When submitting, you are asking the publisher to buy your product. If they don't like the quality of your product and decline to buy that isn't greed. That is good sense. That isn't unwilling, that's just good business. It is up to the writer to convey in as professional way as possible. It is up to us to invest in our own possibility and deliver the best product we can so there is the best chance for it to be seen by a less critical eye in order to sell a story. It is short sighted and greedy not to. I'm sure many a good story has been passed over because it couldn't hold the attention of a critical editor and was passed over. But why go through all the trouble of submitting written work only to stumble on the last effort to clean and polish? We only hurt ourselves by stopping right before the finish line.
Chicken Freak - you obviously have no idea what goes on in football - we LOOK, we SEEK, we BEG for an excuse to send somebody up the chain. I am not talking about the athletically dyslexic, the kids with two left feet, the kids who can barely walk - I'm talking about kids who 'might', and yes we love to pass them up the ladder, we love to see them progress and yes our clubs invest for up to 10 years (forget your 40 hours) with the prospect of never seeing a return. Unrealistic to you - the world of hope for us. We invest in what might be. Am I upsetting your applecart of near perfection or something?
No, most editors aren't going to say: "Wow, that one is missing a comma. Reject letter earned." But what others have said is valid. Editors and agents get dozens of manuscripts a day to consider, if not more. They can publish/represent only a very small fraction of the hundreds to thousands received. Does an editor really have the time to read and consider in depth every submission package they get? Even if a submission package is the first three chapters, a cover letter and a synopsis... say 30 pages to read, that means 15 minutes, minimum. Twenty manuscripts times 15 minutes to read/consider and respond means they've spent half of their ten hour day pondering those submissions, looking for that diamond in the rough. What about their other responsibilities? Ever seen the wall (shelves) of slush Tor books, for example gets? I think one can google the image to see. The objective is to send the very best story you can. Sure, a crappy story with perfect grammar won't go anywhere. But a great story with competent or better grammar has a far better shot than a great story that's rife with errors. As has been said, there are tons of great stories out there--far more than one might suspect. Why waste time on a mansucript that is highly unlikely to bear fruit as compared to others in the stack? Consider a great novel that isn't rife with grammar and other problems will take 50 hours of effort to get ready. Consider a great one that is rife with problems, requiring extensive edits and communication back and forth with the author might require three to five times that much time. Is it really a difficult choice?
Sure, I get that you're using the hypothetical theory of a writer misplacing only one comma - truth is, no, no agent is gonna reject your manuscript based on ONE single misplaced comma. You're using it as an example to illustrate a more general problem of bad grammar - and thus I'm using a strong, albeit not entirely comparable, image to illustrate my point. Neither of our analogies should be taken literally. What I am trying to illustrate is this - that bad grammar IS a handicap to your writing, and you would not dream to place a handicapped person into a professional team (assuming this is a regular team, not a special team precisely for disabled players), so you would not dream of taking on a writer with bad grammar. Grammar is a writer's tools, grammar is not dispensable like matching socks. Bad grammar also does not consist of only one misplaced comma - most people would boil that down to a simple typo. But if such "typos" are occurring all over the MS, you start to question if they really are typos, or if the writer just has no clue. And if the writer has no clue, you'd have to be a fool to take her on.
It's not about wearing matching socks. It's about being able to walk. That's a more apt comparison. Before you can run and kick, you have to be able to walk. Before you can write a good story, you have to be able to spell. Of course, it's possible to CONCEIVE a great story without having good SPaG, but that gets you nowhere. Your soccer kids might be able to imagine the play that leads to a great goal, but if they can't execute it, do you still put them on the team?
A ten year investment in each and every one of those five thousand kids? Wow. Edited to reduce the sarcasm quotient: I'm realizing that I haven't addressed what seems like the core issue here: you don't seem to think that the basic skills of writing are all that important for a writer. Grammar, punctuation, and spelling are the most basic of writing skills. They are, as suggested, similar to requiring that an athlete be able to walk. I suspect that when you evaluate an athlete, you don't need to explain, "OK, the term 'kick' means to move a ball with your foot." If you encounter a kid who has never, ever, in his life, kicked a ball, I suspect that you'll wish him well, perhaps offer some helpful advice on how he can start learning the game, and move on to kids who have. If you meet him again next year and found that he's progressed to and past other kids in his age level, then the conversation can resume. Now, maybe you're only talking about proofreading. You started out apparently talking about these core skills ('no idea what a comma is') and then as the discussion progressed you started talking about a single missing comma. Which one are we talking about? A writer that is missing core skills, or a writer that perhaps just needs a new pair of reading glasses? Again, grammar, punctuation, and spelling are the starting point. The basic, minimal toolkit. There are a thousand more things to master, and many of those things would be addressed by the agent or editor. But however unfair it may seem to you, the kid has to learn how to walk, kick, and run before he can compete. My grammar, punctuation, and spelling are pretty darn good. And I've progressed in a lot of other areas. But I'm still far, far, _far_ from ready for tryouts, and so are most hopeful authors.
Call it what you want. I call it facing the reality of the industry, as opposed to wishful thing about how you think the industry should operate. Consider critiquing in the Writing Workshop. I have little time, and when I do have some time to critique a piece of writing, I have many to choose from. If I start reading a piece, and I'm tripping over grammar mistakes, spelling errors, and poor punctuation, I usually move on to another piece instead. It's not worth my time to plow ahead to see if everything else is good, because it's already fatally flawed. So it is with submissions editors. Yes, they have more time, and yes, they are paid to read manuscripts, but they aren't going to waste that time on sloppy manuscripts that will require a ton of cleanup, as long as they have plenty of cleanly-written ones.
From what I understand, editors LOVE newspaper writers and magazine columnists. There are three main reasons: 1. Those folks know how to write to a deadline. If the editor asks them to have three chapters done, this month, three chapters are handed in, on time and ready to publish. 2. They know grammar and composition. They can put together a sentence well enough that an illiterate person could read it. 3. They understand the basics of writing a story. They can tell a tale in a sensible, logical fashion that a reader can read. If a magazine editor has space in his rag for six articles and he has fifteen articles on his desk, he will select six finished articles and not publish the ones that need work. If the unpublished ones are diamonds in the rough, they might get returned with as much as an attached PostIt saying "Good ideas! EDIT EDIT EDIT! Then resubmit." Think of forum posts. If there are two replies and 1 ov thm is ritn; like ths nd the other one has proper [fill-in-all-the-blanks], which one gets humiliated and ridiculed? No one wants to read text language, when they have the option of... not. If it is a matter of one comma, an editor will add that. But if there are no commas? Or the wrong word is used? Or if it is a word, only not the correct word (spell check didn't underline it so Sammy Smartypants didn't catch it, since he didn't edit it) and it happens over and over, an editor will eventually stop reading and move directly to the next submission. I stopped reading Steven King in the 80s because his editing was garbage! There were multiple misused words on about every third page. I could not get into the novel. If an editor needs to read every word of a submission, it is poorly done. KREM2 news used to publish a lot of their news stories, online. They eventually did two things. They stopped allowing comments on their stories. 80% of which were about how poor the writing quality was! The second thing they did was straighten up the writing. It was exhausting to have to read the poor quality and embarrassing punctuation of a media person's story! Exhausting! I am so thankful it was fixed
Publishers aren't in business to groom hopefuls. Writing is not a team sport. Tennis coaches don't spend hours, weeks, and years on all the kids who want them as coaches - they look at those kids and pick the 1-2% they think are worth their time and effort and will most likely be able to earn back that cost. Even that analogy falls short, though - sports figures also don't have to win over the public to be successful.
JB - regarding your signature's last item: alcohol isn't a solution, it's a solvent. Sorry to everyone else for the off topic side trip.
Fair enough Cogito - Like I said, two different industries looking for the same succesful ending via two completely different visions. When I finish my manuscript I will perfect it as much as humanly possible, if that includes remortgaging to afford an editor then that'll be a bridge we have to come to be before we can cross. If an editor has to go through so many manuscripts a day that he can afford to slate them for bad grammer then he is understaffed - another failing of the publishing house. Not once in this thread have I little more than probed the motives of an editor, and most arguments here have seeked to protect that editor - why should he oversee a few typos in a good story for a perfectly grammatical piece of crap? It seems like some here, are here solely for protectionsism of the industry. I completely understand everybody on this site want to be the best they can be - hence my own reason for being here. Having said that we are to discuss not attack or defend beyond the defensible.
Wow. Wow. Wow. You really think that grammar is not an essential skill for a writer? I'm dumbfounded. I didn't realize how very far apart we were in this conversation. When you argue that a professional need not possess the most fundamental skills of his profession, there's really not much more to talk about. (Most athletes are required to be able to walk, right?) (And where did "perfectly grammatical piece of crap" come from? There are plenty of perfectly grammatical great stories.)
First, I don't see people trying to protect anyone - they're explaining how the industry works. Second, you keep depending on this "few typos" and "a missing comma" when you know it's trivializing. If people want to get published, they need to put on their 'big boy pants' and earn it, not whine because they're not getting their hand held all the way through.
We are too far apart for this to be productive, public or private. Feel free to take the last word publicly, and I will resolve not to respond to you further, though I may respond to others in this thread. No PMs beyond the exchange we've already had.
shadow walker I agree - to be among the best you need to bring your shooting boots. Unfortunately this has descended into a battle between editor's apologists and would-be/hopefuls - not what was intended. I stated that soccer coaches look for potential - literary editors look for the finished product, are we in accord? If so I think that is lazy. Was Stephen Kings first book so perfect it went straight from his typrwriter to the printing block? I doubt it. I'm sure someone along the line said, "You know what Stephen, we think you have real talent but, how do you feel about spending some time with our mentors?" And Chicken freak - via private message you want to take this argument public? Are you sure?
Seriously? This: They are *not* two industries looking for the *same succesfull ending*. You yourself are not looking for an ending. You're looking to train someone. Your comparison is flawed. Giving your manuscript to an editor is not like being selected for further training. It's like being selected for the final match. When picking out the players for the final match of a football team, you take the ones that are best, right? You pick the ones that are the best "at that moment" and not the ones that might be better in the future. You pick the ones that give you the highest probability to win, with maybe some bench-players that are a *little* less good for if the better ones get out of breath or injured or sent off the field. This is what you should compare it with. Picking the best for the current situation, not for the future situation. And we're not saying you'll have to get an editor to edit your manuscript before sending it over for evaluation. We're saying that you should "prepare/train more". You need to learn grammar like you need to learn basic gameplay for football (soccer?). Also, having bad grammar is not "missing a comma" or something like that. That's what you call a typo or an error. Having bad grammar is having the same mistakes all over the manuscript. It's like not knowing how to write words, like not knowing how to use punctuation in general, like using the wrong words for situations/descriptions or like having strange sentences. About the understaffed part: WHAT? Where is the logic in having more staff? If they take too much time picking out the right manuscripts, they are not worth the money anymore. They would cost more than they deliver. The amount of editors you employ does not change this problem. This has nothing to do with greed, unwillingness or short-sightedness. It's simply this: If it costs you two dollars to gain one dollar, you'll be bankrupt in no-time. You'd not even be able to stay in the bussiness, and that's not what we want, is it? Also, I love how you're going against the facts you think you can dispute, and don't even mention the ones that give a longer or more in-depth explanation. I'm almost getting the really vague impression you don't even want to *see* anything else than strictly your own opinion being agreed upon. Might just be me, though. As someone told you before: We're simply explaining the industry.
What we are talking about, regarding typographical errors and punctuation errors, is not one or two in a manuscript. We are talking about more than one error per page. If the writer cannot catch those errors, they are not doing the basic work necessary to their job. They are not editing their own work! You submit your work for publication. You do not submit work for further editing.
Welcome to the arguement - feel free to chalk your cue, sorry what's your name again? In our sport we are looking for someone to contribute in a tiny team of 11 to win a cup, the league, the series to bring in a shit load of money to the club, someof which will get filtered down to the new crop of hopefuls. Who's comparison is flawed? Are you talking about finals day when the coach has 15 players of which 11 must start? I am talking about going out looking for potential. Please take time to read and study a debate for which you dived in at the tail end. Please go back and read again and again untill you have come up to scratch with all sides here. Obviously any business who spends more than they take are not going to bust. If you take time to read the whole thread you will see that I have said something along the lines of: Editor sees potential but has a word with the author - Hey, go brush up on your writing skills, maybe change this to that and come back ~ or ~ hey, this is great but you know what? we think you'll benefit by spending time with on of our mentors. NOT (and go back to the first couple of threads) Oh shit, bad punt - BIN! Be specific - blanks don't hit!
So finally we get to the bottom - your work must be ready for print - full stop or period - or they just aren't interested. You know what? this has descended almost to stupidity, like I am promoting sending in any old shit in the hope of hand holding through a BA in English - for anybody else trying to jump in please be sure to read the whole thread in it's entirety and take note of every point before shooting off. the OP was asking the job of the editor, I reinforced that question with - should the editor seek a rough diamond or look for excuses not to pass a manuscript up the ladder. I think we get that most people's opinions centre around standing up for an overworked editor who hasn't time nor energy nor even the will to look for something that might be great.
Not totally in accord, no. Editors are looking for products that need polishing and have a good chance of earning back the costs of production. The more work needed, the higher the cost, the less chance of earning back the cost of production. It's not laziness, but - as has been pointed out before - good business. I don't understand why you insist this is laziness on the part of the publisher, but ignore the fact that sending in something with significant errors (not an occasional typo) is not laziness on the part of the writer.
thank you shadow. This was the initial question. Upon reading a manuscript an editor asseses the situation - good story too much work or good story, worth the work or, complete crap - whatever. Initially here and elsewhere around the site the message is - Screw up the intro letter, let alone bad grammar and forget it, your manuscript won't even be opened.
I can only echo Cogito's words. Never settle for less than your best. Never be satisfied with second-rate. Always be aware there are other writers out there just as good as you if not better competing for that same spot on someone's list and, if they work harder, try harder, are more meticulous in their editing and proofing, they will be the one to get that coveted contract. All other things being equal, agents and publishers are going to go with the manuscript that needs the least amount of 'fine tuning' to make it marketable. And if you expect to rely on the agent/publisher to do that part of your job, they will look elsewhere and to that 'other guy' who was willing to put in that extra bit of effort to make a manuscript publication-ready before submitting.
