Best Rejection Letter Ever!

[dr_pretentious]

The Big Book got closer this time than ever before. The junior editor must really have liked the cover letter, because she'd have seen the manuscript's word count the moment she opened the file. If something hadn't grabbed her, she could have sent a form rejection right then. But she read the manuscript.

The whole manuscript. Even for a speed reader, this would have been a significant investment of her time.

She then, somehow, persuaded the big name editor at the imprint to read the manuscript. He, too, could have said no right after reading the query, or right after finding out how long the book was. Or right after the first paragraph, for that matter.

Instead, the junior editor had this to say, after the usual riff about how the market does not favor long books these days:
I want to stress again how much we both enjoyed the writing. The characters were engrossing, and the worldbuilding fascinating. It's with regret that we are passing on this. We hope you will consider us for other projects.

Rejectomancy is one of the most perilous of the divinatory arts, but I suspect the big name editor may have read the whole manuscript, too. I like to imagine they might have gotten as far as the profit and loss projections before making a final decision.

I went in through the plain old slush pile, unagented, with an unpublishably long manuscript, and now have an ardent invitation to submit future projects to a major editor who's been on my short list for years. And to think that, when I combed over their guidelines for an upper limit on word count and didn't find one, I said out loud to my computer screen, "What are you people thinking? Don't you know you'll get 300,000 word manuscripts from crackpots like me?" The odds were still as much against me as ever, but I figured the Big Book might as well gather virtual dust in the slush reader's email in-box as on my hard drive.

Fortune favors the bold.

Comments

[kistha.livejournal.com]

YAY!

Also, can you re-send me the big book in word? Thanks!

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

Sent. Wow, that is one bulky attachment.

[dthon.livejournal.com]

That is some damned fine news - and fortune does favor the bold! So, what's your next book project, hmm?

Many congrats!
-Scott

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

Once the Ria story's off to Drollerie Press, I'll get back to the half-finished stand-alone prequel to the Big Book, which is on track to weigh in at about 100K. I've been looking forward to picking that project back up for a while, but the Rugosa Coven series found a publisher first. That's high on my list of good problems to have.

[annathepiper]

Oh, that's AWESOME! Congrats!

And it's so weird, isn't it, saying "congrats" for a rejection. But this is how we can tell we're WRITERS. ;D

[fjm.livejournal.com]

I tell my best students,
"You're ready to start collecting rejection letters."

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

I knew lots of folks on my flist would get why this rejection was cause for celebration. I've collected enough rejections to be able to demonstrate to any promising student that not all rejections are created equal.

[onyxtwilight.livejournal.com]

Happy Dance!

[fjm.livejournal.com]

Can you take that letter to an agent?

And can the book be split up?

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

I'd love your perspective on the agent question, especially since this same book got a similarly enthusiastic/regretful rejection from a big name agent a while back. When the half-finished stand-alone prequel that's on track to weigh in at 100K is finished, I'm sure this letter will help me, but my best guess is that it can't help me secure an agent on the strength of the Big Book. I'm having trouble imagining a way to spin that agent query in a way that doesn't translate to something like, "Even people who want to say yes to my novel can't make a business case for it, but please represent it anyway." I would dearly love to be represented by the agent who almost said yes, but when I imagine the email I'd send her, it keeps sounding like, "An editor rejected me just as cordially as you did, so maybe you can get together with him and talk each other into making a big financial mistake."

Okay, so maybe even after a great rejection like this, one must lick one's wounds.

I'm open to the idea of splitting or pruning the book, but to take either approach far enough to get a result that would be easier to sell and would still work as a satisfying novel or novels would be a six-month undertaking, with no certainty that it would find a taker afterward. And Murphy's Law dictates that if I chose one course of action over the other, I'd choose wrong. If any editor or agent who actually looked at it were to say, "Prune it and get back to me," or "Split it and get back to me," I'd give it a shot. With no specific proposal from a specific would-be taker, I hesitate to do either when I think the book in its current form works on its own terms, though not on the market's.

I've been figuring that the solution is to write my way out of my predicament. If an established novelist can get away with a book this long, but a debut novelist can't, I'll write shorter novels and send them around until I'm not a debut novelist anymore.

But what do I know? If I had all the answers, I'd have been multiply published long ago, and I'd be a household name by now (in households as geeky as mine, that is).

[spindlewand.livejournal.com]

Way. To. Go.!!!

And well deserved.

The invitation for other things you do to be sent, obviously. And since all really great books seem to be rejected about a million times before finding a home, hopes that this one finds one soon too...

[mindseas.livejournal.com]

Woot!

[rednikki.livejournal.com]

Congratulations!

[thunderpigeon.livejournal.com]

Congratualmost!

Also, the Big Book is 300K? I can't remember if that's really a lot shorter than I last heard, or if it has just expanded in my mind to greater proportions than are real...I vaguely remember thinking it was in the vicinity of 500-700K...

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

Oh, dear gods, no.

When I was writing the first draft, I guessed wrong about where to put the boundary between the first volume and the second, and the two together might have neared 500K if I'd written to the end of what's now the second book, but before it could come to that, I split the draft. Trouble was that giving the structure of the next draft a satisfying beginning, middle, and end brought the first book back up to 300K.

Someday it will be an advantage that the second volume is already half roughed out. Not soon, but someday.

[cascade-writers.livejournal.com]

This is great news! I am still in favor of splitting the book into three story lines, if possible, but it sounds as if any future projects will be welcomed by this editor. Now if you can only find the time to write!

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

There's progress on the writing time front, now that Conrad's old enough to sleep better. I have some other commitments to keep first, and then I'll be able to finish something he'll welcome.

[showingup.livejournal.com]

I bet they were hooked in straight away. I've been clean and sober for a few years now, and I still miss that pure Beltresa-crack.

Well, good to know you have persons to cultivate - you're good at that, and you're the best living fantasy writer, so I am confident that the Universe will unleash your work on the world when Potter-mania has died down so that it can be appreciated for what it actually is, and not be unfairly compared to a very different kind of writing.

I send you all much love!

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

Thank you! And I'm pretty sure the Little Book will hit the same brain cell receptors the Big Book did, so you can hope for another fix, maybe around year's end.

We miss you and T especially around Yule, having gotten used to catching your transatlantic reunions with his folks. When will you be back on our side of the pond?

[citabria]

Wooooooo!

[violet-moon25.livejournal.com]

Very encouraging!

[sppeterson.livejournal.com]

Great news!

I wonder if the rise of the e-reader will make longer books more viable. You can't tell how thick one is when you load it up.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

Everybody if the publishing industry is wondering that, too. The day will probably come, but no publisher wants to guess too early that it's here.

One of the things that excites me about my new Nook is that I can fill it up with precisely the books I'd find most ungainly to schlepp around in paper editions. But then, I regard sprawl as one of the chief virtues in the novels I read.

[radiotelescope.livejournal.com]

Congratulations, indeed.

(As I understand it, the problem with very thick books isn't reader expectations; it's the cost of manufacturing a physical binding that'll survive your shoebox of pages. So electronic editions will be a big help... eventually. I don't think we're at the point where any major publisher wants to put out a new book as ebook-only.)

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

It may take that long before this book finds a home. That's okay. I plan on still being in the game that long. Longer.

My list of stuff that's out of my hands: the economy, the state of the publishing industry, printing technology, e-reader technology.

My list of stuff I can do something about: which project I'm presenting, how I'm presenting it, the number and quality of my other credentials, and my visibility in the community of potential readers. So I keep working on this list, writing more new stuff that kicks as much ass as possible--which is what I'd want to do eventually anyway, even if the Big Book sold.