The Transom: It's a Tough Job, But Somebody's Got to Do It

Letters of rejection are missives nobody likes. Prospective authors do not want to receive them, and editors, who must write a great many of them, do not relish the task. Some publishers maintain a file of form rejection letters, drafted, one might suppose, to spare their editors from whatever angst may be associated with lying to the hopeful and to keep prospective authors from the unpleasantness of having to deal with their own shortcomings. This practice may be therapeutic for editors at presses with 300 submissions a month and rejection rates of 95 per cent; but it does not serve the letters' recipients very well at all, especially first-time authors who might happen to be communicating with a press that actually bothers to consider manuscripts by first-time authors.

Rejection letters traffic in euphemism, the effect of which is to obfuscate and thereby postpone any authorial facing of facts. In my editorial day (which seems like yesterday, except for the manual typewriters), there was a line our press employed liberally in thank-you-but-no epistles. We were not, we announced to supplicants, the 'publisher of choice.' Naif that I was, I once asked during an editorial meeting what the phrase meant. Were we simply saying that we did not choose to publish the manuscript? Or did we mean that the author had chosen the wrong press to which to submit his or her manuscript? Or that the manuscript concerned a topic beyond our range of interests? Or what?

As it happened, nobody in that meeting had an answer. Finally, someone said, 'It means whatever you want it to mean.' Thus interpreted in-house, the phrase was convenient to any unpleasantness emanating from that week's mailbag. Inasmuch as I do not recall any rejected author ever asking the question I had asked, I reckon the ploy worked. In any event, we used it again and again. Ambiguity, I concluded, has advantages for those who do not wish to be bothered by details.

The 'publisher of choice' business was, of course, a cop-out, a pretext not unlike others abroad in the land, then and now, for example, 'Your manuscript does not meet our present needs.' Such a statement must puzzle the young scholar, who surely knows which press publishes what. Has there been a complete change of direction to separate the press from the interests indicated in its last six or seven seasonal lists? Why did the press respond favourably to the young scholar's letter of inquiry, wherein the manuscript in question received a detailed description? Would it take that much more energy to tell the kid the real reason for rejection?

Apparently so.

A case in point: Not long ago, a colleague told me of a young scholar who had come to him with a letter of rejection he'd received from a university press. The letter contained a good deal of folderol, wishy-washy with half a platitude thrown in, and it concluded with the assertion that the young scholar's work was 'not marketable.' This phrase, I have come to understand, is the new generic, and it is probably closer to the truth these days than any of its predecessors. And yet, the fact that many presses cannot seem to market much of anything does not seem to prevent them from publishing quantities of overpriced, unreadable rubbish. Well, never mind. My colleague was irritated not because the press had failed to tell the young scholar what he wanted to hear but because it had failed to tell him what he needed to hear, which was that he could not write a felicitous sentence in the English language - or, for that matter, in any other language. 'I've been trying to get him to understand that for a couple of years now,' my colleague said, 'and I hoped that perhaps he'd believe me if somebody in the real world told him the same thing.' There was no help forthcoming from that quarter of the real world, however, no wake-up call, no...