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Originally Posted by Alisa
Yep. Even if they read it, I'm sure the form rejection letter went out after that famous first line.
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Here is an interesting article about this:
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion...ks-457943.html
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Apparently GPs give their patients an average of six minutes before they are shown the door of the surgery. The average author sending an unsolicited script certainly gets much less. Publishers now rely on specialists - agents, in fact (think of them as the consultants of the publishing profession) - to supply them with novels, though we all still buy some non-fiction directly from authors. To plagiarise, it is a truth universally acknowledged, that the most celebrated fiction houses now only buy fiction from agents. All serious aspiring authors know this and seek out an agent as an essential stage in the process of finding the right publisher, and of course the best contract too.
That means the unsolicited fiction is now the leftovers. A terrifying proportion of these manuscripts come from people writing in green ink on scraps of Basildon Bond - surely its only use now. And if they aren't in green ink, the manuscripts arrive handwritten in capital letters, or from prison, or from a secure mental hospital. Of course there may be lost masterpieces lurking in the mad rantings of the sad, the bad and the dangerous to know (to plagiarise again), but publishers are not social workers.
One of the first things every editor is taught is that the rejection letter should be final, that is, it should not give any opportunity for a response. When you return the manuscript you never want to have to think about it again. So it is fatal to suggest that, for example, the plot is quite good but needs work in the closing chapters, or that there are too many characters, or that the dialogue needs work. Send these suggestions to the writer you don't want and you are entering the long-term relationship from hell, because in three weeks the manuscript will come straight back at you with the changes you have recommended. So publishers use euphemistic - all right, let's be honest, weaselly - phrases when rejecting manuscripts, like "not quite right for our list" or "would not fit our publishing programme". The clear subtext is that the manuscript is unpublishable and the writer should consign it to their bottom drawer. For ever.
Finally, let's get personal and specific. David Lassman, über-Austenite, has sought publicity with the news that a number of publishers have rejected his plagiarised Austen novels. His game is one played on unsuspecting publishers every two or three years and it always brings a wry smile to some faces. Last time it was Fay Weldon, and who knows who will be next? But it proves nothing. Jane Austen is, without question, canonical, but she is not contemporary. She is not the new voice that publishers are looking for. Why would editors now look for a writer describing riding down streets on horses, wearing petticoats, or ordering broughams to call on neighbours, visiting card in hand?
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