Submissions and Author Feedback

Week 14 – in which I finalise the submissions process, and work out just what authors want to hear when they don't want to hear what you have to say

The bad news first: the most likely outcome of any submissions process is rejection. Ours is likely to be no different – we have to be picky, because we can only afford to publish about two titles a year, and we also want to select unusual and original work. What those exact odds are will depend upon how many submissions we receive. Let’s walk this through.

Assume that a typical agent gets 2,000 queries a year, and of those, they take on two new authors. So, your odds of getting an agent are 1,000 to 1. The odds of getting accepted for a publishing deal from that agent’s pitches are much better – depending on who you believe, perhaps as high as 67% (assuming 2 in every 3 pitches find a publisher), but may be as low as 10% (1 in 10 acceptances). Your odds of being accepted by a small press that doesn’t require agent representation probably lie somewhere in between these extremes. Regarding ourselves, we open to submissions 50 at a time, which we aim to do every couple of months – let’s say 6 times a year. That’s 300 submissions, from which we may choose 2 titles. That’s 150 to 1, or 0.67%.

These numbers may change as we learn from the submissions process, but they still aren’t great odds. The good news is that there are lots of things you can do to improve them.

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First up is relevance. WoodPig Press specialises in speculative fiction and speculative non-fiction. So, be honest: does your book fall into either of these two categories? Also bear in mind that there are lots of types of book that we don’t accept. Have a read through our submissions criteria and see how well you fit.

Next is quality. We want your writing to sing. This doesn’t necessarily mean “literariness” (though it could do), or even faultless grammar (up to a point), but that the prose has a distinctive character of its own and isn’t just a functional way of getting between plot points or stages in your argument. This is the elusive “voice” that agents and publishers claim to be searching for – and another good reason not to use AI. Your voice should be you – the most “you” you can be, in a writerly sense. So, it may be that you haven’t quite got there yet, your voice is still evolving, and you still need time to develop that.

Aside from voice, there are the usual things that a manuscript is judged on. For fiction, these are characterisation, structure, plotting, premise, pacing, themes, narrative style, etc. For non-fiction, style, structure and premise are also important, but we’re also looking for how skilled you are at making your chosen subject engaging and accessible. So, it’s possible that your manuscript might need too much work in some of these areas for us to take it on.

However, one thing you will be pleased to hear is that we are not judging you on anything OUTSIDE the writing: the synopsis, query letter, and all those other semi-clerical chores that agents and publishers seem determined to foist upon you. We’re also not judging you on your author platform or your social media, how telegenic or TikTok-worthy you are, or what other media-friendly credentials you might have. Be as shy and awkward as you like. This might be your first novel or your fiftieth. It’s the writing we care about.

Of course, it will be part of the editing process for us to work with authors to develop your manuscript into something publishable, so we’re not looking for perfection. But the more polished your work is in the above respects, the better the chance it will have of standing out.

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Anyway, let’s assume your manuscript is as good as you can make it and you’ve submitted. What happens then? The point of Diary of a Micro-Press is to give readers, authors and fellow publishers an insight into “how the sausage is made”. We want to make the whole process as transparent as possible so that everyone gets a better understanding of what’s involved in small press publishing, the challenges we face, and what we’re trying to do to meet them. In this spirit, here is the journey of a submission.

Once you submit, the first step is what I call “triage”. Basically, we’re looking for simple reasons to reject your manuscript. These are:

• Malware/viruses. The first thing we do is put your submitted file through a virus checker.

• Wrong file format. We only accept .doc (Word), .docx (Word compatible) and PDF files.¹

• Spam/bogus submissions. Given that submissions are via an online form, there will undoubtedly be some that are simply automated/spam entries. Our submissions portal (Duosuma) does its best to screen these out, but some may still sneak through.

• AI generated. Despite everything we’ve said about our stance on AI, there will probably be those who decide to test us. I wish they wouldn’t. The Turing Test is pretty much redundant now, and you will gain nothing from tricking overworked small press editors that you’re “human”! That said, we will still try to weed out those cases where AI has generated some or all of the text (which is, to remind you, against our policy!). We do this using AI text detectors (e.g. ZeroGPT), and by employing our own editorial nous (I do still think that AI generated prose has a certain detectable whiff about it).

• Personal/unasked for information. Since the submissions process is anonymous, submissions should not contain personal information, nor additional information (synopsis, blurb, etc).

• Inappropriate genre/not speculative. As stated, there are certain types of book we don’t accept (academic theses, poetry, drama, etc), and we will also reject others where there is an obviously insufficient speculative element.

• Tone of writing. There will be some submissions where it is apparent from the first page or so that the tone of the writing needs more work. Since the start of a book tends to get reworked the most, if this doesn’t grab us, then we are unlikely to read on. This may seem harsh – perhaps there is some wonderful stuff later on – but the start of your book is its shop window. Make it the best advert for your book that it can be! There may be exceptions, such as where there is a great premise or story idea but the writing needs work, but this has to be balanced with the amount of editing we’d need to undertake to get the book to a publishable standard.

So, that’s triage. It’s a quick assessment intended to sift out those submissions that are obviously problematic, don’t meet our basic criteria, or which we don’t think are ready.

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In the next stage – let’s call it “assessment” (continuing with the medical metaphor – not sure that’s wise, but let’s go with it for now…) – all those submissions that pass triage get assigned to a specialist reader, one for fiction, one for non-fiction. These submissions are also read by the Editor in Chief (me!). Each editor reads a submission for up to a maximum of one hour. If they hit a point before that where they’re confident that the book is not right for us, then they stop reading and leave feedback. If I agree with their decision, then I combine feedback and send out the rejection email. It looks something like this:

Dear author,

Thank you for submitting “Your Title” to WoodPig Press. We know how much effort you’ve put in and what this means to you. However, we’ve decided not to go forward with the book.

Specifically, our editors felt that:

[Our Comments]

I know this isn’t great news, but please take our comments with a pinch of salt – it’s just our opinion. You probably hear that all the time, but it is true.

We do sincerely wish you all the best with your writing, and please consider us for future submissions.

Best wishes,
WoodPig Press.

Everything in the above text apart from [our comments] is part of a standard template we’ve written, so lots of people will receive the same wording. However, we do mean it: we’re all writers, so we know how much work goes into a book, and also what it means to you personally and emotionally. Rejection sucks. But it’s not a judgement upon you as a human being, nor even your potential as a writer. It just means that (for whatever reason) this particular piece of writing isn’t quite right for us in its current form.

In addition to the template response, in [our comments] we try to give some personal, encouraging feedback. If there are things we like, we try to say what they are. If there are things that we think you can address, then we try to state them in a helpful way. But bear in mind that these are just our opinions. We might be wrong. Some agent might snap up your manuscript tomorrow and get you a 10 book deal. In which case, we will slap ourselves upside our stupid heads and curse our blindness to your genius. Feel free to diss us in your Booker Prize speech.

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But let’s say that the editors reach the end of the hour and decide that they want to read on. Or perhaps one does, and one doesn’t. These are all marked as “maybe” and set aside until all remaining submissions have gone through the assessment stage. We then return to the maybes and discuss those we disagree on. WoodPig Press is not a democracy – the Editor in Chief’s decision is final, because he pays the bills – but hopefully we can reach some consensus that we’re accepting/rejecting the right books and not missing out on anything potentially Booker Prize winning.

For those that we decide we want to explore further, we then push on to reading the whole thing – what I’m perhaps inadvisedly calling the “diagnosis” stage (in for a penny…) – or as much of the whole thing as it takes to reach a decision. This is the benefit of only asking for full manuscripts (as opposed to samples), as this process is made simpler and seamless. We just continue reading. The editors then come to their separate decisions, and we have a meeting to discuss all these. Again, those we agree to reject, I summarise feedback and inform the respective authors. Those we disagree over, I just shout everyone down until they agree (this is probably a joke). And those we agree to accept, we reach out to the authors with a tentative offer to discuss matters further – at which point, the anonymity ends.

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Anyway, that’s the submission process, which I thought you might be interested in. I hope it also allows authors to temper their expectations. Feedback for those manuscripts we read to the end will obviously be a bit fuller than for those we bail out on earlier, but even that won’t be extensive – this is not a manuscript critique, so don’t expect one. However, I hope you agree that this is far better and more humanising than what you would normally receive from agents and publishers.

By the way, if there is anything you would especially like to see in the feedback – given that we don’t have time to say much – please feel free to leave suggestions in the comments, or via our social media.

See you in January!

1. I was not going to include PDFs, but my daughter tells me that Gen Z onward doesn’t know what a .docx file is. I’m not sure if she’s serious, but better safe than sorry.