I'll bet Heyer didn't have these worries..
November 12, 2009 10:29 AM Subscribe
Looking for people's experiences with submitting romance manuscripts to the usual houses and the aftermath.
I am looking for people's experiences with submitting romance manuscripts to the various houses like Harlequin/ Mills & Boon, Samhain etc. Any sub-genre- I would just like some general overviews of your experiences.
While I have been given some cursory guidelines about the basics of submitting a manuscript (typeface/ pagination, format, what they want to see first), I'm curious about the overall process, pet peeves of various editors etc.
(Posting this anonymously as there is a potential work conflict.)
I am looking for people's experiences with submitting romance manuscripts to the various houses like Harlequin/ Mills & Boon, Samhain etc. Any sub-genre- I would just like some general overviews of your experiences.
While I have been given some cursory guidelines about the basics of submitting a manuscript (typeface/ pagination, format, what they want to see first), I'm curious about the overall process, pet peeves of various editors etc.
(Posting this anonymously as there is a potential work conflict.)
Go to AbsoluteWrite.com and read the Romance/Women's Fiction subforums. A lot of very successful writers for Harlequin/Mills and Boon hang out there.
As homuncula says, the secret is to follow the guidelines to a tee.
posted by Sidhedevil at 11:15 AM on November 12, 2009
As homuncula says, the secret is to follow the guidelines to a tee.
posted by Sidhedevil at 11:15 AM on November 12, 2009
All of the houses have different guidelines, though I think Harlequin/M&B/Silhouette are probably the strictest.
Each house is going to have a page listing their submission guidelines. My best suggestion is to pull out your favorite books and the ones closest to what you've written and see which publishing house comes up most often.
Feel free to memail me, btw. I've been a member of RWA for several years and am happy to talk romance with you and try to answer any more specific questions you have.
posted by sugarfish at 11:25 AM on November 12, 2009
Each house is going to have a page listing their submission guidelines. My best suggestion is to pull out your favorite books and the ones closest to what you've written and see which publishing house comes up most often.
Feel free to memail me, btw. I've been a member of RWA for several years and am happy to talk romance with you and try to answer any more specific questions you have.
posted by sugarfish at 11:25 AM on November 12, 2009
You can also check out the Romance Diva forums. You have to register, but there are specific sections of the forums that deal with agenting, publishing, and submitting manuscripts and they are frequented by published romance authors.
posted by Ugh at 1:03 PM on November 12, 2009
posted by Ugh at 1:03 PM on November 12, 2009
I'm an editor at Ellora's Cave, which seems to be along the lines of what you're looking for. Prior to this, I worked as a prereader for Tor, mostly for their romance line.
Obviously I can't speak to what the author experiences, but I can fill you in about the overall process. This is how it works at EC, though the general idea is at least similar most places.
Submission comes in. A prereader receives it and logs it in a database. She'll skim the synopsis and manuscript within a few weeks to see if it's something we might be interested in.
If it's not what we're looking for, she'll send the author an email saying thanks, but no thanks. If it might be what we're looking for, she'll go into the database and note the bare bones of the story--hot paranormal menage 80K, or 12K steampunk male/male that needs relationship expansion. The author will get a letter saying that the submission is being passed on to an editor for further review.
When an acquiring editor has time to read submissions, they'll go into the database and look for projects that might be of interest to them. I'll often search for steampunk, historicals, and science fiction, say, while another editor might search for male/male, Regency-set, and BDSM. (Uh, probably not all in the same submission, though I've seen weirder things.) We'll request that interesting-sounding manuscripts be sent to us, and then we get about two months to read it and decide what to do with it.
This whole process can take anywhere from a week or two to several months or longer--it depends almost entirely on when people have time to read and what they're looking for.
To the best of my knowledge, there aren't any e-pubs that accept things via committee--print houses generally have a meeting in which the editors present books they want to accept, discuss how they'll fit into their lines, and argue about the book's potential. E-pubs put out so many more books that it's not a practical approach, though EC does special projects by committee.
So assuming that you're at an e-pub, the editor (or, in some instances--Cobblestone, I know, and I think a few others--the owner of the company) will read the submission and decide to accept it (or not). They send paperwork over to the managing editor and/or the publisher, and once they've gotten the okay, they'll contact you and say "I've read your book [x], and I'm pleased to offer you..."
Then you fill out some paperwork, and the editor fills out some more paperwork, and you get a contract, which you sign and send back, and then you speak with your editor and get a schedule for edits. You also get some more paperwork.
The general setup for submissions is similar at a lot of places. Basically, you send in a submission, someone (an intern, a prereader, an assistant) reads it and either says "Meh, not what we're after," or "OMG, this is great, someone has to read this!" Some sort of report is written up about the OMGs, and that's passed on to someone a bit higher in the food chain, who'll read it and say yea or nay, and eventually, if enough people (or people in the right position) say yea, it ends up with an editor, who looks at it, realizes that she doesn't really have time for it right then, sticks it in a pile, eventually reads it while she's eating her lunch or walking her dog or waiting for her kid to get out of soccer practice.
And then, usually, she rejects it. Which sounds brutal, but I mention it only because rejection rates are so high that I feel like it would be dishonest not to. EC--and all epubs, really--have fairly high acceptance rates, and in this instance, "fairly high" means 2-4%. Print publishers, especially ones that accept unsolicited submissions, accept even less. Also, at a print pub, an unsolicited submission can hang around for anywhere from a few months to a couple of *years*--when I was prereading, there was more than one occasion where I was reading a submission that was eighteen months (or more!) old. And I was a mid-level prereader who only read agented submissions or material the editor I worked for requested. For stuff that's actually slush, it can take even longer.
Regarding the comments above about strict guidelines for sub-genres, this is mostly true of categories, in my experience. Harlequin, Silhouette (which is an imprint of Harlequin), and Mills & Boon probably have the strictest rules about this. It's not terribly likely to be a problem for non-category publishers.
Editor pet peeves are hard to guess at, and trying to do so probably isn't worth it if you're not submitting to a specific editor. If you're looking for generic "things that annoy editors", go search for editors on Twitter--there are hundreds of them, some anonymous, some onymous, and many of them spend a great deal of time attempting to educate their followers.
With that said, the fact that you're even asking this question indicates, to me, at least, that you're probably a step ahead of many people submitting--I originally said "to us", but really, people submitting anywhere. You'd be shocked at how many people apparently don't research at all--they paste the entire manuscript into the body of their email; they submit poetry or memoirs (to companies that don't publish poetry or memoir); they misspell not only their title, but also the name of the company to which they're submitting and their own name...
This has turned into a super-long comment, which wasn't really my intention, but oh well. Hopefully some of it's useful to you. If you (or anyone else reading this) has specific questions you think I might be able to answer, don't hesitate to memail me--I'm happy to chat.
posted by MeghanC at 8:45 PM on November 12, 2009 [6 favorites]
Obviously I can't speak to what the author experiences, but I can fill you in about the overall process. This is how it works at EC, though the general idea is at least similar most places.
Submission comes in. A prereader receives it and logs it in a database. She'll skim the synopsis and manuscript within a few weeks to see if it's something we might be interested in.
If it's not what we're looking for, she'll send the author an email saying thanks, but no thanks. If it might be what we're looking for, she'll go into the database and note the bare bones of the story--hot paranormal menage 80K, or 12K steampunk male/male that needs relationship expansion. The author will get a letter saying that the submission is being passed on to an editor for further review.
When an acquiring editor has time to read submissions, they'll go into the database and look for projects that might be of interest to them. I'll often search for steampunk, historicals, and science fiction, say, while another editor might search for male/male, Regency-set, and BDSM. (Uh, probably not all in the same submission, though I've seen weirder things.) We'll request that interesting-sounding manuscripts be sent to us, and then we get about two months to read it and decide what to do with it.
This whole process can take anywhere from a week or two to several months or longer--it depends almost entirely on when people have time to read and what they're looking for.
To the best of my knowledge, there aren't any e-pubs that accept things via committee--print houses generally have a meeting in which the editors present books they want to accept, discuss how they'll fit into their lines, and argue about the book's potential. E-pubs put out so many more books that it's not a practical approach, though EC does special projects by committee.
So assuming that you're at an e-pub, the editor (or, in some instances--Cobblestone, I know, and I think a few others--the owner of the company) will read the submission and decide to accept it (or not). They send paperwork over to the managing editor and/or the publisher, and once they've gotten the okay, they'll contact you and say "I've read your book [x], and I'm pleased to offer you..."
Then you fill out some paperwork, and the editor fills out some more paperwork, and you get a contract, which you sign and send back, and then you speak with your editor and get a schedule for edits. You also get some more paperwork.
The general setup for submissions is similar at a lot of places. Basically, you send in a submission, someone (an intern, a prereader, an assistant) reads it and either says "Meh, not what we're after," or "OMG, this is great, someone has to read this!" Some sort of report is written up about the OMGs, and that's passed on to someone a bit higher in the food chain, who'll read it and say yea or nay, and eventually, if enough people (or people in the right position) say yea, it ends up with an editor, who looks at it, realizes that she doesn't really have time for it right then, sticks it in a pile, eventually reads it while she's eating her lunch or walking her dog or waiting for her kid to get out of soccer practice.
And then, usually, she rejects it. Which sounds brutal, but I mention it only because rejection rates are so high that I feel like it would be dishonest not to. EC--and all epubs, really--have fairly high acceptance rates, and in this instance, "fairly high" means 2-4%. Print publishers, especially ones that accept unsolicited submissions, accept even less. Also, at a print pub, an unsolicited submission can hang around for anywhere from a few months to a couple of *years*--when I was prereading, there was more than one occasion where I was reading a submission that was eighteen months (or more!) old. And I was a mid-level prereader who only read agented submissions or material the editor I worked for requested. For stuff that's actually slush, it can take even longer.
Regarding the comments above about strict guidelines for sub-genres, this is mostly true of categories, in my experience. Harlequin, Silhouette (which is an imprint of Harlequin), and Mills & Boon probably have the strictest rules about this. It's not terribly likely to be a problem for non-category publishers.
Editor pet peeves are hard to guess at, and trying to do so probably isn't worth it if you're not submitting to a specific editor. If you're looking for generic "things that annoy editors", go search for editors on Twitter--there are hundreds of them, some anonymous, some onymous, and many of them spend a great deal of time attempting to educate their followers.
With that said, the fact that you're even asking this question indicates, to me, at least, that you're probably a step ahead of many people submitting--I originally said "to us", but really, people submitting anywhere. You'd be shocked at how many people apparently don't research at all--they paste the entire manuscript into the body of their email; they submit poetry or memoirs (to companies that don't publish poetry or memoir); they misspell not only their title, but also the name of the company to which they're submitting and their own name...
This has turned into a super-long comment, which wasn't really my intention, but oh well. Hopefully some of it's useful to you. If you (or anyone else reading this) has specific questions you think I might be able to answer, don't hesitate to memail me--I'm happy to chat.
posted by MeghanC at 8:45 PM on November 12, 2009 [6 favorites]
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posted by BlahLaLa at 10:47 AM on November 12, 2009