Why is my novel always rejected?
Editorial rejection is something that we, almost all of us, have to go through. It's not pleasant, but you can learn something from it, perhaps one of the most important lessons. The publisher is a business and like any business, it's all about money. I know, I know, you don't care, you want to finish your work, show the world your great stories, let your readirs enjoy your plots and characters, okay, perfect. But the publisher's job is publishing and selling books. It needs to sell books to survive. It needs to earn more money than it spends on publishing your book. And that's the key part. When a friendly editor receives your novel for the first time, there are two questions in his mind that need to be answered in order to decide whether to publish your book or not:
How much will it cost me to edit this text?
How many copies can I sell?
And that friendly editor will keep reading your story until both questions are perfectly answered. Hopefully, it will get to the end, but in many cases, after a few pages he will be almost certain whether it isa viable business for him (based on his point of view) or not. To answer those two questions, he will try to calculate how much work it takes to rewrite the text, if the plot is shown to the reader in a hooking way, if the characters grow and develop at an appropriate pace. He'll think about of all those things that many other writers, like me, talk about in their blogs. All those little features that can turn your promising story into an extraordinary novel.
