The first thing to say is that I've got no idea how other publishers think, but this is what's on my mind.
Being a publisher of trade books (that is, books for general readers which are sold by the book trade) is essentially an exercise in risk management. Whatever your tastes, abilities, and interests, you know automatically that most of the titles you publish will either lose money, break even, or earn a modest amount of money. On the other hand -- in my experience -- if you try to tailor your list to books you don't like or care about, but that you think will make real money, you usually end up doing even worse.
So you have to temper your enthusiasm or even passion for the job with a kind of world-weary acceptance that the market place will always have its way with you. As a general rule, the more books you publish and print, the more will be returned unsold by the book trade. The best you can do is to try to spread the risk so that you can't be brought undone by a big mistake or a series of run-of-the-mill disasters. At the same time, you can't afford to think or publish defensively, as that would limit your horizons and imbue the whole enterprise with the spirit of defeatism.
What this means in practice, for an independent trade house without a multinational parent or majority owner, is that you have to keep a lid on advances and print-runs, while backing your imperfect judgement relentlessly, and publishing and promoting your list as effectively as possible. To put the same point a different way, the fastest way to go broke is to believe your own publicity by paying too much for books and printing too many of them. Publishers never have the luxury of forgetting about their mistakes: they eat away at their profit-and-loss statements, clog their warehouses, and have to be remaindered or pulped after a barely decent interval has passed.
Meanwhile, we're continuously looking at many books and proposals from a wide array of sources -- local authors and agents, and foreign publishers and agents -- that demand a great deal of attention and, often, quick responses.
So a trade publisher has a lot to think about, including but not confined to the shape of his or her list, the state of the market, the performance of competitors, the wellbeing of their staff, the fate of their authors and, of course, the bottom line and the bank balance. There's always a lot going on, and there's never enough time to do everything that needs to be done.
This is what's going on behind the scenes when authors submit unsolicited manuscripts or book proposals to publishers like us. It's a fact universally acknowledged that an unsolicited manuscript has a very low chance of being of a publishable standard; that's why it gets put, in the first instance, in what's known as 'the slush pile'. It's very hard to justify putting scarce editorial resources into assessing such manuscripts. And yet -- as numerous mistaken rejections by publishers around the world and throughout history have shown -- it's folly to treat them all as unworthy of consideration.
We’ve developed over time a system for coping with this dilemma. This is spelled out on ‘Manuscript Submission’, which you can reach by clicking on ‘Submission Guidelines’ on our home page.
First, we ask authors who meet our minimum qualifications to email us first before submitting. We do not read unsolicited material that arrives in the mail if the author has not emailed us first.
Second, if we ask to see sample material, we pay careful attention to the covering note and to the quality of the writing of the sample chapters, as well as to the content. Just as individuals notice and respond to body language when meeting somebody for the first time, an editor will immediately register how language is used by a new author. Punctuation, syntax, grammar, and tone all tell a story, for better or worse.
Proposals that are clearly inferior never get past this step. We reject them as soon and as briefly as possible, using uninformative language to convey the clear message that our decision is final. This, by the way, is what lies behind publishers' apparently bland rejection letters which state that a proposal 'does not suit our list'. This is an admittedly nonsensical formulation, but it does the job of conveying the message that the proposal has been rejected and that there's no prospect of it being reconsidered .
As a general rule, the briefer the rejection letter, the harsher the publishing verdict behind it. Conversely, lengthy rejection letters usually indicate that the editor/publisher found genuinely likeable qualities in the writing, but not enough to overcome its weaknesses.
The worst kind of rejection letter, from a publisher's point of view, is one that leaves room for a response by the author or her agent. This means fruitless correspondence is then entered into, and usually leaves both parties feeling even more unhappy. Sometimes, though, a retort is worth the pain. My favourite example of this was recently provided by an international publishing friend of mine, who rejected a proposal by a right-wing writer he despised. He wrote to the authors' agent: 'I would rather eat ricin than publish A.B.' The agent replied: 'A.B. tells me that she knows where to get you some.'
If we're impressed by the sample material, we'll ask to see the full manuscript, or as much of it as is available. At this third point in our sifting process, we come to the position I described at the beginning: trying to make a sound judgement and backing our instincts, while knowing that it's impossible to be sure of the outcome.
Usually, at least two people, and sometime more, will be involved in this decision-making process. We try to make it a pre-condition for us deciding to offer for a manuscript that I or the acquiring editor love the writing. But love -- in publishing, as in life -- is not always enough. Sometimes you need good luck as well, or even just the absence of bad luck.
I should perhaps explain that, because of or despite what I've just written, we're still expanding our list and acquiring more books than ever (although, admittedly, most of them are from published authors, both locally and overseas). Perhaps this is the triumph of hope over experience, but I still love acquiring good books and imagining how well we'll publish them.
Henry Rosenbloom