Posted by Marian Lizzi
Chat up any editor who’s been around longer than the Kindle Fire, and pretty quickly you’ll tap into a deep well of heartache and loss. I’m not talking about the 75-to-1 ratio of straight women to straight men in publishing (that’s for a different post). No, I’m referring to the submissions we loved but lost. They came into our lives, we fell hard for them, and in the time it takes to say “outbid,” “pre-empted,” or “my publisher just didn’t love it as much as I did,” they were gone. And what’s worse, they hooked up with someone else, without a second thought.
In some cases, it was love at first sight. Maybe we even made the first move – reaching out to a favorite blogger, magazine writer, celebrity, or expert. An agent came into the picture, and a proposal was put together. We were included in the submission, perhaps getting an early look or exclusive. It seemed we were headed for Happily Ever After, but then…something went wrong. We couldn’t make the numbers work. The in-house support wasn’t there. The auction (if there was one) got too heated. For one reason or another, we had to part ways.
Or maybe it was a multiple submission – perhaps written by an author we’d never even heard of before. We read. We laughed. Or cried. Or both. We got reads. We got excited. We imagined a bright future together. But then we didn’t prevail.
There are other variations, of course. Maybe we didn’t love the submission at all, and said no thank you right away. Maybe we thought it was a little sloppy. Or overhyped. Or just a teeny bit cookie-cutter. Maybe it just wasn’t our type. We parted ways, and no one got hurt. Until it went on to win a Pulitzer. Or hit the List at #7. Or outsell jeggings at the mall-store chain. Suddenly an old wound is reopened: Why do I let all the good ones go?
In publishing, as in life, you learn to pick yourself up and move on. The acquisitions game is all about finding the right match at the right time, and if we spent too long pondering what might have been, we’d be missing out on the new crop of possibilities – each one another chance to make magic together…or not.
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