Many new authors wonder why it takes so long for the editor (or literary agent) to process my submission? It’s important that you understand where the editor is coming from—to lessen your own frustration at their slow response or lack of response.
Besides continual networking with established authors for projects, acquisitions editors have other events crowding their daily schedule. These events don’t happen on a single day but often editors are in meetings—lots of meetings—which may include:
- title meetings (to discuss and select the title for a contracted book—and these meetings can take many hours)
- editorial planning meetings (weekly and several hour events at my publisher discussing procedures and other mundane but necessary things)
- concept meetings (where the title has been selected and you need to talk about the contents with your colleagues in the marketing and design areas—for example, what the cover could be for a particular book)
- cover design meetings (several of these meetings where the editors, designers and marketing people look at first covers, then another meeting to look at the covers as they are closer to being in final shape)
- editorial meetings (meetings with fellow editors to determine which projects move to the publishing leadership)
- publication board (the leadership of the publisher who determine which books are contracted and published)
- marketing meetings and
- sales meetings.
No matter what job title an editor has within a publishing house, they handle a plethora of duties and are often overworked and short on time.
Beyond the regularly scheduled group meetings, individual meetings about major and minor aspects of publishing are common. If a current author calls or emails about something, sometimes the only way to answer the request is to hold another meeting. My responsibility was to serve the publishing house and serve my authors (any author with a published book with my publisher). The acquisitions editor is often the public face of the publishing house. If an agent or an author calls with a problem, I actively worked on connecting with the people to solve this situation. Each one of these incidents takes time away from reading proposals and processing unpublished authors.
Another common event inside publishing houses that can stir many meetings is an acquisition of another publisher or another line of books from a publisher. If you read Publisher’s Weekly (which I highly recommend so you can be aware of publishing changes), you will begin to understand that occasionally publishers will purchase entire lines of books from another publisher.
At my former publisher, this type of acquisition added 350 titles to our backlist. For a minute, imagine that you were one of those authors whose book was suddenly sold to a new publisher. Under normal circumstances, when a publisher is sold, the editors and leaders of a publishing house will cease their communication with most authors and literary agents as they try to quietly transfer the entire product line. The new publishing house that buys the older material is suddenly deluged with phone calls from these authors and/or their agents who want to introduce themselves, find out about their books and have answered a multitude of other questions.
When a publishing house acquires a huge backlist of books or another publisher, this acquisition pushes out every other decision within the publishing house (including whether or not to publish new books).
For a matter of months during the transition, this decision is all consuming and few new books with unknown authors are contracted. You should know about this factor and take it into consideration as you send out your book proposal. If a publisher has recently acquired another publisher, it might not be the best time to submit your proposal.
Editors also occasionally attend conferences—sometimes to improve their own skills as an editor and other times to teach workshops and meet face-to-face with potential authors. These sessions often require five to seven days on the road and away from their desk. When I returned from such a trip, I had phone calls to return and urgent editorial matters to handle. The unsolicited manuscripts get pushed into a pile to be processed later.
Why have I told you these details about an editor’s task? Because my goal is to help you understand that the publisher, editor or agent isn’t sitting around with an empty agenda waiting for your book proposal. Many authors complain about the length of time for a decision or any type of response, but there are many good reasons for such delays. The editors inside a publishing house are focused on current work which will hopefully lead to profitability for the publisher. Your proposal or idea may have potential earnings, but the editors are much more focused on the accepted manuscripts already in front of them.
I commonly tell authors if they want my instant response, I can give it—but it will not be what they want to hear. If an author or an agent pushes for a decision, the instant and easiest answer for an editor to give is “no, thank you.” As an editor, when you turn down a project, you risk possibly missing a bestseller such as a Prayer of Jabez or a Purpose Driven Life type of book. From my years of publishing experience, I know these particular books came into their respective publisher not as an unsolicited manuscript. These two bestselling books didn’t come in over the transom or unsolicited. They came to the publisher through some of the other means that editors acquire books.
It’s relatively quick to decide to say no, stuff a form rejection into the envelope or paste it into a return email. I realize that “yes” is the only answer an author wants to hear about their work; however, a publisher’s phone call or email that a publishing contract is on the way to an author often requires volumes of time.
W. Terry Whalin, a writer and acquisitions editor lives in California. A former magazine editor and former literary agent, Terry is an acquisitions editor at Morgan James Publishing. He has written more than 60 nonfiction books including Jumpstart Your Publishing Dreams and Billy Graham. To help writers catch the attention of editors and agents, Terry wrote his bestselling Book Proposals That $ell, 21 Secrets To Speed Your Success. Get a free copy of his proposal book (follow the link). Check out his free Ebook, Platform Building Ideas for Every Author. His website is located at: www.terrywhalin.com. Connect with Terry on Twitter, Facebook, his blog and LinkedIn.
No Comments