Thoughtful ''Open Rejection Letter''

I came across this very straightforward, honest, yet sensitive rejection letter for the small publication firm "Snowbooks."

Snowbooks

If you think about it, we have a financial incentive to put as little thought and effort into sifting through submissions as possible. We've got a lot of submissions to get through and not enough time. Plus, many publishers aren't looking to take any chances with new material; they want obvious, commercial successes, ideally from authors with a track record.

Snowbooks could hire a team of people whose job it is to give detailed constructive feedback to submitting authors and to point them in the direction of other publishers more attuned to their style, but there's no obvious way for us to make that idea profitable. We'd be spending money that other firms aren't and it wouldn't necessarily make us any more financially successful - and it's the same with any other publishers you'll deal with. We're like shoppers at a January sale: we grab the two or three things that catch our eye as quickly as we can and move on. We're not critics so much as opportunists.

Given that a submitted manuscript is inevitably an author's pride and joy, and that a book's acceptance and future fortunes are bound up with its author's own hopes and happiness, it's almost criminal that publishers get to accept or reject submissions with so little feedback or accountability. The best we can say at Snowbooks is that we think it's a bad situation, but we don't at the moment have a solution to it (although we have some ideas for the future which we think will help - see our new process, above).

In the meantime, all we can suggest is that you don't trust publishers. They're not your friends and they're not even that great at spotting what readers will like.