It is a tough call: you have polished your manuscript as
much as you can. You’ve shared it with a critique group and you’ve passed it
around amongst beta readers. You’ve responded to suggestions. You’ve applied your
own stringent editing process. You are too close to your script now to be able
to see it clearly. And now the editor at the publishing house wants more
changes. Sometimes this is before it is accepted and sometimes afterwards.
Publisher seem cruel
sometimes
It probably seems incredibly cruel when an editor says “We’d
be pleased to see your script again once you have addressed this issue but at
this point we can make no guarantees.”
You might make all that effort. Your novel may still not be
accepted. And it is after all only one opinion.
However, most of the time the script will improve at this
point. Once a major fault is corrected you may be able to see other problems
more clearly as well. The amount of time this process gives you also allows you
to gain some distance from your script.
What’s in it for the
publisher
For the publisher, asking for a rewrite without a guarantee
of publication serves two purposes:
It helps the editorial team see how well an unknown writer
can respond to editorial comment.
It enables the editors to see whether there are faults
beyond this more obvious one.
It happens to us all.
Case study 1
One well-known writer reported that she was told that the
ending of her first novel was weak. She
strengthened that. Then there was a problem with the opening. She worked on
that. Then, as you might expect, the middle was faulty. It’s probable that the improved
ending made the opening look weak, which was then in turn improved leaving the
middle still at an inferior quality.
Case study 2
I am also a published author. I was asked by one publishing
company to add another story strand into a children’s novel. I completed this
but then that publishing house stopped producing children’s fiction.
Nevertheless, I then managed to find another publisher. It’s possible that the
extra story strand helped.
Professionalism
It’s probably not the most satisfying part of our writing
lives, but we do need to embrace editorial work. The publisher is on the writer’s
side. Both writer and publisher want every book to be the best it can be. It is
sometimes actually quite difficult and we don’t always know immediately how to
make the changes asked for. Yet if we are to be professional we need to take
note of editorial commentary and act upon it. Often we have to find a third
way: what we have produced isn’t yet right but what the editor suggests isn’t
quite suitable either. What needs to be written is a text that is better than
both suggestions.
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