Hot Take: Notes From an Editorial Assistant Doing Her Best

I handle the slush pile.

I roll in it. Hundreds of emails accumulated over months of people professing their interests and aspirations and wounds and impulses; people assuming that being dealt a bad emotional card or an interesting life path gives them the skills to be a novelist; people who think they can write children’s books because it’s just easier than adult fiction; people who copyright their storyboard sketches despite them being haphazardly-drawn sketches on a piece of A4 paper; people who have checked the website enough to include all the requested documents, but have ignored the large, glaring red note across the top of the page that says SUBMISSIONS CURRENTLY CLOSED.

People call in—elderly folks wondering if they can post their submission (of course, and they tug heartstrings the most with their WWII spy thrillers or poignant, poorly written romances), or men who’ve already exhausted every other publisher by requesting a one-on-one meeting with your editors to discuss their groundbreaking book idea. I have five full Post-Its of notes from a woman who called about her non-fiction manuscript on James Joyce, all listing the compliments she gave herself on her stunning research.

One particular English chap refused my assertion that unsolicited manuscripts are sent to me through email or post. He claimed he only wanted experienced professionals discussing his work. Approximately ten years of student loan debt waiting on my doorstep, giving my publishing know-how an academic stamp of approval, does not entitle me to a peek at his mind-melting work.

I also have a creative writing degree. I wrote a YA fantasy manuscript, then a literary fiction manuscript, then poetry, and eventually short fiction. I got the rejection letters. The blunt ones that took five months to arrive, and the brief but sincere ones with a note of encouragement tucked into a quick PS. I began writing in regional competitions back in America at age twelve, and I wasn’t published until twenty-four. A poem about wanting to skin my lovers and eat them alive.

I feel that ache, now, sending out rejections to ninety-nine percent of people who submit. The vast majority of presses do not have the time to offer personalised feedback—they truly don’t, that’s not bullshit. I do, in fact, have more to do than sit at my desk with a cuppa and some Hobnobs, cooking up bullet-point advice on how to make a piece of writing publishable.

Those stock episodes from countless sit-coms where a teenager ends up taking two dates to the school dance, having been unable to tell either one no, circulate frequently in my mind. I’m sweating in a chintzy pink tulle dress, spitting out shoddy excuses to one guy before sprinting across the gym to my second date, who has been grabbing me a glass of punch, none the wiser. It always goes wrong—they scramble to explain the mix-up to both dates at the end of the episode, and the world moves on.

But my prom doesn’t end (I never actually went to prom in high school, so this is conjecture). I’m stuck in the middle of the dance floor, Rihanna is playing, and I don’t have the energy to dance. I’m the one sneaking a flask out of the folds of my dress and pouring it into my punch. I retire to a plastic seat in the back underneath waves of crepe paper streamers stuck to the ceiling with Sellotape and squint against the multi-coloured lights bouncing off the disco ball.

I wish I could put a sneaky note in the emails: I get it. But it’s not very professional.

We instruct people not to send original written manuscripts because we can’t send them back. I do, even though the postage costs are a nuisance.

It’s discouraging. I think of my short stories fermenting in someone’s inbox like fruit fallen from tree branches to rot—not even in the main inbox, but a sub-folder titled To Be Read or To Reject. I can’t always blame the people who take my rejections personally, not really. I’m sorry it took four months to get a No, but the woman who had the job before me lost the plot and stopped sorting submissions, so I’m doing damage control. (But a note: I put every impolite email in a special folder titled Rude LMAO, so that technological bridge will be burnt.) The longer I spend sifting through the slush pile, shovelling the snow off the path so that I can make my way to the dozen other things I need to do today, the more I realise that the horror stories are a bit true, sometimes.

I get a bad taste in my mouth from certain fonts. Times New Roman always works; Calibri tends to imply inexperience (it is a sans serif font, which makes it more difficult to read in longer passages); Courier New is almost exclusively employed by men who want to appear intelligent. Garamond, rarely used, is the way to my heart.

I don’t like when people put five pages of titles, subtitles, copyright details, and other “official” information before starting their story.

I usually dislike rhyming in children’s stories. It’s not a necessity. Your writing should be interesting without rhyme.

Take the allure of self-publishing with a grain of salt—once you get the idea of going to an established publisher with your story, after hawking it by your lonesome on Amazon, the market and potential publicity we could’ve mined is used up.

Don’t tell me your manuscript is one of a kind, don’t tell me you’re the next JK Rowling (this communicates far more than arrogance these days), don’t tell me it was a COVID pet project, don’t tell me how much your beta readers liked it.

I would prefer, much more, despite the disappointment, if my two dates could come sit in the back with me. Pull down the streamers and tie them around our heads and our wrists, get tipsy on the punch. I understand. I do, for reference, even when it’s busy, keep a notepad next to my computer, and I write down the name of everyone who is very kind, everyone who has potential, everyone who has dedicated time to their work. And I write them a personalised note in their rejection email.

Some people write back telling me it was the kindest letter they’ve received, and it’s motivated them to write more. Some people resubmit. And they get better with time, too. I sometimes go back into the recesses of my personal email account and find my first submissions to agencies and publishers when I was eighteen and think about how I became a new person, a new writer, roughly five or fifty times between then and now.

I can’t say exactly what will make any one publisher choose a submission. It changes—between publishers, between genres, sometimes between days for the same jaded editorial administrator sitting at a desk. Keep reading, keep researching, take some classes, do writing exercises, think about what your project, specifically, has to offer to other people.

My editor remarked recently that I’ve pulled a record number of items from the slush pile to be pushed forward to publishing meetings, compared to the people who had the job before me. It’s still very few, mind you, but there are first-time authors there. Kind people who followed the rules and, above all, just cared about what they wrote. I can feel it, for reference, the sort of unburdened passion.

They’re like the one or two people on a dance floor absolutely losing their minds, and they might not be ‘perfect dancers’ in the strict sense of the term, but they’re good by their sheer determination to make it all good. It gets me and my dates out onto the floor for sure (we’re well tipsy on punch by this point). They’re people who make everyone feel like the entire prom was worth it, just to jump around for that one song.

It took me twelve years, a degree, writing seminars and retreats, and a hell of a lot of research and time and effort and refining and editing to get published. Take your time. Enjoy the process. And please, for the love of God, consider that the person rejecting you might only be doing their best as well.