I can understand not liking it enough to buy it themselves, it's the wondering if it's because nobody would buy it that drives me crazy. {grumbles} Seems to me that the publishers/agents would be doing the whole industry a favor by making that sort of a distinction with their form letters, otherwise we're just wasting everyone's time in turn by blindly shopping around a manuscript that no one would want to make a go of...
My response to this is probably unfortunate -- but there are books published now that have sold quite well that I would not, in a million years, have expected anyone would, as you say, want to make a go of <wry g> had I been offered them in manuscript form. So while it does seem as if a blanket statement of that nature should be possible, the reality is that each person reviewing or reading editorially is individual -- and given that the book that I would have dismissed in that fashion is both published and selling, I would have been dead wrong, and have done no one any favours.
If you mean that there should be letters that say "learn to punctuate. Learn to spell. Learn sentence structure, paragraph structure" etc., then yes, those might be helpful -- but I'm assuming that for most people (there are always exceptions), the basic tools of composition have been mastered.
There are also markets that are shrinking enormously (memoirs come to mind, and historicals aren't exactly a booming, thriving niche, and I like both), so books that might once have been bought, aren't. Other genres have expanded -- romance, for instance. It depends on a number of things, one of which being, what you've written, and for what market.
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branchandroot
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Date: 2004-08-11 07:48 am (UTC)My response to this is probably unfortunate -- but there are books published now that have sold quite well that I would not, in a million years, have expected anyone would, as you say, want to make a go of <wry g> had I been offered them in manuscript form. So while it does seem as if a blanket statement of that nature should be possible, the reality is that each person reviewing or reading editorially is individual -- and given that the book that I would have dismissed in that fashion is both published and selling, I would have been dead wrong, and have done no one any favours.
If you mean that there should be letters that say "learn to punctuate. Learn to spell. Learn sentence structure, paragraph structure" etc., then yes, those might be helpful -- but I'm assuming that for most people (there are always exceptions), the basic tools of composition have been mastered.
There are also markets that are shrinking enormously (memoirs come to mind, and historicals aren't exactly a booming, thriving niche, and I like both), so books that might once have been bought, aren't. Other genres have expanded -- romance, for instance. It depends on a number of things, one of which being, what you've written, and for what market.