Why Manuscripts Get Rejected

[Paul Whybrow]

I recently received my 38th rejection from the batch of 60 queries I made last November—yet again, it was from someone, presumably an assistant, whose name doesn't appear on the literary agency website.

I'm bulletproof, so it didn't bother me, but all the same I was heartened to read advice from a couple of publishing industry professionals in these two articles:

Eight reasons that even a good book is rejected by publishers

Every Writer Needs an Editor, Especially if that Writer Is Also an Editor

I will endeavour to persevere, though I'm trying a different approach to raise my profile by entering as many competitions as I can afford.

As 20th-century Canadian surrealist painter, Mimi Parent advised:

Knock hard, life is deaf.

 

[Luciferette]

Hi Paul,
I entered competitions (but only short story ones) for years, with zero success. Until the Curtis Brown/ITV novel contest, which I only went for because my mum said, 'Well, you can't be any worse than some of the others entering!'...damned by faint praise indeed Not in a million years, after so many rejections, did I expect to get anywhere. I admit to delusions of grandeur: one kiss from Schofe was enough to set off fantasies of the Booker.
But, long-term, I'm still pretty much in the same position (as yet. All moveable digits crossed for the future). Unagented. Unpublished. Still hacking away at the day job and writing at night. As you say, it raises your profile but it's certainly no guaranteed track to doing what many of us truly desire: writing for a living.
A case in point - I'm just looking at the Virago debut crime writer competition. It sounds dreamy: a contract with Virago! The banner across your hardback cover! Publicity galore! But...the advance is *only* £7,500, and the T&Cs for the winner are prohibitive, to say the least. One of the runners-up in the CB competition (C.J. Tudor - she's lovely, look her up) submitted elsewhere. At Frankfurt this year, Madeleine Milburn made her one of the fair's biggest debuts. I don't know the specifics (far too polite to ask Caroline!) but it was life-changing money.
Rejections are bloody awful, especially on those occasions where you really thought you'd written something decent. But, just maybe, being the winner of a big-name competition is a double-edged sword...

 

[Paul Whybrow]

I agree with much of what you say, and though any prize money would be helpful my main motivation is to get my name on the literary radar. Although many competitions are great sources of revenue for the organisers, with thousands of entries, I'm mindful of what happened with a competition run by the local newspaper in Liskeard, Cornwall.

It's part of a large newspaper group who publish local papers and has an average circulation figure of 7,500 a week. The contest they held had one question: name the original name of the town, which is Liskerrett. The prize was worth having if you like preening, for it was being collected from home in a chauffeur-driven Bentley to be taken for a meeting and tea and biscuits with the mayor, followed by a trip to a country house restaurant to enjoy a meal for two. I knew the chauffeur, and he found out that just one person bothered to enter the competition—a little, old lady who was thrilled to be the only name drawn out of the hat!

I've spent the last week searching for short story and poetry competitions, and so far have found twenty that close by the end of May. A few are free to enter, while most cost £3-£8, with one charging a whopping £25. The prizes range from having your winning story read out by an unspecified celebrity, to publication in a rather obscure journal, to publication by a reputable book company and £20,000 as an advance.

The latter figure is for the Daily Mail and the Amazon Kindle Storyteller prizes for a debut novelist. I'm torn about entering either of these, as though both publishers have great clout when it comes to generating publicity, I'm wary of their business methods and politics. Entering the Amazon contest requires giving them exclusive rights to all of my ebooks through their Kindle Select programme, withdrawing them from other online book merchants. The Daily Mail entry rules stipulate hard copies only, which seems daft in the 21st century, but I guess it's way of reducing the number of competitors.

Some competitions have themes, such as 'Silence', while others are a hugger-mugger of write about anything you like in whatever genre you fancy. Quite how the judges decide what is best between 3,000-word short stories set in some distant nebula, a Tudor castle and a Wild West town I don't know. Then again, a lot of media competitions are like this—think of the Oscars or the Mercury Prize for music.

One thing that I've noticed in my assiduous research, is that most competitors, judges and eventual winners are female. I've nothing against that, and anyway it reflects statistics. It's something to bear in mind as I write new material.

 

[Luciferette]

Oh, I wish I'd been that lady - that's my kind of prize!
Totally agree about the Mail/Amazon point. That was part of my original issue. You're tied to them, then, *if* you win, and I certainly wouldn't want to be eternally associated with the Daily Heil...
But: I am spending this week's day off preparing my submission to the Bath Novel Award. For 3 years, I wasn't ready for it (novel wasn't finished/edited/polished) but now I am. Might as well have a bash.
Anyone else entering? (Address please so I can come round and...um...eliminate the competition)

 

[Katie-Ellen]

Not me !
She says hastily, although also, it is true.

 

[Luciferette]

Not me !
She says hastily, although also, it is true.

All's fair in Love and Litopia *sharpens pencil to a murderous point*

 

[Katie-Ellen]

Pen/cil
Needle
Sword

They say the pen is mightier than the sword, but in the history of civilisation, I can't help but wonder about the contribution of the needle.

Knickers on and dressed ( as the general rule) THEN sits down to write. Or plot the elimination of the competition.

 

[Luciferette]

Oh, I think you're bang on with the needle point (!). If it wasn't for the women sat round beavering away at their sewing, A. Half the stories in the world would never have been told (I know what gets said at my mum's Stitch n Bitch club and it makes fiction look like Janet and John), and B. The men wouldn't have been able to go out hunting and come back with their own epic tales because they'd have frozen to death as soon as they left the cave.
So yay for the needle - the true foundation of literature!

 

[Bernard Stacey]

But: I am spending this week's day off preparing my submission to the Bath Novel Award. For 3 years, I wasn't ready for it (novel wasn't finished/edited/polished) but now I am. Might as well have a bash.
Anyone else entering? (Address please so I can come round and...um...eliminate the competition)

I was thinking of entering this too as I finally have something worth sending (the £25 entrance fee makes one think hard about this).
My address? I live in the lion enclosure at London Zoo (do drop in anytime...)

 

[Luciferette]

I was thinking of entering this too as I finally have something worth sending (the £25 entrance fee makes one think hard about this).
My address? I live in the lion enclosure at London Zoo (do drop in anytime...)

Bring it on, Bernard! I shall bring some Whiskas
Seriously, the entry fee was a sticking point for me, too. Having said that, deciding to go for it has given me the impetus to return to my novel (seeing as my head's taken up with the first draft of my new WIP) and take a knife to it. Again!
I HATE writing synopses, though...

 

[Kitty]

Competitions are really well worth entering, particularly the big ones like Bristol, Bridport or Yeovil. Agents regularly check out the winning authors, and placing in any of these gives you a really decent writing credit for your CV. I'll be entering Yeovil this year. Unfortunately I don't think I can enter Bristol because I've had a book published and checking the small print that makes me ineligible. Ho hum.

 

[Kitty]

Some competitions have themes, such as 'Silence', while others are a hugger-mugger of write about anything you like in whatever genre you fancy. Quite how the judges decide what is best between 3,000-word short stories set in some distant nebula, a Tudor castle and a Wild West town I don't know.

Because good writing transcends genre and that is what the judges of these competitions are looking for.

One thing that I've noticed in my assiduous research, is that most competitors, judges and eventual winners are female. I've nothing against that, and anyway it reflects statistics. It's something to bear in mind as I write new material.

In some cases, yes, there can be a bias. For this reason it is well worth checking out what sorts of prizes they offer and what sort of stories have won in the past. If they state that shortlisted stories will be sent to women's magazines for consideration, as in the case of the Frome Short Story Prize, then that gives you a bit of a clue about the sorts of stories they are looking for. Others, such as Yeovil, are very open with regards to genre. I particularly like the idea of their Writing Without Restrictions category!

 

[NickP]

On the subject of why manuscripts are rejected - I think it's better to think about why some are accepted.

I believe publishers and agents will nearly rip your arm off if you write something that they think will sell. Think of your favourite writers - frankly they are often in a completely different league from the ones getting rejected.

 

[Kitty]

That is so true @NickP, and why the advice to submit in batches of ten is so sound. If you only get form rejections from those ten, bearing in mind they're top of your list and therefore the best fit for your MS, then maybe you need to revisit your work and take a long hard look at it. Does it have the following:

1. Unique concept or unique twist on an existing one. Basically what is your USP? Is it strong enough or is your book just the same as everything else out there. In which case it's unlikely to sell.
2. Character. Do your characters spring off the page? Are they unique, well rounded and memorable? Can the reader really empathise with them?
3. Writing skills. Have you worked on the craft and developed your skills as a writer?

Of these I would say 1 and 2 are the most important. It's surprising what a good editor can do for 3.

If you do have something that agents and editors want then you should expect to get a mixture of full requests, personalised responses and requests to see whatever you write next, in among the inevitable form rejections and non responders.

 

[NickP]

Well it's so rare that anybody agrees with me that I will celebrate by saying something else.

It's a fair bet that most of us here can string a coherent sentence together and probably even summon some occasional lyricism. But sadly that has nothing whatsoever to do with why most of those who do actually read at all read stories.

 

[Paul Whybrow]

Well it's so rare that anybody agrees with me that I will celebrate by saying something else.

It's a fair bet that most of us here can string a coherent sentence together and probably even summon some occasional lyricism. But sadly that has nothing whatsoever to do with why most of those who do actually read at all read stories.

You raise an intriguing point, NickP, and it's an area of writing or more accurately marketing that I've been pondering for some time. What strikes me, is that books that become bestsellers share three qualities. As Kitty said, the story has to have a USP, a unique selling point; the concept has to grab a potential reader's interest. This is also called the elevator pitch, a term used to describe how to sell an idea for a movie in a few sentences. An extreme example of this is the film Snakes On A Plane whose title alone summed up the plot.

The other key ingredient is readability. Although we all labour long and hard to produce writing of high quality, that represents our 'voice', it might be that we're being too true to our own selves by going for stylistic flourishes that put off the reader. I say this because reading best-selling books by Lee Child, James Patterson and Wilbur Smith is no harder than reading a story aimed at young readers. They don't use long or difficult words, the speech is simplistic and the characterisation is two-dimensional. They succeed through being uncomplicated and readily understood: readers don't necessarily want to be challenged....

The third factor that aids sales is, for want of a better term, loyalty. I could say brain-washing, but readers get hooked on an author and buy their work whatever critics say. I've known people who only read Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Harlan Coben, Georgette Hayer or Terry Pratchett. Sometimes they do so because they've become hooked on the story arc of the protagonist if they feature in a series of stories. It's something that I'm attempting to use in my series of Cornish Detective novels.

After all, if you don't empathise in some way with the hero, why would you read the story?

 

[Katie-Ellen]

One of my favourite novels is The Haunting of Gad's Hall by Norah Lofts. One look at the cover or the blurb says it's a horror novel. And in a way, it is.

But anyone wanting a good horror fix is not going to get what they expect. It's actually a story about inheritance and legacy, material, monetary, genetic, even epigenetics; whisperings within.

Literature? Nah. You could call it a domestic drama, I suppose. The prose is unassuming, transparent. And yet, it's taken me several reads to unpack all the layers of meaning, either because I am a bit dim, or the writer is so subtle.

I LOVE that sort of book!

We write for the people who GET us. We write for the people who read what we read.

No use busting our brains about the rest. They ain't our reading tribe and the only question is, who, and how big and wide is our natural reading tribe.

 

[Peggy Lou]

I agree with Katie-Ellen. There are so many reading tribes out there, as there are tribes. The trick is to figure out which tribe is the right one for a particular manuscript. Perhaps some readers don't like being challenged. Others do. Perhaps some like two dimensional characters while others don't. There's no 'one right way' to write a book.
As for rejections, I've got so many they can fill a room. One learns to live with them, because the other option is to stop writing, or just writing for oneself. I have a CP who does that. He slaves over stories, go through several edits but never submits them. Says he writes only for himself.

 

[Paul Whybrow]

I was recently watching one of the many American imported reality series that fill the UK television schedules. Cajun Pawn had a customer come into their store who wanted to sell his collection of Civil War ammunition, which he'd diligently dug up from battlegrounds and from out of trees. He'd mounted them in display cases with captions saying where he found them.

Most of the bullets were deformed from impacting with hard surfaces (including human bone!) and the collector had hundreds of them, making a considerable weight. The pawn shop owner is an expert on many things, including this era of warfare, and pointed out that troops used to hunt for bullets fired at them, to melt over a flame to pour the lead into bullet moulds--to shoot back at the enemy in the next battle.

This struck me as the perfect analogy for querying literary agents and publishers. They might well fire a dismissive form letter of rejection your way, but so what? It's how the battle to get published goes. Simply dig the bullet out, maybe refine it a bit, then fire it back at someone else!

Make them have it!