A Note From Serendipity Systems

Why are you getting rejection slips?

Many inexperienced writers get nothing but rejection slips from publishers. If you find yourself in this situation, you may be asking yourself why is this happening to me? Most likely, you are doing something wrong. You may be doing several things wrong. Here are some of the common mistakes which lead to rejection slips.

1) Submission made to wrong publisher

Always read a publisher's writers' guidelines before submitting a manuscript or book proposal. Many publishers only want to see works in a narrow range of topics. Many publishers are specialists. They are not interested in anything outside their of area of interest. To make an inappropriate submission wastes your time and money and wastes the publisher's time. If it is obvious that you have not bothered to read the writers' guidelines, then a publisher will not bother to give you a polite reply. You'll get a rejection slip. Serendipity Systems is a very specialized publishing firm. We only publish electronic books. We are primarily interested in highly literate works of fiction. We are interested in seeing works which take advantage of computer-assisted features like hypertext and multi-media. More than half of the submissions we see are not appropriate for electronic publishing, or are non-fiction works outside our areas of interest. Writers who make such submissions get rejection slips.

Some writers make "shotgun" submissions. They send their proposal to every publisher in the book. It is usually obvious to the publisher when a writer does this. Such submissions are given only a very brief glance. They are almost always inappropriate and get a rejection slip. (The post office is the only one who benefits from "shotgun" submissions--they sell a lot of stamps.)

2) Submission in an unwanted form

Publishers want to see material in specific forms. Some publishers want to see an outline and a sample chapter, others want to see the whole work. Serendipity Systems is an electronic publisher. We can not use manuscripts on paper. (Queries on paper are OK, but the work itself must be in digital form.) Send us a manuscript on paper, and we'll send you a rejection slip.

3) Poor quality submission

Manuscripts with spelling, punctuation, and/or grammar errors will quickly go into the reject pile unless the writer is telling a very good story. However, in almost all cases, a poorly-constructed story will also be a poorly-told story. Awkward sentence structure is the most common flaw in a poorly-written manuscript. If you have not edited your complete manuscript a dozen or more times to make the action and dialogue flow smoothly, it probably is not ready for submission. Remember, for every book published there are hundreds of rejected manuscripts. Competition is fierce, and editors need not bother with sloppy manuscripts.

4) Writer "completely out to lunch"

Sometimes, a writer is just so blatantly incompetent that an editor can only wonder if the writer been on a distant planet for the last several years. About ten percent of the proposals we see fall into this category.

5) Manuscript just doesn't grab the editor's attention

Occasionally, an otherwise OK manuscript deals with a topic that the editor doesn't find to be of interest. We can't publish everything that might be "publishable," so we'll have to pass over some manuscripts which another editor might put at the top of the pile.

If you have e-mailed a book proposal to Serendipity Systems and got this file back as a reply, it means that we feel that your proposal falls into one of the categories outlined above. If, after giving your work an honest evaluation, you think that you fall into category 5, then submit your work to another publisher. However, please make sure that your proposal meets that publisher's guidelines.

Our Writers' Guidelines are here: Guidelines

Our Manuscript Help file is here: Manuscript Help

Additional writers' information will be found in The Electronic Publishing Forum: EPF

Our Free books are here: FREE eBooks

Our Catalog is here: Catalog

Our bulletin board for writers is here: BBS

A list of new stuff from Serendipity Systems is here: New Stuff