What really happens when my Manuscript arrives at the publisher’s/agent’s office?
Does it sit in a large pile or is it sorted out in to yes, maybe and no piles.
Then what happens next i.e Who reads it?
Please let me know why it takes so long… It can’t be just the number of manuscripts that drop through the post, can it?
I would really like to know…
(This is a letter and its subsequent reply taken from The Writer’s Market UK website). I thought it interesting because it gives you an insight in the type of job I used to do!
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Thank you for your query. Unless you send your manuscript to a specific person it will be delivered to whoever handles unsolicited proposals. (That was me!) This could be anyone from a secretary or junior editor, to a commissioning editor or publishing coordinator. (Or if it’s an agency, maybe the girl/boy on reception.)
This person will then sort the proposals by categories, such as craft, art, history, etc (or genres in the case of large fiction publishers) and distribute them to whoever is the editorial head of that category - usually a commissioning editor.
The editor for each category will then have a look at each of the proposals and, basically, sort them into yes, no and maybe piles.
The ‘maybe’ proposals will then be researched by the editor to determine if they will be able to fit into the companies publishing programme.
Then any ‘yes’ proposals (including ‘maybes’ that look like they will work) will be accepted and the authors will be contacted (usually for more information/pages) and any ‘no’ proposals will be rejected and returned.
Manuscripts are generally read by relevant commissioning editors or, possibly, by the publisher or head of publishing. They aren’t generally read by junior staff at this stage.
For agencies, manuscripts will be read by whichever Agent handles that particular category, so it’s much the same as in a publishing house. (I used to work in a literary agency and what happened was the script came in and the assistant to the agent would read it first, and IF it was any good, they would pass it on. But in most cases, this was not the case, and so the assistant was also responsible for penning the dreaded ‘no’ letter. I was this assistant and I always tried to make my ‘no’ letters as nice as possible. This was a film agency but same kind of principal.)
Now, this process can obviously take quite a long time, especially considering the amount or proposals that a publisher receives. This might seem like a silly excuse but some of the larger publishers can receive upwards of 1,000 proposals/manuscripts per year, and smaller publishers usually receive at least 100 or so. If you think of how long it takes just to read one novel at home you should have some idea of how monstrous a task it is to deal with manuscript submissions. This is basically why authors are asked to only submit three chapters in their initial proposals.
Further to this the vast majority of unsolicited manuscripts sent to publishers are unsuitable. They will either be mis-directed, a fiction proposal sent to a non-fiction publisher for example (which happens very often), or they will not adhere to the submission guidelines, or they might just be unlucky to have been submitted at a time when the market is full and there is no more room on the publishers list.
And of course a lot of unsolicited submissions are simply not of an acceptable quality.
All these factors add up to make it very hard and time-consuming to sort through proposals, which is partly why the process takes so long.
