Ficlets

Oh, look: Someone’s submitted Jane Austen’s books to a bunch of publishers, only to have them rejected! It proves the publishing industry is horribly screwed up! Which means you can feel better when your own book is rejected!

Yeah, well. Not really. The implication here is that the novels were rejected because the agents and publishers can’t recognize quality when it’s presented to them. What’s more likely, however, is that most of the agents and publishers do recognize it, and they recognize it’s from Jane Austen, not this yahoo. The article notes that of the 18 publishers and editors who this dude sent the novels to, one seemed not to recognize the source, one definitely did, and the rest “simply rejected them or never responded.”

“Simply rejecting or not responding,” you should know, does not necessarily imply unfamiliarity with the work of Jane Austen. It simply suggest that the publishers/editors faced with the Austen samples just didn’t take the time to handcraft a response, signaling they were onto this fellow’s silly game.

Here’s the thing: Most manuscripts submitted to agencies and publishers get a form response, even the original ones. Why this guy feels he should get a personalized response when he did even less work is beyond me. It’s likely the publishers and agents saw what he was doing and just sent out the form response rather than to bother with him. I think it’s more interesting that he didn’t get a response from some places; to me, that implies they saw the stupid trick for what it was and just threw the damn things out, correctly recognizing that this fellow was not worth their time.

The significant thing to note is this part of the article: “Mr Lassman came up with the experiment when struggling to have his own novel published.” You can read this as “Mr. Lassman, a frustrated author, was having a hard time coming to grips with the fact that what he was writing was not interesting to publishers and agents, so he devised an experiment to assure himself the problem lay not within him but elsewhere.” I hope this makes Mr. Lassman feel better about himself, but I suspect that the problem isn’t really elsewhere.

The irony is, this little “experiment” is nowhere near new: Author James Macdonald wrote a long piece when someone pulled the same stunt last year, and listed several previous occasions in which someone pulled the same stunt. He also goes into depth, using sources including acquiring book editors, about why rejection isn’t always about literary quality (or lack thereof), and why editors are in fact usually aware when someone is trying to pull a fast one on them. It’s worth reading, and following the links Macdonald provides.

But if you don’t want to bother, here’s a graf that sums up why this fellow got non-personal responses, which allowed him to think the editors were the idiots, rather than him:

Suppose you are an editor trying to fill an anthology. One day, reading slush, you find a story that you instantly recognize as “A Cask of Amontillado,” from “The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could,” straight through to “In pace requiescat!” Do you really want to get into a lengthy correspondence with someone who may be a nutjob, a guy who thinks he’s E. A. Poe’s reincarnation? Who might sue you for mental cruelty for suggesting the work wasn’t his? Do you want this guy to start stalking you? Do you want to get Legal involved? Or do you just reach for that pre-printed form? I don’t know about you, bucko, but I know what I’d do.

Precisely.