Quote:
Originally Posted by tompe
They will take it on if the author can tell a story. Technicalities like spelling and grammar can always be fixed by the editor. What is rare is to find the people that really can tell a story.
Also it is not uncommon that writers under contract have to re-write big parts of a book (the last exemple I heard about was throwing away 85%) due to the input of the editors.
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Also: I've had at least two stories...no make that three stories that were turned down (according to the editors and they made it all the way to the editor's desks) because, paraphrase, "I just bought something very similar and cannot buy another of this genre/feel at this time." In all cases, the letters said nice things; two of them gave some story advice, etc. One was with a medium sized imprint and one was from a very small publisher. Publishers only have so much money/room on the shelf.
And of course if the editors LOVED it enough they might have bought it anyway. But as the person said who quoted TOR--there are publishable things in the slush pile, but they can't all be published traditionally for a lot of reasons, including economics of the publishing houses.