5 Reasons I Say “No Thank You”
I’ve been powering through submissions this weekend, and I decided to do another list in hopes of helping future submitting authors understand what makes a submission an almost instantaneous no. Some of these are probably universal nos, some of them may be just my own quirks. Most of these authors will receive a form letter on Monday morning instead of whatever feedback I can usually find time to provide.
5. First North American Serial Rights Only.
I’m not sure why anyone would send a book publisher the opportunity to buy serial rights at all since that’s for magazines, nor why anyone who knows our first publication is always electronic would limit it to North American. It is possible to limit electronic book sales if you only want to sell through Amazon for the Kindle or on Mobipocket, but we sell through a lot of outlets. We don’t limit print sales either. You can buy our books in Denmark, New Zealand, or South Africa if you want to, whatever format you read.
4. Locked Document/ Copyright the Author. Do Not Steal This Book.
This is an odd one, but it does happen. Most of the time I wouldn’t even notice the document was locked… if it’s formatted in 12 pt. Courier and double-spaced. If it isn’t, I usually give the author the benefit of the doubt and CTRL+A to change the font and spacing. If I can’t? It’s an immediate no. I usually assume these people are related to the COPYRIGHT people. The zealous copyright notification combined with the “don’t steal notice” all over the place is wince-worthy. I don’t have time to steal someone else’s work. I not only don’t have the time, I don’t want to do that. Setting aside the distastefulness of the whole idea, how long would I last as a thief? Word tends to get around. Assuming those people are going to be suspicious of everything, I put them in the No pile too.
3. PDF.
I don’t receive many of these anymore, but still, now and again I’ll get a 150k word manuscript formatted like a book, with acknowledgements page and thank you and copyright all neatly typed in some font the author thought would be attractive. As a PDF. If the font is legible, I do usually read the first few pages, but the minute I itch to write a little note to the author to explain that there’s a POV problem, or the pacing is off, I close it. I prefer to make my notes on the manuscript so I don’t lose them. If I can’t, then there are no notes. And if the manuscript was borderline, it goes in the “NO” pile. (Exception, an intricately formatted poem that requires special handling.)
2. Illegible.
I know a lot of editors don’t care what font something comes in as long as it’s readable, but my preference remains 12 pt. Courier, and the lines have to be double-spaced. I read too many submissions to switch back and forth. As I mentioned before, if the author sends it in something else, I usually fix it first-if it’s fixable.
I doubt you’d believe how often I’ve changed the font and line spacing to discover that the author used a “hard return” at the end of every line. A hard return is when, instead of allowing the word processing software to wrap the line wherever it would naturally, the author hits the ENTER key at the end where he or she wants it broken. When I get those, it often looks fine until I change the font size, type face, or line height. Then I end up with text halfway across the page, or broken in the middle. I can’t tell where one paragraph ends and another begins. Most of the time these came in a font I can’t read on my machine, so there’s no going back, sucking it up, and reading it as the author sent it. It’s a sadly wasted effort, for both of us.
1. Info dumps all over the first page.
The star had once been a yellow star, some 5 million light years from previously explored space. At the height of its power, it had had a gross weight of at least 10 × 1028kg.*
As the star’s hydrogen supplies run out, its form changes significantly. Its core, now composed almost entirely of helium, begins to collapse upon itself, releasing further energy. This is sufficient to power an expansion of the matter around the decaying core, and the outer layers of the star swell to many times their original size. Meanwhile, the collapsing helium core reaches a point where fusion can proceed once again, this time fusing atoms of helium to produce carbon and oxygen. In this new phase, the temperature of the outer layers of the swollen star has cooled to give it a red light, and the resulting star type is known as a red giant.
Just as the star’s original hydrogen fuel was eventually exhausted, so the star’s new supply of helium fuel will also eventually be exhausted too. The next developments in the star’s life will depend on its mass. If it is sufficiently massive, it can once again ‘recycle’ its fuel into heavier and heavier elements, until eventually its core is composed of iron. But beyond this limit no further processing is possible: the core collapses completely to form a superdense neutron star, while the outer shells of material are blasted away in a catastrophic event known as a supernova.
This star, though, has too little mass to pass through this process. Once its helium core is depleted, nuclear reactions will cease, and the core will shrink to roughly the size of the Earth. The result will be an inert and highly dense stellar remnant, known as a white dwarf. Meanwhile, the outer shells of the giant phase will drift away from the dead core, eventually forming a bubble or ring of matter known as a planetary nebula.
However a star dies, much of its matter is spread back into the Interstellar Medium, whether through the supernova explosion or the formation of a nebula, and in that medium the processes that formed the original protostar are always at work. The matter cast away by one dying star may eventually find itself taking part in the birth of another.
And that’s where our intrepid crew was headed, a white dwarf 10 million light years from home.
(*Thanks to glyphweb.com/esky for the example of what not to do at the beginning of a piece of fiction.)
At least with #1, I have something to tell the author about the reason behind the refusal.
Mirrored from dlmfisher.com.