{"id":271,"date":"2007-07-21T07:49:09","date_gmt":"2007-07-21T15:49:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/2007\/07\/22\/rejecting-harry\/"},"modified":"2007-07-22T08:17:05","modified_gmt":"2007-07-22T16:17:05","slug":"rejecting-harry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/publishing\/rejecting-harry\/","title":{"rendered":"Rejecting Harry"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.friscovista.com\/news\/2007\/07\/12\/san-francisco-magic\/\" title=\"the knight bus: harry potter in san francisco\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog-images-07\/knight-bus-IMG_6827.jpg\" title=\"knight bus\" alt=\"knight bus\" height=\"326\" width=\"435\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>As <a href=\"http:\/\/www.robertpeake.com\/\" title=\"robert peake\">Robert Peake<\/a> noted <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/2007\/07\/19\/rejecting-jane\/\" title=\"peake on lassman\">in a comment to a previous post<\/a> about David Lassman&#8217;s somewhat pointless exercise in submitting Jane Austen&#8217;s work for (re-)publication, publishers&#8217; manuscript screening processes are flawed, &#8220;and such flaws are only exacerbated in a deluge. The current fiction publishing markets, like the poetry markets, are just flooded.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>That is true &#8212; at Mercury House I published maybe a couple dozen books a year, against something like 3,000 submissions. Such a flood of submissions strains resources, and it is difficult as an editor to sustain top-level judgment; at least, I know I had lapses.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s why on this Harry Potter weekend it&#8217;s good to recall that eight publishers passed on the first Potter book before it was accepted by Bloomsbury. (And 27 publishers rejected the first Dr. Seuss,  22 rejected Joyce&#8217;s <em>Dubliners<\/em>, etc. etc.) It&#8217;s a frustrating process, but authors should not obsess over <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/publishing.wiki\/tiki-index.php?page=Rejection\" title=\"rejection (publishing wiki)\">rejection <\/a>&#8212; you don&#8217;t know what was going on at the other end of the transaction. If you have lost a sale it is better to move on than to linger over the loss or despair of ever succeeding. Life under the stairs might not be forever; Hogwarts awaits.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As Robert Peake noted in a comment to a previous post about David Lassman&#8217;s somewhat pointless exercise in submitting Jane Austen&#8217;s work for (re-)publication, publishers&#8217; manuscript screening processes&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=271"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=271"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=271"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=271"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}