Category: Submission Guidelines

Among the pleasures and perils of being a book editor is that the daily mail usually contains queries from folks who want to get published. Submissions fall into three categories: 1) the ones that are so good and so appropriate for the house that the answer is an easy yes; 2) the ones that are so bad or so inappropriate for the house that the answer is an even easier no; and 3) the ones that are either appropriate but badly written or inappropriate but engrossing. In the acquisitions process, categories 1 and 2 take little time, but category 3 involves back and forth discussion and agonizing efforts to calculate the editorial costs of rescuing a bad manuscript …

Every so often I get calls from unpublished poets wanting to query a poetry collection. My sense is that as the book market shrinks overall,

I’ve been a bit circumspect on the whole BookBlast question; I figure, it doesn’t work when authors send me a query via Bookblaster, but who’s