At Leucrota Press, we pride ourselves on always giving a reason why a manuscript was rejected, many times even commenting on or giving a short critique of the story to help the writer out. For those stories that are “almost there,” we’ve even called the writer up to discuss a few points on how to make the story better in the hopes the writer will revise and resubmit.

Now, that’s all fine and dandy, but there’s just one problem that has been arising with that lately.

That’s not enough for some aspiring writers.

Recently, we have been getting multiple phone calls and some upset emails asking why a particular editor will not respond back to their questions regarding their rejected manuscript. Questions have ranged from how to round out one of their characters, suggestions for this or that scene, help tightening up the dialogue, or heightening tension in the rising action. And all of these questions have come back AFTER their manuscript was rejected (and given pointers on how to improve). Once in a while an editor will reply back reiterating what they had already explained, just in case there is confusion over the editor’s letter, but not always.

And then the writer gets mad and upset yelling (or typing in all caps) that we are ignoring them and not holding up to our promise of personalized rejections.

Well, actually, we are. Every manuscript IS getting a reason  why they are being rejected, not a simple “not at this time.” As I have said before in past posts, that not all writers will like the reasons we give, but that’s not our problem. We do our best to give a nudge in the right direction, or a few pointers on what’s not working, but we can not do much more than that. The simple fact is, we just don’t have the time, and it doesn’t make sense from a business stand to go back and forth with a rejected author to fine-tune their manuscript that may or may not ever be publishable and accepted by us.

Our website states that we will give reasons to rejected manuscripts, not provide one-on-one writing classes for free. We are a publishing house, not a writing tutor, and a manuscript is only given the personalized attention that many of these upset writers are seeking AFTER a manuscript has been accepted and contracted. At that point, the author is probably going to want to tell us to back off we try to be so helpful and mentoring, but until then a writer is on their own.

Sorry. It just doesn’t work that way.