Friday, November 9, 2007

Rejected - Finally!

I sent a book proposal for one of my Boomer Sister book to a publisher earlier this year. MUCH earlier this year. Several weeks after sending the package, I got a confirmation note back, acknowledging they'd received it. I appreciated the confirmation - many publishers don't even do that. The date was April 1st.

Yesterday, 7+ months later, I finally got the long-anticipated "Thank you for your submission, but we are not interested at this time..." letter.

I know I'm in good company and just about every famous book ever published was rejected a million times by countless publishers (not that I'm expecting any of my stuff to ever become famous). I'm neither surprised nor upset by the rejection, and I wasn't exactly waiting around for their response. To be honest, I'd sort of forgotten about them. But what I can't wrap my brain around is why it took so long for them to make a decision.

I know it takes a while for a publisher to read and judge all the submissions they receive, but I can't believe it really needs to take seven months. If the author forgets about you by the time you make a decision, something's wrong with the process. Something's broken. And it's not just rejections that take a long time. A friend of mine had a book accepted by this same publisher - and it took 5 months before they replied to her. Call me impatient, but I think that's a pretty long time.

On the plus side, they returned the copy of the book I'd sent them. I think that was nice.

Thank goodness for Lulu!

2 comments:

Michelle said...

Yep, the slush piles are huge and the wait times are ridiculous. But hey, congrats on hearing back from them at all! Nothing burns me up more than NOT being rejected.

Unknown said...

Good point - it's better to get rejected, how ever long it takes, than to simply be ignored...