How Not To Submit

Good morning and welcome to wwwblogs. Today, we’re talking how to impress with your submission to a publisher.
You’ve finished your book. Your beta readers have told you that it will impress every publisher you submit to as literary genius. But, you have to go through this fabulous manuscript just one more time, to ensure you’ve caught every single error, have fully developed characters, witty dialogue, intense and descriptive narrative. By the time you finish a week later, you decide your new additions are perfect. There is no need to go through the process with your beta readers again, even though you put the prologue all of them insisted was unnecessary back, because it’s absolutely essential to the story.
Satisfied you’ve created a book worth of the attention of every publisher on the planet, even if they claim they don’t accept the genre you’ve written this tale in. Hours later, after having gone through the online submissions process for all of these publishers and a few literary agents for good measure, you sit back and grin in anticipation of the wonderful time you’ll have getting exactly the contract you want.
Day one comes and goes without any responses. A week passes and nothing. By now, you’re wondering exactly what’s going on. Then, one morning, you open your email and discover responses from most of the publishers and all of the literary agents. One by one, you open them carefully, searching for an attachment indicating you’ve been given a contract. You’re dismayed there aren’t any contracts. Every response is nearly the same: Thank you for submitting to us. While your book, Rush: a Tale of One Family, is good, it is not right for us.
Your first reaction is these publishers/literary agents need to fire their submissions manager and find people with imaginations who can see the brilliance of your work. Your second reaction is to fire off emails to those hacks that tossed your work into the recycle bin and tell them that they need to learn what is excellent and what’s not.
Undeterred, you resubmit to these jerks, because they are the best publishing houses for your work, only to receive a faster response that they are not interested and you need to move on. Finally, after a week, where the rest of the publishers respond without a contract offer, you are faced with the reality that your book hasn’t been accepted anywhere.
At this point, instead of dumping those rejections into the recycle bin, you need to go over exactly what was said to you. A few of the publishers mention that the prologue seemed to have no connection to the full story. Exactly the same thing all of your beta readers said. The other instances of problems brought up by the submissions managers center on all the additions you made after deciding your beta readers hadn’t identified those areas as problematic.
Realization dawns in a hard way. Throughout the whole process of writing and editing your book, you followed the advice of many experienced authors about how to prepare your novel for submission. It was only after it was time to submit that you lost your nerve and decided you had to make your work better, but you made it worse.
This harsh lesson is one learned by first time authors every day. They follow all the right steps to achieve publication but falter before submitting to fix non-existent problems. If you have gone through this, remember that this isn’t the end of the world. Take a step back. Work with your beta readers again. Give it some time before you resubmit to those publishers, but slowly. And never give up.


About the K.C. Sprayberry
Born and raised in Southern California’s Los Angeles basin, K.C. Sprayberry spent years traveling the United States and Europe while in the Air Force before settling in northwest Georgia. A new empty nester with her husband of more than twenty years, she spends her days figuring out new ways to torment her characters and coming up with innovative tales from the South and beyond.
She’s a multi-genre author who comes up with ideas from the strangest sources. Those who know her best will tell you that nothing is safe or sacred when she is observing real life. In fact, she considers any situation she witnesses as fair game when plotting a new story.
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