PRQ News

Last week I put together an email submission for The Friday Pitch as part of my submission to Allen & Unwin. From the guidelines, I was told that if they had not contacted six days later at the end of the business day, they were not interested in me.

Because of the time difference, I found out they weren’t interested on Wednesday. Naturally, I was a little disappointed, and to raise my own spirits I decided to submit my manuscript to them again so I could get some satisfaction out of knowing the editors had one more pointless submission to read before the end of the week.

I even considered doing it continuously every week until I got published elsewhere.

Anyhow. The irony is that after the second submission I got a confirmation email from Arena stating they received my submission. I never got a confirmation email the first time! Does this mean they didn’t get it the first time? I think they’re on to my plan for revenge and are turning it back on me.

Nevertheless, I guess we’ll see what happens the second time around.

It appears that the time for my Friday pitch has come and gone, so my rejection has come without word and quite event-less. I wonder if I should keep submitting? Ha ha.

All isn’t lost, I suppose. It’s not like they emailed me back and said, “Wow! That was the worst thing I have ever read. Perhaps you should stick with your day job because this crap made me want to rip the eyeballs out of my socket.” They’re just not interested. Which could mean any host of things.

They were looking for adult fiction, and mine blurs the line a bit with British-style humor.

My manuscript is also  a mere 68,000 words. Which is short for short stories.

Perhaps they don’t accept submissions out of country.

I’ll never know what it was. Oh well. C’est la vie. There are pleanty of other publishers in the sea.

I sent off another submission to the Australian-based Arena imprint (under Allen & Unwin) as part of The Friday Pitch. As part of their plan to find new authors, the Arena imprint of A&U have opened every Friday to unsolicited submissions via email. Being on the other side of the international date line, that means I had to submit mine today (Thursday).

They promise a fast turn around in that if I haven’t heard a word back by 5:30 PM, Thursday (9:30 PM Wednesday for me), then they don’t want it. Believe it or not, I find that good news. It’s nice to have some sort of confirmation back (good or bad) so quickly.

I realize that it is considered taboo to submit manuscripts to multiple publishers at the same time without a Literary Agent, but I didn’t read anything in either Allen and Unwin’s or Tor’s submission guidelines against such. Conversely, I have found the rule in the submission guidelines of many of the other publishers I’ve looked into. Regardless, I suspect it won’t matter much.

Also: I received confirmation that Tor recieved my manuscript in the mail! So I’ve begun the countdown timer to my notificaitons on the right. I’ll keep you updated.