Submissions Again 26th November 2010.

It doesn’t matter how often I write about submissions to us, something new always turns up.

We changed our submissions policy when we reopened this time, much tighter guidelines and we added the dreaded marketing plan clause. In other words, we asked the prospective author to tell us what they knew about book marketing, specifically of their own book. Some of our authors are very good at this, some not so good, some have reasons for keeping a low profile, others want the limelight.

If a prospective author submits and ignores that section then that’s going to quickly become a TS situation – otherwise known as thanks but no thanks. The free ride to riches happens to about one author in every generation, and sadly (for the rest of us) that was J.K. Rowling for the last generation and Stephanie Meyer for this. Everyone else, else to get involved in their own marketing, like it or not, if they want to sell their books. If they don’t want to get involved, why should we get involved with them?

We’ve been running like this for four weeks now, and the number of submissions has gone down, and the quality of submissions has gone up. Given so many authors were, like me, getting involved in NANOWRIMO means it would probably have dropped anyway.

We have had two oddball ones though, which goes to show it doesn’t matter how you set things out, people still don’t read.

The first one was sent to me direct, not via the submissions e-mail address, despite the two being on the same page of the website. We ask for the complete manuscript as an attachment. What we got was an excerpt in the body of the e-mail, no supporting information, no synopsis and no bio. No name or title. The sentence at the bottom of the e-mail was remarkable in itself; it was the closest thing to correct grammar in the whole e-mail.

“What’s it worth to me if send you the rest of my masterpiece? It’s great.”

Yes – the I is missing in the original.

The answer was short, terse and two words.

“Not interested”

Sorry for those of you who expected something more to do with a biological behaviour and an outing, but I don’t think its good practice to swear in an e-mail.

The second one was even more unreal.

An aspiring, but as yet unpublished author sent a query to the submissions address on the web site, asking what our submissions guidelines are. Hello, Earth calling -.... It’s on the website.

It just goes to show, like so many of the rest of the world, some authors don’t read.