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Book Review: Straight Talk from the Editor

November 11th, 2008 · No Comments · book review

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Want a quick reference to help you prepare and submit your manuscript the right way?

Author and editor W. Terry Whalen recounts his own experiences receiving and reading submissions and gives good insight into what an editor is looking for. In this Amazon short, you will find his advice boiled down into easily digestible bits.

The most important lesson I got from this piece was the reminder that editors are busy. They receive many submissions each day, and no matter how much they would like to give constructive feedback to each one, they simply cannot. So they are looking for quick ways to weed out the ones that can get a quick form rejection. The queries that include misspellings, a pitch for a type of book the publisher doesn’t print, a pitch that is too similar to current works, or a query that shows a lack of experience in the field. Spend time on your query, proofread it, and ensure that you have targeted the right publisher for your manuscript. Don’t give the editor an excuse to reject you without even reading your stuff.

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