the narrative describes the protagonist’s first introduction to mainland 18th Century Japan. Mitchell could have conveyed this culture shock by telling us how surprised, disgusted, enticed, intrigued, etc, Jacob was by the experience. Instead, he shows us:
Through another set of gates, the retinue is submersed in a shaded thoroughfare. Hawkers cry, beggars implore, tinkers clang pans, ten thousand wooden clogs knock against flag stones. Their own guards yell, ordering the townspeople aside. […] Through the palanquin’s grille, he smells steamed rice, sewage, incense, lemons, sawdust, yeast and rotting seaweed. He glimpses gnarled old women, pocked monks, unmarried girls with blackened teeth.
It goes on, interspersed with Jacob’s thoughts on it all. Note the appeal to different senses here, not just sight, but smell, sound and anticipated taste and texture.
The danger of learning this lesson – that such detailed and sensory language is better than bald “telling” – is that the author comes to assume that it is something that should be applied wherever possible. But sometimes less is more. Take this passage from Agency by William Gibson, where the characters are loading a drone into a car:
Sevrin opened the driver-side door, got out. He closed it, starting around the front of the van. She undid her own seatbelt, scooting along the seat toward the open passenger door, then getting her legs up, out of Virgil’s way. Sevrin appeared at the passenger door, a cab passing behind him. “Stay until he has it out,” he said to Verity.
“What’s here?” she asked. Virgil, having squeezed past her, was pulling up the handle, unfastening the drone’s seatbelt.
“The Clift,” said Sevrin.
Virgil edged the drone forward, until it cleared the front of the seat. One hand on the handle, the other near its feet, he lowered it to the carpeted floor. “Wouldn’t want this in an overhead bin,” he said, swinging it around by the handle. He started to back it out, past her.
He and Sevrin lowered it to the street.
Now, I should say that I’m a bit of a William Gibson superfan, and I’ve read pretty much everything he’s written, and even to me this feels like overkill. I realise that when writing sci-fi you might want to give extra detail on particular pieces of technology if it’s important to the plot, and because such technology is new to the reader – and this is often what Gibson does. But unloading that technology from a car isn’t an example of such information. This type of thing, where you describe each step in meticulous detail, is something a writer may do when they’re trying to make the fictional reality seem more real. But it’s better to keep that for unfamiliar or exciting things, not mundane happenings. Here’s my suggested edit:
They arrived at the hotel and unloaded the drone from the car.
What Gibson is doing here is creating a scene (a dramatised sequence of connected events) out of something that should be more briefly summarised. “Scene vs summary” is closely related to “show vs tell”, but in Gibson’s passage the usual purpose of slowing events down to step-by-step, realtime action is absent: we aren’t emotionally more engaged by reading how a drone is unloaded from a car, we aren’t more embedded in the reality of the moment, it isn’t unfamiliar (unloading things from cars, undoing seatbelts, etc, are not unfamiliar actions), and nor do we we learn much about character or plot. Better then to summarise or tell, not dramatise or show, in this instance. As Lee Child, the author of the Jack Reacher novels, puts it: do the fast things slow, and the slow things fast. Skip quickly over the boring and the mundane stuff; dwell on the fascinating, the action packed and the unusual.
Or to put it in business speak: this meeting could have been an email.
That’s it for this week. More soon.
Comments, as always, are welcome.