The submission of people who actually want to improve their work (and I'm confident that that includes Bocere) would improve. The submissions from people who have delusions of genius would not improve, but the hate mail and other harassment would drastically increase.
Yeah. Like I said, I get it, but people like Bocere are the ones they actually want quality submissions for. So you think they would want to help those kind of authors as much as possible. They're always going to get the "how DARE you reject my baby! I am the next Tolkien meets Rowling!" people... unfortunately for them.
Thelonelyauthorblog and Tenderiser are bang on. Not even giving a word of indication of what was wrong with the story leaves authors not knowing what to do. Because of the randomness involved in publishing decisions, we don't even know if we need to improve the quality of what we write or not. Well, I know that I need to from looking around, but there must be many people who are there or thereabouts wondering what they need to change.
Editors get so many submissions, they can't comment on them all. When I was first reading slush pile submissions (for short stories; not novels), I read each submission all the way through and gave personal feedback along with any rejection. After a while, I got to the point that I was getting way too many submissions to do that. So the rejections became form rejections, and many of the stories started getting rejected after a page or page and a half (which is generally plenty of time to tell if you want the story). It's just a practical fact. Editors aren't beta readers. If you're getting a lot of rejections and suspect it is a problem with the story, get some good beta readers or hire a developmental editor to give you feedback on what needs improvement.
But your premise seems to assume that there's a shortage of very good submissions. I suspect that that isn't true--that probably the issue is narrowing them, not increasing the number. So while it might be nice in a global sense to make some writers better, so that the number of very good submissions is even larger, so that their task in choosing among them is even harder...it's not actually going to do their employer any good. And it probably wouldn't do the authors any good either. I'd guess that if they took the time to scribble even a brief comment regarding every manuscript that has any hope of improvement, they would have to leave some manuscripts unread--that is, un-glanced-at. And surely their job is more about at least looking at every manuscript, than about looking at a smaller number but teaching their authors? It might be nice if the agents and publishers hired twice as many readers so that they could both read and teach, but that doesn't feel realistic. And, again, you may say, "I'm not talking about teaching, I'm just talking about a few quick words." But those few quick words will nevertheless take time, and also invite unwanted contact and conversations, which will also take time, if just time in rebuffing them.
@ChickenFreak happens occasionally, but more and more rarely I find. I sold a story on the second submission thanks to an editor from the publication who initially rejected it saying "I liked X and Y but not Z." I fixed Z and it sold to the very next market. But that was a short story. I suspect with novels you're much less likely to get that feedback. When you publish, you're basically asking the publisher to go into business with you. Further, you're asking them to front money for you to go into business with them. Asking them, on top of everything else, to also teach you the business seems a bit much. It would be like approaching a restaurant owner about going into business with him, but it being clear that while you might have some ideas you have no experience or practical ability in the restaurant business. So you want the restaurant owner to take a risk, front the necessary money, and teach you the restaurant business. Meanwhile, there's this other guy who also has ideas and clearly already knows the business. Is the restaurant owner going to take the time to teach you, or go with the guy who already knows? If you want a publisher to take the risk of going into business with you, do what it takes to learn the ropes, to write a good story, to identify problems in your own manuscript or come up with some means of identifying them prior to approaching the publisher. You'll have a much better chance of a partnership with the publisher if you do those things.
No my premise is that reading the 'slush pile' is so time consuming because of the sheer volume of submissions. If the authors got a line or two of personal feedback highlighting the main problem, they would be able to fix it (if so inclined) and wouldn't submit the same flawed manuscript to another 50 agents who also have to read it. I'm sure they already get loads of people arguing and surely they just ignore them, not take the time to write a reply rebuffing them? And if they have time to do that, they must have time to write a line on three chapters they've taken the time to read. I also doubt that agents are swamped with manuscripts they want to represent but can't because they have too many. The latest reader whose blog I read said they read about 350 a month and usually take on one. Not because that's all they have the resource for, but because only one comes up to scratch. I'm sure the rejected 349 were sent to a high number of other agencies too. Another agent whose blog I read frequently posts a summary of her rejections for that week. The reasons are often things like "good, but not for me" which a beta reader can't identify.
Just to follow up on my prior point, above: I have represented a number of artists (which term I use to identify writers, musicians, painters, etc.), and many of them don't think of things from a business standpoint. Some of them don't want to think along those lines, some of them just don't seem to operate that way mentally (which is fine, by the way, because the fact that artists think the way they do contribute to their art). What you get is either bad business decision making, which I've seen a lot (simple screws ups, even, like taxes), or people who are willing to be guided on the business side of things even though they don't think that way themselves. One of the areas that I think it is hardest to push artists into a business mindset is when it comes to valuation of their work. We all know how many hours of blood, sweat, and tears went into a book, or a painting, or a song, or whatever. It is somewhat disheartening when you're trying to sell it to see it reduced down to a commodity in a business model. Some artists avoid all that by going their own route (painters who handle their own sales exclusively, writers who self publish, and so on). If you want to get with a traditional publisher, or get into any other business where someone is going to handle the marketing, sales, and distribution of your creative output, you have to understand that the other side is approaching it as a business only. If they're going to take you on, they've got to be reasonably certain they can make some money off you. If they're not interested in taking you on, it isn't likely they're going to spend any time on you, including the time it takes to make you better at what you're doing. There are exceptions no doubt, but generally it comes down to business, and if you want to get on-board with a professional publisher you need to provide them with a professional product, not something they can use to teach you to produce professional output.
I think that you're assuming that the rational authors, the ones that would take comments to heart and fix the manuscript before sending it to every agent they can find, are a significant percentage. That's an optimistic belief that I don't share. I think that you're also assuming that the authors that will take deep offense at the slightest criticism, and who will harass the agent or publisher to the point that legal action will be required, are almost nonexistent. I don't share that belief either.
I received many personal (non- formal) rejections. I and my co-author decide to transform our book to some kind of graphic novel (we aready have 90+ watercolor illustrations) and sell book to the agent, who work with graphic novels / comics / heavy pictured books. It seems traditional fantasy agents is not our cup of tea.
How useful would a line or two of personal feedback really be? First, it's just the opinion of one agent/editor. What didn't work for them. It might work for the next...or it might not. Second, a line or two means that maybe there is just one or maybe two areas of concern. Many editors and agents who read a submission that was close do provide a personal rejection, sometimes with comments. Third, as has been mentioned, it takes time to compose a descriptive yet concise explanation of why a piece was rejected, one that an author could potentially act upon. If that reply takes even sixty additional seconds to compose and send, and the agent has 60 manuscripts being rejected, than means an hour out of the work day, responding to authors that they have no connection to. And I am being stingy with the time. Really, to ponder and compose something useful would take more than a minute. Fourth, an author already signed with an agent/publisher would much prefer them working to sell their books/edit their books than composing comments for slush pile submissions. There is a limited amount of time in every day, and the slush pile is not a high priority among the multitude of tasks and responsibilities for a reason. It's not a positive reality from the author trying to break in. It's just part of the business. Many editors/agents post blogs or write articles or speak at writer conventions, informing and guiding authors. For them it's a much more efficient use of time, and authors concerned about how to improve their submission and their chances will avail themselves of what's provided in articles and appearances. At least one person mentioned above that they read slush. I too read slush for a magazine for a couple of years, I did some editing, but my main responsibility was the slush pile. It's a never ending task, keeping the queue moving and not piling up. Read 15 submissions one night, the by the time the next night rolls around there will be 10 to 30 more added to the line. Skip a day or three, and you might be lucky that only one or three more had been added, or you could be looking at over a hundred added...and I worked for a small magazine that paid only 1/2 cent per word. Weekends tended to be the main submission days, especially Sunday evenings. As a slush pile reader, I was focused on finding the very best stories...and narrowing them down because we could only publish so many stories per month. There were many we would have loved to publish, there just wasn't the space, nor were there funds available.
I thought explained it, but must not have been clear. Time and priorities. That their comments might improve submission quality is not relevant (and that is a big 'might'). There are plenty of quality submissions for them to choose from. I cannot speak directly for agents, but it makes sense as it would follow with editors/publishers. There are more top quality books out there that they would love to publish, but just do not have the sources to publish. Resources being time, money, distribution, personnel, marketing, etc.
Just curious, @TWErvin2 . When you say you used to read slush, do you mean you read the actual pieces on offer, or just query letters? I suppose if they were magazine submissions, they would have been the actual articles, etc? Have you ever read slush for novels? I kind of agree that agents shoot themselves in the foot at times. But I think it's maybe their reliance on query letters, rather than taking a look at the actual MS, that adds to their work load. I think they've got the process backwards, actually. I 've said this before on the forum. They would save themselves a lot of time if they'd just read the first page (or paragraph) of the actual MS, rather than some query letter. In other words, cut out the 'middle man' and just read what they might actually publish. Surely it wouldn't take them any longer to just have a look at the page of actual prose, rather than a query letter which requires a request for a follow-up before they reject (or possibly accept) it. Now that submissions can be done electronically, agents won't get stuck in offices cluttered up with MS submissions on paper the size of old Monkey Ward catalogues. It would be just them and their email inbox. As now. But the content of the inboxes would be radically different, and more to the point. If I were an agent, I'd ask for the entire MS right away, submitted electronically—with nothing else added besides the author's contact details. If it looked good, I'd go for it. If not, it would get rejected (and deleted from the inbox, after sending an email rejection notice.) What I would be rejecting would not be an 'idea' or a pitch—which might actually be written by somebody other than the author of the book. I'd be rejecting the actual book itself. Makes sense to me. If I decided I liked what I saw, I would then contact the author and ask for things like a synopsis, or further clarification of what the rest of the book is like, or (if needed) what genre the book has been written for. I have already been 'grabbed' by the prose itself. So that's the first hurdle cleared. Whether an agent feels it's worth his/her time to add a few lines of critique is up to them. If they feel the MS just needs tweaking to make it publishable, they might feel like doing that. If it's a hopeless mess, probably not. Unless I've got the wrong idea altogether, it seems to me that agents are now swamped with many more submissions than ever before in the history of agentry. So they maybe need to re-think their filtering methods and try a new approach. I'd prefer to let the quality of the writing speak for itself. Hundreds of query letters per day must be soul-destroying to receive. On the other hand, hundreds of stories? That sounds like a much more inspiring workload to me.
Perhaps the agents and slush pile readers find it less soul destroying to be rejecting people based on substandard query letters rather than actually having to read the manuscripts. It's not guaranteed that an awful query letter means an awful manuscript, but it may well be a useful heuristic.
In the UK, at least, agents ask for some of the ms. I recall one i submitted to say they have just 1 reader. He asks for 50 pages and my guess is, that as with people in interviews, he often makes his mind up quickly. I've spoken to someone who works in publishing in the past who thought that there must be a lot of work that is close to being good enough - but you can't read many full ms. There is also at least 1 UK agency site that says something like most people submit when their ms is nowhere near ready. So, I guess they get a load that are quickly dismissed and plain shouldn't have been submitted in the 1st place. In these cases a query letter might promise a good book that the writing fails to provide. Not so long back I thanked an agent for taking the trouble to send a rejection - much better than waiting and waiting then having to decide yourself that no response is rejection. I wrote briefly to this agent that I assume she had a full inbox and I appreciated her taking the time. She immediately responded to thank me for understanding and that it had really helped her that someone had said thanks. My guess is that every now and then they work thru a s/s and send rejections - and that must be a pretty miserable job.
Jannert, I read the actual short stories (and in some cases, poetry, but that was not my primary area), although in the submission form there was a block where cover letter info would be included, and was part of the submission package. I have done a limited amount of novel editing (free lance) for small publishers, but never read slush/query letters. I was assigned the novel by the publisher. If I were to give up writing novels and stories, it is an avenue I might pursue, but editing takes a lot of time, which I don't have (I teach English, I grade/teach e-course English part time, am on the Village Council, and I am an author--plus I have a family and other interests).
