Why Agents and Editors Are Simply Not Responding You You Anymore

As you know, this is a pet peeve of mine, not only in the publishing world but in the world of communication in general. I am a firm believer that if you email someone, that person deserves a response back. I also believe that response should be a timely response and not a "Oh, my bad, I just missed it" response. 

However, I do want to address this and talk about one of the biggest reasons why so many editors and agents are simply not responding to authors anymore. I want to deal with the ugly reason first.

It is due to the authors out there who simply cannot read submission guidelines, cannot keep track of their own submissions, believe if they bombard the system with submissions something will stick, or just argue with us. In other words, the bad seeds of the group.

Yes, there are those people out there. 

This weekend, I answered countless emails just like that. For example, as you know, my submission guidelines clearly stated that I accept only traditional romance and women's fiction, AND YET, I was getting memoirs, science fiction novels (and novellas), self-help books, cookbooks and... Good lord people, can't you read? So, I send my response of telling them this is not what I represent, and sure enough I will get one of the three responses:

1) My bad, I didn't read your guidelines. 

2) I just thought you would be more open to accepting things that were well written

3) Getting slammed on the internet for sending a form response stating that their "form query letter" was not a genre I represent. 

We also get people who think that if they just submit the same project, change the name and "pretend" it is something different, things will change. I get if you revise the book, but tell us that. But come on...sending the same query and project? We aren't idiots!

So, what is the easiest approach to this? Editors and agents simply use the statement, "Due to the high volume of submissions we receive, we will respond to authors if we believe your project is something we would like to move forward with." In other words, "we are going to ignore some of you. 

Now, it is that part that personally I am not a big fan of. If you want to skip on the project, then send that darn form letter at least acknowledging receipt of the project and a decision to pass. Authors at least know. 

But for now, please know that your lack of hearing from so many of us (not necessarily me) is due to your fellow writers who cannot seem to do the right thing.