Almost three years ago, in late 2020, I finished the final essay in a collection of them that I'd been working on since around 2015. I started shopping the full manuscript in early 2021. The essays, nine of them, are hybrid: they contain creative nonfiction, film criticism, fiction, and various textual strategies (collage, list, diagrams). I know that my work in this book is rare and I know it's good.
I've sent the manuscript to sixteen presses, not counting the half-dozen presses and scattering of agents I pitched with a proposal. All have rejected it (except the two who are currently In Progress on Submittable, along with the ones who never got back to me).
I chose these outlets carefully. I wanted:
- presses that routinely submitted to book awards, because I think this is an awards-type book.
- presses with a history of publishing bold hybrid work, because I knew I'd encounter fewer editorial obstacles when working with folks who knew what my manuscript was doing.
- presses that had had at least one hit book (covered by major critical outlets or sold well, one or the other), because just in case my book was a hit, I wanted a press that had experience with that.
- presses that didn't publish mostly white men.
- should be obvious, but presses that hadn't been determined to be fraudulent or run by shitty people, per Writer Beware and my own whisper network.
- presses that accepted unsolicited/unagented manuscripts, whether through open reading periods, contests, or an open-door policy. Because I don't have an agent and I think I've exhausted the relevant favors my network owes me.
When I sifted the gigantic list of presses I'm aware of through the mesh screen of these priorities, it narrowed out my choices to a couple dozen presses. And I've submitted to nearly all of them over the last two and a half years. So I've almost reached that dreaded place: the end of the line.
Both of my previous books also reached this place. For Ceremonials, the criteria included a press that'd publish a very short prose manuscript as a book, which is harder to find than you'd think, and with Junk Film, the list of presses that wants such a particular kind of nonfiction is shorter than I'd ever imagined. For Ceremonials, only complaining about the manuscript on Twitter led me (miraculously!) to the right press, and for Junk Film, I decided to work with someone I knew and liked, even though his press had different priorities than I had envisioned, rather than keep trying to sell the book to a dwindling list of possibles for another year or two.
These were harder decisions than they sound like in that practical little paragraph. The despair I felt at the end of the line on Ceremonials was mammoth. It took me months, and a wholescale rethinking of my trajectory as a writer, to mentally accept the conclusion I came to with JF. In both cases, these were the right choices, and my reservations proved totally unimportant in the end. But it could've gone the other way. With two other projects I won't specify, it did, and I suffered heartbreak and hard lessons.
I'm writing this post because the end of the line is a hard, lonely place to be as a writer with a worthy manuscript. I want to offer sympathy, but also options, based on what I did with the prior books and what I'm doing next with my hybrid essay manuscript.
One option that's always available is to give up, either temporarily or permanently. As Gus tells Tina,
Maybe you don't quit being a writer, or give up on the manuscript entirely; maybe you set the manuscript aside for a while and try to find a home for it later. Maybe you write another book, an easier one to publish. I firmly believe that opportunities come up at the time they're supposed to, especially in writing. So if you haven't had success at chasing down those opportunities, sit for a minute and see if they arrive on their own schedule. Success at publishing a project doesn't always have a lot to do with how worthy the project is, and giving up temporarily or permanently can be about time, place, and available opportunity rather than writing quality.
Another option is to ask around. Go to AWP and visit press booths. Go to readings. Join writers' groups on Facebook. Look at the spines of books that resemble yours to see if you've missed any presses in your research. This might be very frustrating advice to some of you - it would be for me, as I'm very tuned in to the small press world and do not need help finding presses - but for others it might be the window to a new round of submissions.
The third option is to change your standards/priorities/criteria for presses. Right now, I'm leaning toward removing the "submits to awards" and "hit book" criteria from my list. This means I'd start from the top again: first I'd pitch the manuscript to friends who run presses, then to presses that know me from my time as a reviewer, and then cold-submitting. I already did that process for this book to presses that met all the above criteria, so I'd have to do it again once some of the criteria have been eliminated.
A strategy related to this option is to shift your goals for the eventual book. My initial goal with a manuscript is always to sell half a million copies and win a MacArthur Genius Grant. As I gather up rejections, that goal shortens and narrows. The end of the line is the place where the goal shrinks to bring this book into the world. For some books I've written, that goal is not sufficient for how far I think the manuscript can go. The urban fantasy book, for instance, would find a great home on the Barnes & Noble SFF shelf, and I'm sure that goal is reachable, so I'm not going to submit to presses that won't suit that goal. I won't lower the goal for that manuscript to bring it into the world, because I don't think that's enough.
For this hybrid essay manuscript, I'm almost, but not quite, at the point where I need to decide if my goal is going to shrink any further. It started out enormous, and now it's reasonable, and I really don't know if I want to make it smaller. I have to decide within the next couple of months, after the final two presses respond.
I'm not quite at the end of the line for this book just yet; these last two presses have it, and after that I still have some options, even if they aren't ideal. But I remember the sensation I'm feeling right now from both of the prior books - the mentally looking around at an emptied room that was once bustling with possibilities. It's almost time to close the door on that room and open a different one.
I will weather it, because it's my job to do so, but it would be a mistake to minimize how difficult this process is. You feel helpless, and angry, and sad, and indignant, and maudlin. You feel the train coming to a gradual stop, the stuff that was whizzing by now moving so slowly that you could put your head out the window without any danger at all. It's frustrating to be moving like that, not able to accelerate or hit the brakes yourself.
Toot toot.
