Post by account_disabled on Dec 30, 2023 0:42:40 GMT -5
When we talk about great authors and bestselling novels, we always come across the ups and downs that the manuscript has undergone before arriving in the bookstore. Everyone knows that Harry Potter was rejected by several publishers before finding the one who actually published it, and the same fate happened to hundreds of authors, Italian and foreign, contemporary and from the last century. From Stephen King to Pennacchi, from John Grisham to Zafón, most of the writers who now have solid and undisputed success have received dozens of rejections. But why should this surprise us? Manuscript selection is not an exact science. It is not an algorithm (for now) that selects what to publish and what not.
Nobody knows a priori which book will sell a million copies and which will not, otherwise only bestsellers would be published. There are always people reading editorial Special Data proposals who have in front of them endless piles of paper and/or hundreds of seemingly identical files to deal with. Finding a bestseller in that mountain of stuff is really looking for a needle in a haystack. No publisher – that I know of – reads everything that comes their way in full. Those who take editorial proposals into consideration make an initial skimming by taking a quick look at the covering letter and a few pages of the text. It is obvious that by evaluating in this way, a valuable book can escape.
How many times when reading the first pages of a novel did you think it was insipid and only by continuing did you enter into the story, identify with the characters and get to the end thinking "wow, I would never have guessed that from the first pages"? Also because, let's remember, no novel is published as it arrives at the publishing house All books, before arriving in the bookshop with their beautiful cover, undergo more or less in-depth editing. No manuscript arrives perfect and finding in the rough stone what will then be the jewel is neither an immediate nor a predictable operation. I mean, everyone is capable of recognizing a gold nugget after it's been found, but when you're on the riverbank with a sieve it's not so easy to distinguish a stone from gold.
Nobody knows a priori which book will sell a million copies and which will not, otherwise only bestsellers would be published. There are always people reading editorial Special Data proposals who have in front of them endless piles of paper and/or hundreds of seemingly identical files to deal with. Finding a bestseller in that mountain of stuff is really looking for a needle in a haystack. No publisher – that I know of – reads everything that comes their way in full. Those who take editorial proposals into consideration make an initial skimming by taking a quick look at the covering letter and a few pages of the text. It is obvious that by evaluating in this way, a valuable book can escape.
How many times when reading the first pages of a novel did you think it was insipid and only by continuing did you enter into the story, identify with the characters and get to the end thinking "wow, I would never have guessed that from the first pages"? Also because, let's remember, no novel is published as it arrives at the publishing house All books, before arriving in the bookshop with their beautiful cover, undergo more or less in-depth editing. No manuscript arrives perfect and finding in the rough stone what will then be the jewel is neither an immediate nor a predictable operation. I mean, everyone is capable of recognizing a gold nugget after it's been found, but when you're on the riverbank with a sieve it's not so easy to distinguish a stone from gold.