It never ceases to amaze me just how many people imagine that the way a book is published is simply typing it up or printing it out, putting it in an envelope and sending it out to publishers.
The three critical pieces to getting your work eventually read are: 1) Hire a professional editor. Pay someone to go through your work, find grammatical errors, plot problems, or areas which need revision. 2) Write a good cover letter and synopsis. You have three paragraphs to get across your book, and one of those paragraphs effectively has to sell your book - think of it as how you’d describe the work in one paragraph in a catalog. 3) The sample: The first few chapters of your book. IF someone gets through the cover letter and your synopsis page, they’ll read your sample.
If you consider it logically, this all makes sense. There are maybe ten people in the US who are paid professionally to read entire books, just to read the book and give their opinion of that book. There’s no one sitting in a publishing office who spends their day reading random books that are submitted through the mail.
As for professional editors - again, there’s not a whole lot of them out there, and while they aren’t cheap, they also can be your best advertisers. Even there, they’ll also want a synopsis, a cover letter and those sample chapters. They aren’t going to want to invest heavily in your work without complete assurance that you’re not out to waste their time.
In every business, time is money. You have to use the scant moments of time you get from publishers effectively. That manuscript might be the best book ever written, but odds are it won’t be. And no publisher can afford to sit there and hand out manuscripts to be read on the random chance that it might be great.
Well and truly stated ... you might be a professional editor!
Kingu - professional publishers aren’t actually doing their jobs. They’ve been caught before doing this, and this isn’t a one time thing.
You would think that a professional publisher would at least do a search on the book title and name to see if it had been published before.
It’s the same with teachers too. You really think they check your sources? No, they don’t. I had one teacher in 4 years of school care enough to check my sources. If it looks good - that’s all they care about - whether the i’s are dotted and the t’s are crossed and whether the format is the one that they prefer.
Think about this for a minute - teachers are willing to tolerate, even ignore entirely erroneous citations if they look good. It was depressing. Me and the teacher who did check became good friends.