Submissions Redux: Red, Yellow, and Green Flags

An editor, when they first get into the book business, probably thinks that reading books on submission is the coolest part of the job. The one where you get to flex your cultural muscle and taste to be one of the vaunted decision makers who gets to decide what does and doesn’t get published. To play gatekeeper—a word that describes modern editors less than ever. The reality isn’t so rosy.

Writers perhaps don’t want to believe book publishing is a meritocracy, and it isn’t in most every regard expect for the binary question of what does and doesn’t get published. The best or even the merely good stuff isn’t “missed” by traditional publishing. Even self-publishing successes usually get “taken over” in due course by traditional publishing. That’s why when it comes to submissions, a lot of the good, completely obvious novels and book proposals—of either high quality or good commercial potential, or occasionally both—are extremely competitive. There is no “gatekeeping” to be performed when 14 other editors want the publish the same book: you want to turn your nose up at the quality of the submission, that’s just fine, there are 13 other editors behind you clamoring to publish it.1

Over the last few years, every editor has found themselves saying some version of “submissions are either selling lightning fast or sitting forever”. It isn’t uncommon for editors to express interest on a project to its agent within hours, overnight, or in days and not even be the first to the punch. A recent project I was interested in set meetings within hours of going on submission and was preempted2 within days. That fiercely competitive process is one end of the spectrum. Odds are that as an editor these hyper competitive submissions won’t result in an acquisition since you’re one of dozens of interested parties. That’s one reason why the submission part of the job isn’t so fun: an editor runs around for a week or two when they get a big submission, rushing to come up with a comprehensive editorial and publishing plan, and chances are that, in the end, all this groundwork will evaporate into thin air when the submission gets sold elsewhere.

“While it is exhilarating to strike gold, it is not the glamorous work a bright-eyed English major might have been led to believe it is.”

The other end of the spectrum is like sifting for gold with your bare hands. Editors receive on average anywhere from 1-3 submissions a day, not a business day, but a day.3 The number of submissions an editor will acquire from this pool is in the low single digit percentages.4 Acquiring these books is also no walk in the park. If there isn’t instant, obvious interest like in the above scenario, an editor must argue the market.5 Without quick and furious outside interest an editor has to go out on a limb and make the case to their editorial higher-ups that what they’ve found is gold and not schist. This is the reality—not so much gatekeeping, but more like an attorney arguing an impossible case.

While it is exhilarating to strike gold, it is not the glamorous work a bright-eyed English major might have been led to believe it is. You’ve probably done the math and realized that it’s impossible to read 365+ manuscripts from start to finish, so an editor often stops reading when they feel certain that they either don’t want to or won’t be able to buy a project. This is why — sans paying you money to publish your manuscript — the highest level of validation an editor can give you is reading a manuscript in its entirety, especially if they know they won’t end up working on it. Below are observations based on a few weeks’ worth of reading submission to add to previous warning signs discussed. What signals make an editor read on and what ones make us cut our losses and go back to the endless pile of submissions for something else. There are six in total: two red flags, two yellow flags, and two green.

“The highest level of validation an editor can give you is reading a manuscript in its entirety, especially if they know they won’t end up working on it.”

Several gimmicks have been devoted at Dear Head of Mine to the idea that some types of stories are harder to get people interested in than others. A thought that ran through my mind while reading submissions recently was: “if it isn’t written, there’s a reason.” Can’t find a shelf full of a similar kind of book at your local store, or at the top of the bestseller list as the submission you’re reading? It’s probably because there is a cultural aversion to it.

A sub-genre like espionage novels presents a good case. A fabulous genre that contains many exceptional novels, but a genre born of out a specific time and place, namely the Cold War. Since the peak days of Graham Greene and le Carré the idea of spies has just become less interesting to people in general for technological reasons (most surveillance doesn’t happen person to person anymore) and political reasons (people are less interested intellectually in the warring ideologies that undergird this genre). That doesn’t mean exceptional books don’t break out of the pack — Mick Herron, Jason Matthews, David McCloskey to name a few. But we don’t read spy novels at the same clip as we read genres like thrillers or romance. I love spy novels, have even worked on one of these exceptional exceptions, but don’t find myself as a reader seeking out a spy novel in a bookstore. There’s some avid espionage readers left, but the genre and its devoted fans were most likely made in the days when these Cold War concerns were at their fever pitch.

The quickest red flag is a type of submission that readers have little interest in—editors are readers, too. If it’s a genre or a slice of a genre that isn’t regularly read, then the question becomes “is this submission exceptional or not?”, which is a much easier question to answer quickly (often “no”).

“The trickiest submissions are the ones that are good enough to keep going and lack any outright red flags.”

This is an important yet classic reader test to employ for editors and non-editors alike. Have you ever had the experience of slogging through a book three pages at a time for weeks on end? Elisabeth by Eric Rohmer, reviewed a few weeks ago here, felt like a battle even though it wasn’t a particularly taxing read.

The trickiest submissions are the ones that are good enough to keep going and lack any outright red flags. Submissions have a sneaky way of getting better the longer an editor spends sifting through the pile. A few quick and obvious rejections prime an editor to be more generous as a reader to the next submissions they read for the simple reason of comparison. Some light Googling says this is called the Contrast Effect.

To counteract the Contrast Effect the “put down, pick up” test is useful. Most readers in the wild, to my knowledge, don’t sit in a big stack of books reading a few pages of each at a time to determine which one is best. They read one book and usually not in a single sitting. Putting down a submission for a time can be an important test. Do you want to pick it back up? Crucially, do you remember the story and dynamics when you pick it back up? How a book sticks with you is just as important as its page-turning qualities. Stepping away from a submission often reveals a novel’s true nature: is it forgettable, a slow burn, or a story you can’t stop yourself from getting back to?

Nothing makes me give a submission more of a chance than a new perspective. The old hits are the old hits for a reason when it comes to characters: charming old ladies in a small village, rich people behaving badly, moody detectives, has-been novelists. Archetypes done well will always have a place on the bookshelf. But when a writer finds a type of person or point of view you haven’t encountered on the page before, there are few things in a cold submission that engender more curiosity.

At the time, Darkly Dreaming Dexter by Jeff Lindsay was a revelation. A serial killer killing serial killers. Now Dexter has been copied to death and run into the ground, but one can imagine the first time reading these novels as an editor and being surprised, amused, and enthralled (or extremely confused and put off):

Moon. Glorious moon. Full, fat, reddish moon, the night as light as day, the moonlight flooding down across the land and bringing joy, joy, joy. Bringing too the full-throated call of the tropical night, the soft and wild voice of the wind roaring through the hairs on your arm, the hollow wail of starlight, the teeth-grind-ing bellow of the moonlight off the water.

All calling to the Need. Oh, the symphonic shriek of the thousand hiding voices, the cry of the Need in-side, the entity, the silent watcher, the cold quiet thing, the one that laughs, the Moondancer. The me that was not-me, the thing that mocked and laughed and came calling with its hunger. With the Need. And the Need was very strong now, very careful cold coiled creeping crackly cocked and ready, very strong, very much ready now—and still it waited and watched, and it made me wait and watch.

I had been waiting and watching the priest for five weeks now. The Need had been prickling and teasing and prodding at me to find one, find the next, find this priest. For three weeks I had known he was it, he was next, we belonged to the Dark Passenger, he and I together. And that three weeks I had spent fighting the pressure, the growing Need, rising in me like a great wave that roars up and over the beach and does not recede, only swells more with every tick of the bright night’s clock.

This goes beyond a single character as well. Plenty of dynamics are well represented in literature, all manner of sibling configurations, fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, toxic female friendships. But finding a relationship dynamic not well represented in literature, but well represented in life, can immediately hook an editor. Recently, I’ve seen a slew of stay-at-home dads as main characters, something that’s increasingly more common in life but hasn’t made its way into literature. I read a lot of these stay-at-home dad books on submission start to finish and even tried to buy one or two.

Another quick pass, especially in the genre space, is a boring structure. This may be the Contrast Effect speaking and it may not apply to all editors, but a predictable and plodding procedural that starts with discovering a body, then interviewing the witness, etc., etc., is an easy skip. This is an equal and opposite flip side to the red flag of “Bad Genre.” If you choose a “Good Genre” than a submission has to be less exceptional but must find ways to be unique in a sea of similar submissions. A writer who goes the extra mile to subvert or evolve the form is sure to snap the overloaded editor or literary agent to attention on submission.

This is where all that work that didn’t go into writing the manuscript or book proposal pays off. If you’re a previously published author, work at a fancy literary magazine, come recommended by other respected professionals, have a popular Substack, your submission will get more leeway. These factors, most likely, won’t change the outcome between acceptance and rejection for an editor or literary agent. However, they will get you the next most valuable thing: real feedback. Everyone gives more rope to authority. Think about your own reading experiences. How much longer did you spend reading that Pulitzer Prize-winning book because you were waiting to “get it”? Again, credentials may not get you a publishing deal without doing the work, but they will often get you more serious, longer reads. A literary agent or editor will be forced to read enough to really articulate why it doesn’t work for them. This is free labor the writer should utilize, valuable feedback for the next submission or editorial conversation.

The main piece of advice for writers always comes back to reading a lot. But this is true for editors, too! Spend too much time in the submission pile sifting for gold and you’re bound to miss the forest for the trees.6 Editors have to read contemporary published books constantly in order to see what the bar is today and how the manuscripts they read on submission can meet or exceed that bar. An editor must honestly ask themselves: “Would I have bought this if it were on submission?”.

There’s a lot of Monday morning quarterbacking when it comes to published books. Most editors are inclined to lie to others (and themselves) that whichever big successful book of the day is one that they both admire the quality of and would have completely seen the vision for as a big bestseller if only they had it on submission. The surprise, early-2000s feeling hit of Strangers by Belle Burden is not something I could confidently say I would have predicted if it were on submission (notably, Strangers did not have a major book club picks, so a good deal of the industry didn’t see its big potential early on either). But reverse engineer it, dig into the author’s background a bit, and you see why this memoir might have been primed to beat the long odds of the category.

That’s to say, if you want to know what really works on submission go to a bookstore. Every book represents the watermark for what passes muster. Reading a compelling, well-executed, fully-edited and polished published book will show you better than anything what green flags an editor or literary agent will be chasing on submission.

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