Publishing has its own language. It is polite, it is vague, and it nearly always means no. I have translated it.
Every phrase below is real: you will meet them in rejection letters, submission guidelines and the advice columns of literary agents. The translations are mine. Inside the essays on this site the same phrases wear a dotted underline: tap one and the gorilla explains.
41 phrases from the publishing industry, translated into plain gorilla.
A
- Anthology
- Translation: A book of stories by many writers. Twenty contributors, one cover, and every one of them buys five copies for their mother.
- Auto-reply
- Translation: Proof that your email arrived. Enjoy it: it may be the last time anyone acknowledges that you exist.
B
- Best of luck placing it elsewhere
- Translation: Go away, but politely. Also the most sincere sentence in the letter: they really do hope someone else deals with you.
C
- Comp titles
- Translation: Two recent books that sold well and resemble yours. Too famous and you are arrogant, too obscure and you are unmarketable, too old and you are dead.
D
- Desk rejection
- Translation: Rejected without being read past the first page, or at all. Named after the desk the manuscript never left.
- Didn't connect
- Translation: The editor felt nothing and refuses to elaborate. Feelings are not negotiable. Neither is this letter.
- Due to the high volume of submissions
- Translation: There are too many of you. This sentence is the receipt, and the reason you get no other sentence.
E
- Editor
- Translation: The person paid to say no. Occasionally, and this is the only reason anyone keeps submitting, the person who says yes and then makes the story better.
- Exposure
- Translation: Payment in the form of people seeing your work for free. Cannot be used to pay rent. Will be offered to you anyway.
F
- Finalist
-
Translation: Close enough to buy a train ticket to the ceremony, not close enough to win anything once you get there.
See also: The Chameleon on the Tree → - First reader
- Translation: The guard at the gate. Often a volunteer, often tired, has read forty stories about a dying grandmother this week. Do not be the forty-first.
- First rights
- Translation: The right to publish a story for the first time anywhere. You can sell it exactly once. Guard it like a gorilla guards a lemon.
- Form rejection
- Translation: A letter written once and sent to thousands. The most-read prose in publishing, and nobody remembers the author.
G
- Genre
-
Translation: What a literary jury calls a story with a spaceship in it, usually right before the rejection.
See also: Xenomorph in the Dollhouse → - Ghosted
- Translation: Rejected by silence. Cheaper than a form letter, crueler than a personal one, and the industry's most popular reply.
H
- Held for further consideration
- Translation: Your story survived the first cut and now sits in a smaller pile. The wait gets longer and the hope gets worse.
- Honorable mention
- Translation: A prize made of words instead of money. Still better than nothing, as anyone who got nothing will tell you.
K
- Kill your darlings
- Translation: Cut the parts you love most. Usually credited to Faulkner; the original 'murder your darlings' is Arthur Quiller-Couch, 1914. The gorilla prefers to kill other people's darlings.
L
- Literary agent
-
Translation: A person who sells books to publishers, which means saying no to hundreds of novelists to find the one they can sell. Fifteen percent of everything, zero percent of the rejections.
See also: The novel's query journey →
M
- Manuscript
- Translation: Your text dressed for the editor: double spaced, name in the corner, page numbers up top. Press 'Manuscript' at the top of any essay here to see one.
- Multiple submission
- Translation: Sending several stories to the same place at once. Usually forbidden: editors prefer to reject you one at a time.
N
- No response means no
- Translation: The silent rejection, now official policy. After a set number of weeks the void is your answer, and the void does not do follow-ups.
- Not a fit
- Translation: A rejection holding a tailor's measuring tape. Nobody will tell you which part was the wrong size.
- Not quite right for us
- Translation: We do not want it. The 'quite' is there to make you think you were close. Nobody has told you whether you were close.
P
- Pitch
- Translation: A promise made in two sentences. Writers write them for publishers; publishers, as this blog has documented, write them for writers too.
- Please send us more
- Translation: The one sentence in a form letter worth decoding. It is usually sincere. Do it before they forget your name.
- Pro rate
- Translation: The pay per word at which a market counts as professional. Earning it once is a career milestone. Living on it is a fairy tale.
- Publisher
- Translation: The company that turns a manuscript into a book and the author into a line item.
Q
- Query letter
-
Translation: One page begging a literary agent to read your novel. The novel took three years. The letter will take longer.
See also: Brimstone Management →
R
- Reprint
- Translation: Selling a story that was already published somewhere else. Pays less, proves more: someone wanted it twice.
- Response time
- Translation: A number on the guidelines page. Fiction, like everything else on that page.
- Revise and resubmit
- Translation: Not a yes, not a no. A homework assignment with no grade guaranteed and no deadline for the teacher.
S
- Simultaneous submission
- Translation: Sending the same story to several places at once. Most markets allow it. The rest want exclusive rights to keep you waiting.
- Slush pile
-
Translation: Every unsolicited manuscript a magazine receives, piled up for the first reader. A mountain of hope read at 11 PM. You are in it. So is the gorilla.
See also: Play: The Slush Pile → - Standard Manuscript Format
- Translation: The dress code for stories: double spacing, word count up top, a running header like 'Surname / TITLE / 3'. Every editor demands it. No editor has ever praised it.
- Subjective business
- Translation: Someone else will hate it differently.
- Synopsis
- Translation: Your whole novel in one page, ending included. Agents ask for it. Writers would rather write a second novel.
T
- Tiered rejection
- Translation: A form rejection with a nicer coat. Some magazines keep a ladder of form letters, and the higher rungs hint 'please send more'. Writers spend years learning to read the rungs.
- Track Changes
-
Translation: The Word feature that shows every edit in red. Editors live in it. Writers die in it, one strikethrough at a time.
See also: The Price of Saving →
W
- Withdrawn
- Translation: When the writer leaves first: the story sold elsewhere, or the wait became an insult. Rare, petty and delicious.
- Word count
- Translation: The first thing an editor checks and the last thing a writer wants to cut. Over the limit means unread, however good the words.
No such phrase. Yet. Give the industry time.
— The Lemondrilla, lexicographer