Out on your ass, Jane Austen
Some frustrated writer apparently submitted a Jane Austin novel to a publisher and had it rejected. The point being, I guess, that publishers are all screwed up and therefore the author in question can now whine a little louder about his work being rejected. John Scalzi makes short work of this:
Honestly, you'd think newspapers would be bored of reporting this genre
of stunt by now.
You know, as an aside to this foolishness: If I were an editor today,
and Jane Austen had not previously existed, and someone submitted Pride and Prejudice as a mainstream novel, I'd probably reject it. Because it's the 21st goddamn century,
that's why, and the style is all wrong to sell a whole bunch of them
(even if it were pitched as a mainstream historical novel). In point of
fact, I'd probably reject anything written in a 19th century manner,
with the possible exception of Mark Twain's work; for my money he's
probably the only 19th century author whose writing style doesn't make
me feel like I'm slogging through a morass of commas and odd language
structure....So, yes. Out on your
ass, Jane Austen, until you can write in a contemporary way.
Yes, its a major pain to get published by a top house, and in fact I have yet to be successful, though I honestly think the current book I am writing has a good shot. But there are lots of reasons a publishing house might reject a perfectly good book: It may not fit the types of books they publish (you don't send a period piece to a sci-fi house); the publisher's pipeline might be full; the author's synopsis or the first 30 pages might not be catchy enough (publishers cannot read every word of every submission they get); or the publisher could be missing an opportunity; or the book might, gasp, not be as good as the author thinks it is.
