450 Decisions, or the Serendipity of an Editor and their Submissions

#1 Myth: An Editor Rejects a Manuscript Because It’s Not Good

We’ve discussed the misconceptions around editors as “gatekeepers”, while noting that they often do provide a level of quality control associated with that term. However, literary agents should be thanked first and foremost by general readers for this quality-control efforts to get the public good books. While my submission log in 2025 amounted to roughly 450 agented submissions, which is about 2 books to read each and every work day, one of my favorite literary agents and fellow Substacker Danielle Bukowski of Just Reading All Day wrote that she considered 3000+ queries this year (and signed 2 of those writers as clients).

That’s all to say that editors benefit from the significant filter of literary agents who mostly hold high standards for the projects they take on. By the time an editor gets a manuscript or book proposal, it’s usually not someone’s rough first attempt at writing, unlike the variance in quality that agents can often deal with in the querying process. At the same time, reading two books a day, just in submissions, is not feasible for most human beings. There are likely editors that are closer to the 3 or even 4 submission per work day mark as well. In the documentary Turn Every Page famous editor Robert Gottleib talks about his practice of reading every submission overnight. But a modern editor simply can’t afford to do that given their load of responsibilities (nor can they argue over every comma in a 1000-page book for years on end, which is the subject of the film).

One drawer of Robert Caro’s notes, there’s a memorable scene in Turn Every Page where Caro opens a closet in his New York apartment and thousands of pages of typewritten manuscript drafts are stuffed on the top shelf.

To answer another common question: editors do not read every submission from beginning to end. Nor should an author or agent expect an editor to need to read the entirety of a book to make an informed decision on a project. What you learn is that if you only read asking “is this good?” or “do I like it?” , as many assistants start out by doing, you will quickly drown and lose valuable time that would be better spent on the manuscripts you’ll end up acquiring and working on. It is this pragmatism, not pure quality that determines much of what an editor buys and what they don’t. Although rejection is never an easy pill to swallow, this should be heartening for most writers and literary agents: a rejection is rarely ever just a judgement that a manuscript isn’t worthy. There are many other factors that go into the decision beyond if it is a good book that the editor likes.

With that in mind, let’s put the most obvious and most subjective factor, quality, aside and talk about why an editor may pursue a submission with the hopes of paying the writer for the privilege to publish their book.

Ease Over Excellence

It’s not excellence that often determines if an editor takes on a project but ease.

I pride myself as an editor for being able to figure out difficult publishing situations, taking on projects that have problems to solve editorially or logistically. I find it a good way to stand out because, frankly, most editors are stretched too thin and many have come to the conclusion that the amount of effort put in does not necessarily correlate with success in the publishing business, an entirely reasonable conclusion. There are a lot of gems that editors aren’t willing to publish because of the vast administrative and emotional hassle involved in publishing.

Ease is often valued over quality by editors. Every obstacle you can remove or diminish for an editor clears the way for a smooth acquisition. No sales track to contend with? Beautiful (this is why the word “debut” adds significant value to a submission). A category the editor already works in? Easy.* A category the publisher has recently been successful in? Even more important. A novel manuscript or book outline that needs no structural work? Best of all. A pitch that reads like a real book description, early blurbs, etc., each little task you take off an editor’s plate makes them more pliable and wanting to say yes to a submission.

*Important Side Note* Editors and publishers want similar, not the same! A huge mistake both writers querying and agents submitting make often. An editor and a publisher don’t want the same exact thing that they’ve already had success with because this takes resources and attention away from their existing author (and they are comparing the two, which is generally unfavorable for the newcomer). However, if you can fit a similar book into the same program as a successful book, then you have a winning formula for making the editor more receptive (the book still has to be good, of course!).

Editors, and even more so their publishers, are looking for books that they can put into their existing publishing system whatever that system may be. Even an indie publisher like Graywolf Press, which writers and agents might think of as bespoke indie publisher, has a clear system. If you look at Graywolf’s successful publications, they have a lot of similarity in cover design, author background, and stylistic ambition. This is a very different system from a commercial juggernaut — like, say Berkley— but it is a system nonetheless. Every publisher has personnel on staff and a certain way of doing things that benefits different kinds of books. A literary publisher will help clear the path for review coverage and award consideration, given their previous success and relationships with reviewers and award committees. A commercial publisher will know how to meet a specific, reliable kind of reader under the current market conditions. Other specialized publishers will have even more specific sets of systems to make what looks like unique books on the outside into a repeatable formula (e.g. the beautiful books of Rizzoli).

Crucially, anything outside of a publisher’s expertise requires multiples of the amount of effort from the editor to pull everything together. The editor must explain to everyone in-house why the process needs to happen differently than usual (i.e. explaining you want a commercial cover at a literary house or, conversely, a commercial novel needs a real awards push). An editor’s passion for a project and/or its potential and quality have to make up that sizable gap of publisher expertise if it’s not in their typical wheelhouse.

The Moving Bar

We’ve covered this before at Dear Head of Mine, but every genre and type of book has a different bar it has to exceed in terms of quality for an agent/editor/reader to take it on. How good a manuscript or proposal has to be depends on who is writing it, what the current demand for the category is, and, relatedly, how difficult it is to write a book that stands up to books already published in that category.

If you want to get in the weeds, there’s an entire bracket that breaks down what is the hardest kind of book to write from a writer’s perspective. But here is a very subjective re-ranking based on market conditions, 1 being the most difficult to publish and 8/9 the least difficult publish. Every editor will have a different calculus, more on that below.

The best way to explain this is that celebrity memoir remains one of the least difficult kinds of books to find a market for, and therefore offer on as an editor. Let’s put it this way: if Martin Scorsese were to write on a napkin “I want to write a book” and submit it to editors, I would be putting an offer together tomorrow.

FICTION

1. Short Story Collections

2. Poetry

3. Literary Fiction

4. Action/Adventure

5. Horror

6. Science Fiction/Fantasy

7. Mystery/Thriller

8. Romance

NONFICTION

1.Memoir (non-celebrity)

2.Essay Collection

3.Academic

4.Narrative Nonfiction

5.Journalism

6. History

7. Self-Help

8. How-To/Practical

9. Memoir (celebrity)

This is subjective, of course, and every editor will have likely a much more informal, unsaid ranking going on in their head. A sneaky, under appreciated fact is that basic supply, demand, and timing dictate that an editor who specializes in one category of books will counterintuitively automatically have a lower standard, not a higher one for that category. This is because if your mandate as an editor is to publish 10 memoirs a year, then you don’t have the same luxury as a general editor to pass on every memoir just because it doesn’t meet some exacting, high standards (they will also see more memoirs on submission, potentially balancing this out entirely). Specialty editors therefore also have to try to add more value in the editing in publishing, using their expertise to take average or slightly above average books in a category and elevate them. Whereas an editor who moonlights in a category can wait and wait and wait until they hit the one memoir they’ll do every few years.

Literary agents, not being bound by imprint mandates or specialties are often a bit more free-ranging, they can wait forever to take on new clients if they don’t like what they’re seeing. But like editors they often develop specialties that help them add value, especially by knowing the peculiarities of editors. Such that a great literary agent can pair an author, that might not otherwise make a deal, with the right one or two editors in the entire business who will understand how to publisher their book.

The inverse relationship between ease and excellence. Big books tend to happen when this graph is defied—when a book is both easy to publish and excellent.

Trust

Ease and the closely-related difficulty may be two major reasons an editor does or does not buy a book, but there are a number of other factors in Stage 2 of a submissions journey to consider. When an editor loves a submission, they must convince their publisher (and sometimes other bosses) to commit financially. Here both the editor’s and the agent’s reputation — and seniority— generally come into play. There’s an element of faith and trust in the acquisition process, books after all are nothing but words on a page and a promise. A young editor can more likely buy a submission if they have an agent with a sterling reputation behind it. A young agent can more likely sell a submission if a more senior editor wants to buy it.

There are other simple, incentive-based economics at play. Writers prioritize agents who have sold books in the past. Agents prioritize submitting to editors who’ve put money on the table in the past. Editors prioritize agents who they’ve bought projects from or tried to buy projects from in in the past. This is the cold reality of numbers. People tend to put their energy, including their reading energy, toward submissions that have a they have a higher chance of actually closing a deal on. Although, thankfully, most of us are humans and not calculators. Attention to detail and energy can go a long way in changing this. At any point in the submission chain a thoughtful writer, agent, or editor can break this calculation by putting in extra effort, elbow grease and attention being the things that are often in short supply.

An agent’s pitch rarely ever makes or breaks a submission, but 9 out of 10 times a book I’ve read all the way through had a special pitch letter or an agent who I trust implicitly to deliver a great submission whether I try to buy the book or not. A submission that you can tell isn’t just something the agent was firing off to forty editors and praying some editor would bite on. When the agent’s pitch feels different, locked in, whether that’s over the phone or in writing, it bumps it way up the priority list no matter what the agent’s seniority is. Although you wouldn’t be surprised to hear that the best of the best literary agents have this passionate quality in almost every pitch they send out, from small novel to franchise blockbuster.

Submissions Are in Competition

Like every editor’s book is competing for the attention of colleagues, of the media, of readers, every submission is competing for an editor’s attention. It is true for me, and other editors, I’m sure, that when one submission wins out it means everything else on submission has to wait. We only have one set of eyeballs, after all.

A typical, but sneakily good, question literary agents often ask editors is what books they would’ve liked to publish or what books they tried to buy but lost out on. The opposite of an editor not wanting to buy something too similar to what they already edit and publish is that they are much more likely to buy something similar that they narrowly missed out on but that went on to have big success. The “one that got away” has a huge allure.

Competition also comes into play with what else is happening at the editor’s publishing house and the market more widely. An unfortunate reality is that a big part of the submission process, for many, but not all, editors is groupthink. Many editors rely on the market to speak for them and tell them what to read and bid on. When wading through hundreds of potential submissions a year some editors give up on trying to vet every submission empirically. They start relying on the interest of other editors or scouts to decide what they should read. In turn publishers are sometimes more inclined to believe the market rather than the opinion of their own editor, even if they market often proves to be wrong in one way or another. There is at least reputational safety in doing what everyone else does (e.g. “we got it wrong” instead of “I got it wrong”). It’s not a philosophy I endorse, but it is a reality.

Why an Editor Buys

Completely out of control for agents is which editors are busy when, or who has space and time to buy more books. So much of what determines the demand of an editor is what amount of attention and the needs they have at any given moment. Much like the hungry judge effect where arbiters of the law are more lenient when they aren’t starving, an editor falling in love with a book — as really any reader can attest to — has more to do with random timing than we’d probably like to admit. Sometimes a submission finds an editor right after they’ve had their morning coffee or they’ve just become interested in a topic weeks before. It’s somewhat an agent’s job to try to know these things, but a huge part of the process is serendipity.

An editor buys a book when everything clicks. When an editor has an idea of how to publish a book (and likes it enough to want to work on it for multiple years—a high bar), their publisher agrees, and the agent and author agree (and they all find the right price). Yes, editors go after submissions because they’re good but in the half dozen times a year an acquisition come to fruition out of four hundred and fifty options it is because everything else off the page lines up to send an author and editor off to the races together.