What We Did to Ask Your Opinion

[mrissa]

Please note that I am aware that most of you have not read this book, so you are not being asked to comment on whether the title works well for the specific book I've written. (Although if you have read it, feel free to e-mail me with opinions on how the title worked for you.)

[Poll #1294645]

Also, if you ran across a book called What We Did to Save the Kingdom, what, if any, preconceptions would you have about it? (Funny, serious, high fantasy, swashbuckling, sword-wielding protagonist, lots of boats, whatever.)

Comments

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Do not try to sell novels on this theory. There are otherwise perfectly sensible children's and YA editors who will reject novels they say they love because they are "too political." By which they clearly did not mean "too tied to contemporary politics," but rather, "too focused on a political situation."

[moiread]

I don't follow? Not the bit about the editors, I mean, because I get that and it makes me facepalm, but the link between my comment and yours. It's probably just that I'm not very awake yet, so you might need to do a 'breaking this down so you can understand it' on me. ;)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Saving the kingdom is a political situation.

It is as political as a situation that has gotten one of my books rejected for being "too political" for a YA audience.

Sigh.

[moiread]

Oh. That's... exceptionally disappointing and very sad. I would buy it, as I'm sure you know, but obviously I'm not a publisher, and in fact most of the publishing industry is all Greek to me, so I can't just whip an unorthodox company's name out of my butt and send you to them. But surely there's got to be somebody out there who doesn't think so little of teenagers?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

There are some. But there are also entire respectable imprints that will reject things on those grounds.

You don't even want to know some of the other crazy-ass grounds for rejection people list in their letters. One of my editor friends suggested that they were flailing because they wanted to make it clear that this was not a form rejection, to say something useful, but I'm not sure; when they specifically say, "If you do something that's more x or less y, please send it to me," that sounds awfully full of feedback to me.