Part of the thing that suckswhen you're trying to find a home for a book is that when you fail, you almost never hear from people. It's just an echoing silence of uninterest.
@Impossible_PhD as someone who was an editor for a literary magazine, I think "uninterest" personalizes it for your specific work, making it feel more personal than it is, when the reality is the volume of submissions is simply more than you can even imagine. To put it bluntly, it's not even about you.
Consider: my literary journal 4 pages, published twice/year, as an insert to our local newspaper, in a town of 6000 people nestled in the Oregon mountains. More to the point, it was specific to the places and people in The Columbia River Gorge.
It was literally nothing.
We had hundreds of submissions. Too many to read. Submissions from China, from Norway, from Israel, like how did they even find us. One submission was a childhood memory of visiting here only to realize they were talking about (we think) the Mississippi River.
It was insane. I literally had to hire other editors. There were 4 of us. For four pages…in The Hood River News!
@Impossible_PhD Now, expand that several orders of magnitude, and think about a small editorial staff of less than 5, wading through that room of books. The sheer math is daunting.
Give each book only 5 minutes, which is nothing, and we're talking about (realistically) less than 60-70 books an editor barely has time too open in a day, if they are zooming. But they're probably getting 100 submissions every day.
And the reality is that editors become editors because they love writing. so they don't throw 5 minutes into the book. They put in way more. That means your book is a one-man sailboat floating in the middle of the Pacific, which is filled with boats.
Yeah, to you, it's life, because it's your boat. But to the editors, it's just a sea of boats.
It's not about you, it's not about disinterest. It's shear math. Unless you have a way to get it in front of someone's eyes—the right someone's eyes—through connections or luck, then you are one of 700,000 boats.
@DivineKestrel I get it. I do. It just... Feels kinda hopeless, because I'm a teacher and don't have the time to play the numbers game, sending hundreds of inquiries out. 😞
@Impossible_PhD Damn, that stucks. :blobhug2: At the very least they could say "sorry, we don't like this." Just getting crickets is the worst kind of rejection. "We didn't send a response because we don't even care."
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