Over on the LabLit Forum we’ve been analyzing why authors who write books that feature scientists doing realistic scientific things (‘LabLit’) seem underrepresented in the market. One view is that editors are extremely poor at judging the worth or likely success of a book.
One correspondent, remarking on the fact that J. K. Rowling received many rejections before she was taken on as an author (a phenomenon familiar to many authors), remarked that if that were the case, then the editorial filtering system is deeply flawed – if editors make the wrong choice 9 out of 10 times.
Well, no, it’s not. The reason is that it’s not as simple as that. Several other factors must be taken into account, not all of which are easily quantifiable or scientific (although some of them are nonlinear, I suppose).
1. Authors do not always judge the best publishers/agents for their work, and submit work inappropriately – for example, to a publisher who only deals through agents; to an agent who is not taking on any more authors; to a publisher who deals primarily in romance, so won’t be interested in your hardboiled thriller, and so on. Read the guidelines. better still, phone up and ask.
2. If you have checked the above box, it could be that the editor thinks your novel is fine, if developed more, and might even make suggestions for development – but won’t take it on unless the author amends it. Now, time was when editors did spend time with promising authors to develop their work, but commercial pressures now mean that editors are really best thought of as project managers. Editorial development is now devolved to agents, and even they have less and less time for this these days.
3. It could be that you’ve written a pile of poo. Get over it, and try again. If authors are poor judges of the likely venue for their work, they are even worse at judging its inherent worth. That’s why the editorial filtering system is necessary.
4. Editors are not the only determinants of what gets published. Of equal weight (some would say more) are the marketing, advertising and sales departments, who are less interested in the intrinsic merit of a piece, or how important it seems to an author, than how it will sell in a specific and identifiable market. This is why it is very important for books to be easily pigeon-holed into genres – and why a ‘new’ genre, like LabLit, will (in their eyes) be impossible to sell. The answer is POD (and that’s another story).
5. Then, there is the all-important ‘crazy’ factor. I once asked an editor with a reputation for spotting bestsellers how he did it. His answer was that he didn’t – because his judgement was fubarized by the many imponderables in the system after a book is published, including whether a book is reviewed (and when, and in which paper, and by whom – and how well), and even such things as the economic cycle, what was in the news at the time, even the weather. He said that he’d seen a lot of bad books reap undeserved success, and a lot of good books just stiff. (He had just bought my first nonfiction trade book Deep Time, for quite a lot of money. It tanked).
So, there may be a few potential bestsellers out there that never reach their audience, just as there are ones that have generated enormous sales despite being … er … less good.
6. Editors are only human, and they do make mistakes. But it would be over-simplistic to say that they make mistakes 9 out of 10 times. And sometimes, if rarely, you get an oddball editor who kicks over the traces and decides to publish something a bit different. Another time I was at a party in NYC with a lot of bookish types, one of whom was a children’s-books editor at a publisher. I asked her why she thought Harry Potter was so successful. She confessed that she had no idea, and neither had anyone she talked to – they couldn’t see what was so amazing about it. But, obviously, it took just one editor with the right cast of mind; all the stars were in alignment, the crazy factor was in abeyance, and Rowling lucked out. But she had to luck out, again and again, all along the line…