Why is one author successful in placing his or her book with a traditional royalty publisher while another is not?
It may be that the writer has approached editors or agents who fail to grasp the true value of a manuscript they’re reviewing. Or perhaps the author’s timing is off, and the subject is too new, too controversial, too esoteric or obscure, or too outdated—the author has simply taken so much time preparing the manuscript that it is no longer salable; the trend has passed.
Maybe the author is submitting the manuscript to the wrong kind of publisher. Regardless of how compelling and well-crafted a novel might be, for example, there is no point in sending it to a publisher that limits its output to self-help books or military history. Religious book publishers don’t sign computer books, and technical publishers don’t sign spiritual guides.
There’s always the chance, as well, that a publisher, no matter how prestigious or savvy, just doesn’t get it. Like everyone else, publishers often make errors in judgment; it happens every day.
Several years ago, when I worked for Harper & Row Publishers (now HarperCollins), I met the late Cass Canfield, who told a story on himself that might serve as an object lesson to authors trying to place their literary property with a big-time publisher—or any publisher, for that matter. In his memoir Up & Down & Around: A Publisher Recollects the Time of His Life, he expanded on his story and described how he hurriedly passed a manuscript on to a young editorial assistant, just out of college, and asked her to read and evaluate it. He was off to Europe and didn’t have time to review it himself:
George Orwell was another writer whose early career included service as a kitchen boy in a Ritz hotel—this one, the Paris Ritz. He wrote about it in Down and Out in Paris and London, a book which didn’t sell at the time of its publication but contributed to the author’s reputation. Orwell taught me two things: not to put uncritical trust in a reader’s (his assistant) report and to hold fast to a writer whose work you admire. After Down and Out Orwell wrote Animal Farm. The finished manuscript appeared on my desk in New York a couple of days before my departure on vacation and I asked for a quick report. The reader damned the book, taking the view that its fantasy was unconvincing, that Animal Farm fell between two stools; she felt it was not suited either to children or to adults. So we declined the manuscript—and the book has become a classic. The rejection of Animal Farm was disastrous, and this goof taught me to read a manuscript myself when there is the slightest question about its merit. However, occasionally a reading is impossible because the editor must make a publishing decision on the basis of an outline, sometimes on the basis of no more than a title and the author’s name. As bidding for potential big sellers has become more and more frantic, this kind of situation occurs more and more frequently. Note that Canfield had a reader assigned to him. Most large publishing houses at that time (early 1940s) employed young people whose job it was to plow through the mountain of manuscripts that flowed into the office; they frequently were brand new graduates, more often than not from the Seven Sister colleges*, who were interested in careers in book publishing. The job was an entrée into what they perceived to be New York’s “glamorous world of publishing.” From such a position, often unless marriage beckoned (it was a different time!), a reader might advance to copy editor and eventually on to editor. A problem could arise though, as Canfield learned, when a reader was too inexperienced to recognize genius when it presented itself on the page.