How to Achieve Instant Proposal Rejection
Well, perhaps not instant, but close. It does take time to download and view your proposal or manuscript. But quite frequently it doesn’t take more than a few minutes for us to reject it.
Here are the key reasons:
- Ignoring the mission statement. I am amazed at how many authors apparently haven’t read our web site, looked at our catalog, or apparently done any research at all when they submit a manuscript. On that mission statement page I’ve embedded a little YouTube video in which I explain why I founded this company. It’s home video, it’s old, but view it!
- Bad proposal. Under this heading I include boilerplate proposals (which also tend to fall afoul of #1), proposals with very poor punctuation or grammar, and disorganized proposals. Read our submission guidelines. If you have a boilerplate proposal you are sending to a number of publishers, adapt it to meet our standards. That information is a minimum, but if you submit more, make sure we can easily find the information we want.
- Carelessly written manuscript. Our readers don’t expect that your manuscript will be perfect, but they also don’t want to have to struggle to read it. I tell them that if they encounter this problem, they don’t have to read more than a page. Just send it back to me, and I’ll send it back to the author. The record for errors in a submitted manuscript was about one error for every ten words. (I exclude the handwritten one someone handed me at a show. I didn’t bother to count the errors in it.) You would have to have the most brilliant and original idea I’d ever imagined to make me work through that or expect copy editors to do so.
Those three items cover the vast majority of our rejections here at Energion. If we kept your manuscript for several days or even weeks before responding, you know you made it past those tests. At that point it’s a question of which good thing we can do.
— Henry Neufeld, Energion Owner/Editor