So, we all have faced rejections at least once. No, I am not talking about relationship,I am talking about book publishing.
Well, as my last post said, today I would like to tell about the major reasons for rejections by the publishing houses. There are a lot of authors in India as well as outside, who have sent their queries to the publishing houses and got rejections in answers.
Sometimes, many authors get frustrated due to this, and start with self-publishing their book. Well, its all good, but believe me when I say that it is troublesome and worrisome. I have done so myself, and my first book is getting self-published in Amazon on December 10th itself.
But, let's be clear. Whereas self publishing needs you to either hire a professional for editing, marketing, cover design etc, or spend countless hours in front of your system to do those things by yourself, a publisher if accepts your novel, would do all those for you. So, its always better to go with the publishing houses.
So why do they reject???
So why do the publishers reject?
Most of the time, the reason is us ourselves. The most important thing for submission to a publisher is to follow their guidelines in their submission section. Almost all publishers nowadays allow only email submission, but I know people who tried to submit their manuscript through post or face to face. And that won't work. So before submissions, go through the guidelines and all the details along with terms and conditions for the submission procedure of that particular publishing house.
Now, I would like to give some pointers for submissions to the publishing houses below :
1. Always check the guidelines of the particular publisher you are approaching. Sometimes it happens that we have seen the guidelines for a publisher and following the same procedure we are submitting to other publishers. This is NOT ok. You always need to check the submission procedures and details first before submitting to the publisher.
2. Check your synopsis before you send. Check for the spelling mistakes, grammars etc. Then show it to your friends, family etc to know if the synopsis is intriguing. If not, then change it, but do so withing the word limit of the publishing houses guidelines. Its preferable not to include questions in the synopsis. As my last post said, try to include the whole storyline including the ending in your synopsis, so that the publisher knows how the story goes.
3. Now, regarding the workload of the publishers. We always see that they are rejecting and judging them from our perspective. Now lets check from their perspective. Imagine, for example, that a certain publishing house publishes around 25 books per year. Now imagine, that same house receiving nearly a 500 queries and synopsis per year. That would mean they have to go through nearly 40 queries per month. Even if there are 10 people in the house to check the queries everyday, that would mean that each of those people need to check around 4 manuscripts/synopsis per month. As a reader, ask yourself, how difficult can that sometimes get, especially if its your day job to read manuscripts. Along with that, add up the fact that some synopsis are not that great at the end and adds up to the frustration of the publishing agent who is checking those everyday.
So, its not always intentionally that the publishing houses reject the books, sometimes its also due to work pressure.
4. The novel as a whole sometimes is the reason for rejection as well. Sometimes, it happens that the synopsis is good, the outline of the novel itself is good, but that same flame is not there inside the book. How many times have you yourself put down a book as it was not that great as you imagined? Same goes for the publishing house as well. At times, the starting of the book is really extraordinary, but in the middle or at the end, it gets too much boring or predictable.
So that's one of the reasons for the rejection of the manuscripts as well.
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Happy publishing.