Butchering Day
Life would be easier if I had a colder heart. Take my drakes, for example. Fine fellows they are: young, handsome, friendly Indian runner ducks. But in spring, when their hormones start to flow, they will be too intense for my poor hen ducks. If I keep the flock intact, well, not everyone will survive the unwholesome mad frolics that would occur in the pond. One drake for three ducks is the recommended ratio, and I’ve got nearly four for six.
So, I’ve got an issue to address. And much as I like duck a l’orange, I wasn’t brought up in a slaughter house.
Another issue is my chickens, though I’m a couple years from having to address that. Chickens lay eggs for two or three years. Then, real farmers relocate them to the closest stew pot. The alternative is to keep them around, and run an old age home for chickens. If you want more eggs after that, you need to get more chicks.
Unless you can do the dark deed, you can wind up with an infinite number of chickens. And unless you can do it with inappropriate book proposals, well, it’s an impossible business model for a publisher.
Summertime is when teachers often have time available to write books, and the end of summer seems to be the most intense time for them to send book proposals to publishers. Last August, I was really getting inundated.
Then a deadline for proofreading something was looming, and so I switched gears to become just a proofreading machine for a few days, and tried not to get distracted by anything else. When I came up for air, it was time to devote a couple hours to the odious task of rejecting manuscripts.
In my job, there is practically nothing I hate more than rejecting manuscripts. Crushing dreams. Well, not only. The ones I actually feel sad about are in the minority. Like, we once received a beautifully prepared manuscript submitted for a book about how to play the didjeridoo. In all honesty, I think it would have been among the best books published on that topic. But we are ill prepared to market something like that. Our house brand is more about contemporary popular music, jazz, production, making a career, and so on. It just wasn’t a good fit, so we had to pass. A different publisher would have been more optimized to sell it to the appropriate channels. I sincerely hope the author found someone and that her book did well.
[Note: it wasn't really about the didjeridoo. The only lying I plan to do on this blog is to change details to protect the innocent. So, a didjeridoo proposal last summer by a little old lady in Kentucky might have actually been a harmonica proposal five years ago by a pimply teen-ager in Canada.]
Anyhow, most of my butchering doesn’t require so much soul searching, and my loathing of the task often has more to do with the self-absorbed rudeness so commonly part of the person submitting it. (I’m talking non-Berklee types here. It’s completely appropriate for any Berklee faculty member to propose any idea to me, including lunch. But our Web site states clearly, “We publish products by faculty members at Berklee…”)
For example, random people around the world send me scores of atonal chamber music. I happen to like atonal chamber music, and have written some of it myself. But if the author had spent two seconds to look at our Web site or catalog, they would have seen that such publications are simply not what we do. I have to take the time to open their Byzantine packaging, figure out what they are suggesting, and then send them a response. And what they are suggesting is effectively that we make a foolish business decision that would waste tens of thousands of dollars in production and marketing, if we had made the wrong choice and published their hideous cacophony.
I’m reminded of one of the funniest portions of any of our books, a passage in George Howard’s book Getting Signed, where he describes himself listening to demos, wrangling with duct-taped packaging, while the phone is ringing off the hook, and he’s desperately trying to eat some sort of lunch. (Check out George’s excellent blog.) I totally relate. Reviewing book proposals is very similar.
Maybe, I can process a wildly inappropriate proposal in ten minutes (minimum), from opening the envelope to sending the polite declination, and fulfilling some additional administration associated with it. Judging the wildly inappropriate project itself might just take two seconds. It’s the rest of it that’s time consuming.
What a waste. I particularly hate it when people I’ve never heard of overnight inappropriate proposals to me. Sometimes, such packages come from overseas. How much does that package cost them? $50 perhaps, including photocopying and CD, but not including their time? And are they shotgunning many publishers with the same inappropriate proposals? A tiny bit of research would save a lot of money.
One good thing, though, about butchering day: it makes me feel better about the mounds of rejection letters that I’ve amassed myself, of my own work. These rejections aren’t personal. They are rejections of the proposed business collaboration, which would have been doomed to failure and a dreadful mistake for all concerned. Sitting on this side of the desk has really changed my own approach to getting my work published, and helped me to get more personal work in print.
Perhaps, we reject nine out of ten proposals we receive. For maybe half of those, it is immediately obvious that they will never work, so I try to drop them like hot potatoes. The criteria are clearly articulated on our Web site. We publish instructional works by our faculty members, and any exceptions to that rule have special stories; maybe they were guest lecturers, etc. We don’t publish chamber music arrangements. Look at our catalog! We just don’t do it! If a non-faculty member proposes that we publish their chamber music, well, it’s an obvious no. (Note that in August, I received internationally overnighted chamber music score proposals from two different people.)
Of course, the destiny of some proposals is more difficult to figure out, because they might be close to being appropriate for us. These can take several months to process, as various decision makers have to weigh in. If a proposal is so good that it actually gets accepted, it is likely that fifteen or twenty people, spread out over five committees, have weighed in on it. If it’s “close, but no cigar,” still, quite a few people might be involved in the decision. Solid proposals we reject often take more of my time than solid proposals we accept because I do my best to advocate to the other decision-makers that we publish it, despite their opinion.
But again, rejections are often due to factors that have nothing to do with the quality of the intended work. We publish about a dozen products per year. If we already have six drum products in the pipeline for this coming year and someone proposes another, chances are that it won’t fly, no matter how good an idea it is.
I think my record butchering day was about nine projects. I regretted to inform them, but you know, more than that, I regretted that some of them tried to snooker me into making bad decisions, too.
To the “close, but no cigar people,” though, I really am sorry that we couldn’t publish your work. There is just finite space and feed in this coop, and I’ve got to make some tough calls.
