Interpret Rejection Narrowly

In November 1797 the Reverend George Austen wrote to the London publisher Thomas Cadell, offering a manuscript novel “comprised in three Vols. about the length of Miss Burney’s Evelina” and saying he would send it if Cadell was interested. Cadell returned the letter with a curt note across the top: declined by return of post. The manuscript had not been sent. Cadell had not read it. The reply answered an offer, and about the book itself, then called First Impressions, it said nothing. That book would reach print in January 1813 as Pride and Prejudice, after Austen had revised it heavily in 1811 and 1812. The museum at Chawton notes that the first draft is believed to have been written as a series of letters. The text refused in 1797 and the text printed in 1813 were not the same object.

An answer like Cadell’s is easy to read as a verdict on the person or on the Work’s worth. It is just as easy to conclude that every refusal is the publisher’s blunder and that those turned away are all Austens. Both read too much into the evidence. Strictly, a refusal establishes that a particular reader or institution declined a particular Work at a particular time, under conditions the writer can’t see, such as a list already full of a similar book, a budget for the year, or the taste of whoever opened the envelope. It can speak to fit, timing or reception, usually only one of them, and often faintly.

A form refusal says almost nothing about the Work; it is a message about the sender’s process. A personal note, even a line, suggests someone read at least some of it. A specific critique, offered with reasons, is feedback and should be handled as such (Practice 87). The strongest evidence a rejection process produces is a pattern, the same reservation from several independent readers, and it concerns the Work. Sort each response into its grade and let it move your estimate by that much and no more. That is our reasoning, not a law of publishing.

Proust’s first volume, Swann’s Way, was turned down by several publishers in 1912 and early 1913, among them the Nouvelle Revue Française (NRF), where André Gide, who later took much of the blame, was among those who looked at it. Accounts differ on how closely he read it. In his own first draft of the apology, Gide says he had only one of the notebooks, opened it with a distracted hand, and stopped at the cup of camomile on page 62 and a sentence about a forehead and vertebrae on page 64. His colleague Jean Schlumberger later said that nobody at the house had read the manuscript beyond dipping into a few paragraphs whose writing looked discouraging. Proust paid for Grasset to publish it in 1913, and in January 1914 Gide wrote to him that the refusal of the book would remain the NRF’s gravest mistake and one of the sharpest regrets and remorses of his life.

A judgment made on partial reading was reversed by the man who made it. That does not make refusals generally mistaken, and the comfort of “they rejected Proust too” should be handled with care. Austen and Proust are known to us because their cases turned. For most writers a refusal stays a refusal, and some declined manuscripts were not ready.

Submitting spends time and money. Each query takes preparation and then a wait, some venues charge fees, and the wait forecloses other uses of the same months. Austen’s Sense and Sensibility appeared in 1811 on commission, which meant that she carried the financial risk, and its title page said only “By a Lady.” That route had costs of its own, and it shows that waiting and giving up are not the only choices.

Practice. Before the first submission, spend thirty minutes setting up a rejection ledger. For every response, in about five minutes, record what happened in plain terms (who, when, what they said or did not say); what it supports, if anything (fit, timing, reception, a craft concern, with the reader’s stated reason where one exists); and what it does not support. Then write a revision trigger in advance, while you are calm. For example: three readers who give reasons and name the same problem send me back to revise; form refusals alone send me to change the list of places I submit to, not the manuscript. Read the whole ledger again after the tenth entry, when a pattern, if there is one, has had room to show.