Amych, yes and no on the urban legend: it depends on individual store and chain policies. The local Dalton doesn't return unsold autographed copies - they put them on the "bargain" table.

Which doesn't count as a return, which keeps the numbers up.

Anne, I did some volunteer work as a teenager with severely disturbed kids - children who would deliberately hurt themselves, who were violent, who couldn't or wouldn't talk. At least three of them, all under the age of ten if I'm remembering right, drew in a fashion that reminded me of people like William Blake. Theme, content, extraordinary beauty and power, all right there.

I wish I wasn't such a wuss. I love input and solid crit on my own stuff, but I hate dishing out bad news.

Furthermore, aren't you supposed to reply to queries one at a time? I'd always heard that editors were royally pissed off if you simultaneously submitted a full manuscript to two different houses. It's one thing to simultaneously send queries, but once somebody's reading the full manuscript, s/he's supposed to have an exclusive.

Although being "a wuss" as well as good manners, kept you from saying it sucked and blew, so probably better they heard it from you. And maybe it will help them learn. But that is why I hate it when acquaintances give me stuff to read...I can only imagine what it's like for somebody published.ETA: I think Betsy's right.

I'm in an online writer's group and a face-to-face. Everybody in the face-to-face is competent. Not everybody in the online is. By FAR the hardest segments to critique are the incompetent ones. Because every single line has something that needs to be fixed, and I can't flag every single one without devastating the recipient. And the standing rules of the online group (which I think are wise) are that there are five questions that must be answered in every critique; two of them are "What must be kept in the manuscript?" "What must be fixed?". Sometimes it's just about impossible to find something that ought to be kept. "Um... nice use of 'the'."

Amych, yes and no on the urban legend: it depends on individual store and chain policies. The local Dalton doesn't return unsold autographed copies - they put them on the "bargain" table.

Yeah, store policies are a different matter. Unfortunately, I've heard hundreds (really!) of writers say "oh, I'll sign all you have, because signed books Cannot Be Returned", as if it were a universal rule among publishers -- when I knew that in all too many cases, my bosses would make me write up the returns before the writer even left the store.

I know you know your way around the publishing biz; sadly, it's a "rule" that a lot of fairly naive new writers pick up, and it's only going to hurt them when their royalty statements come in.

sometimes though, it's like with the bad fic. Sometimes, they have a good idea that ought to be compelling, but they mess it up with the way they tell it.

Nice thing about being an Old Bat in the world of mainstream publishing: I learned this stuff the hard way, but I learned it.

Betsy, they sent out 238 queries - not the MS. 238 people were sent the pitch letter and synopsis, which I rewrote. That pitch letter and synopsis (I'm not bragging, I'm stating the fact which got my sorry ass into this mess) were sent to a test group of (hang on, let me look at his email) 22 agents. Twenty, on the basis of the pitch and synopsis, requested sample chapters. And within days, they started getting the "novel doesn't live up to the pitch and synopsis" responses.

So they wrote to me, begging.

Oy vey.

Betsy, allow me to reiterate, BTW - these people, nice or not, are so totally and completely not being invited to participate in our writers' group. Brrrrr.

edit: erika, I wish I knew what the story is in this one. I think I know, but only because of the synopsis. The first 55 pages show me diddly.

I'm in an online writer's group and a face-to-face. Everybody in the face-to-face is competent. Not everybody in the online is. By FAR the hardest segments to critique are the incompetent ones.

My writing class involves an hour or so of small groups -- 3 or 4 women who are in the same group for the whole semester -- that are designed to give each woman a chunk of time to have a piece of writing critiqued.

Now, the way small group is structured, the writer specifies what kind of feedback she'd like -- some women don't want critique; they might be working with a first draft and not want real nit-picky punctuation critique; they might be reading a journal entry that they just want to share but don't intend to revise further; or, as is the case with one woman in my small group, they might be such a new writer that they're not ready to hear critique. And I totally respect that.

However -- this summer class is not my normal Thursday-night group, so all the women are new to me -- I ask for critique when I bring stuff to small group. I want feedback on my *writing.* And the women in my small group always, without fail, comment on the content, but not the actual writing.

I have class tonight, and I'm going to have to hit that really hard -- stress that I want to know what they think of the writing itself, and not just the topic.

Wow.It sounds like, to put it mildly, they are focusing on the wrong end. The whole "having the book in the store" bit instead of having some story they want to tell, you know? Kind of the opposite side of Anne Lamott's K-Fucked.(One station says you're not worthy, and the other side plans to hang out with David Letterman or someone.)ETA: Deb's critique-seekers not Tep's group. Tep, I had the same problem with the group I was in.

erika, I think part of this is the couple themselves. She spent years immersed in soaps, as a reporter for a Hollywood rag on the subject; he's a go-getter, runs a PR agency. They decided to write the thing, rented a cabin in the woods, spent three months doing nothing except writing the thing, and came out with (please, Jebus, help me) 135K words.

I don't want to paint them as arrogant or evil or stupid. I don't get that impression and besides, would they be asking for help so easily if they didn't think they needed it?

But non-arrogant, non-evil and non-stupid aside, I think they're clueless about what a novel is, and how to write one.