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This is a fascinating thread with great responses. Thanks Steve and everyone.
All figures, of course are anecotal and nobody really knows how many completed novels (especially if you include those millions which must have been written and completed but never submitted) ever see the light of day.
That 98% failure figure is about accurate for my own wee house ... but do remember that we're pretty unspecific when it comes to genre and about 75% of submissions are from first-timers who don't quite know what they're doing yet but who we're willing to work hard with if their stuff shows sparkling promise. I suspect that rejection rates at bigger and more genre-specific houses and agencies who also expect perfection at first pass must be even higher than ours.
I've never worked this out formally, but I reckon we ask to see a full manuscript on about five in every hundred submissions. When we decline on the basis of synopsis and the first two chapters, the author is told within a couple of weeks and can move on.
Of those full ms requests, we might pick up on one, maybe two, to work on over a period of months or, in some cases, a year or two. (I am, of course, not including here authors we've previously published. Their success rate is well over fifty percent because they know their jobs, know our needs and know our style.)
Maybe another one-in-five of these full manuscript submissions also show enough promise to send back with a full editorial report, a provisional (if sometimes partial) pro line-edit and an invitation to the author to re-submit after revision at his/her end. When this happens, I think we go maybe for more than half of the resulting material re-worked as per our suggestions and advice.
So I think a 2% hit rate overall is pretty close to the mark.
BUT ... rejection rates at specific, individual houses -- large or small -- can be misleading. And this is vitally important to the author and well worth considering, folks.
Let's say, for instance, that Harry Potter was part of the 98% rejection statistics with the first seventeen houses Rowling subbed to. When she (and an acquisitions editor) got it right, she became one of the two percent rather than the ninety-eight. In other words, her personal rejection rate within the industry as a whole was actually a hundred percent.
Each time you submit, you increase your chances.
What I'd really like to know is the percentage of author successes when they have faith in their work and sticking power and have subbed to twenty, thirty, fifty publishers and agents. I suspect that -- overall -- nowhere near 98% of books ultimately go unpublished as they're passed along.
Nobody yet has done the math, so who knows; (self publishing apart) perhaps as many as ten, fifteen or even twenty percent of manusripts see full release, peraps 100% of good ones from determined authors who believe in their work.
Let's hope.
Cheers. Neil
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