Quote of the Day: "My angel wings are bruised and destroyed."
--The Smashing Pumpkins, Today
I had a bit of a sad moment this week. A manuscript came through that looked quite interesting, interesting enough that I wanted to read it at any rate, but was just not something the company I'm working for publishes.
It was a memoir (possibly fictionalized, the cover letter was pretty tough to decipher) of a mixed-race woman's experience growing up in Tennessee in the early part of the 20th century. Sounds cool, right? Well, judging by the few pages I skimmed, it was. She had a great voice and it seemed like it'd be great.
But sadly, I had work to do, so I just sent along the "Sorry, we don't take this genre" formulaic rejection letter and went about my day. Had I not written a note reminding myself to blog about it, I would have completely forgotten about the manuscript by the end of the day.
I'm think I've said this before, and I'm sure others have said it, but I'll say it again: you don't want your manuscript going to place that doesn't publish or represent its genre. Even if this was pulitzer-prize winning literature, my house simply doesn't have the setup necessary to publicize and do a good job publishing memoir. If we were to take a manuscript like that, it would essentially be condemning it to wallow in the dirt for x number of years before someone important finally read it by accident and it blew up---probably long after the deaths of anyone involved.
And why would you want to do that to your book?
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