My first experience with manuscript assessments was when I sent off my first full-length, YA novel for assessment soon after I completed a course in writing for young adults. The assessment came back glowing. “This manuscript will most likely get published,” it said.
Wow! I paid the invoice and was thrilled.
Full of confidence, I sent off my manuscript to publishers. Well, guess what? It didn’t get published.
So, what went wrong between the assessment and publishers’ rejections? Quite simply the book was awful!
Looking back with twenty years of experience now behind me, I can see that I had no idea what I was doing and that the manuscript was nowhere near a publishable standard.
For the last ten years, I’ve been on the other side of the laptop – providing manuscripts assessments for would-be authors. Looking back through my files, I can count over 300 manuscripts in that time; some are great, some are ok, but most are not ready to be sent to a publisher – and I tell the authors exactly this (along with constructive advice on the steps the author needs to take to get it to a publishable standard).
When reading these manuscripts, I regularly think back to my first manuscript assessment and realise that the assessor — although probably trying to be kind (or thinking they were giving me what I’d paid for) — did me no favours in telling me the manuscript would likely be published. The false hope that was created by that assessment, made the crashing back to earth all the more painful. I never wrote another novel after that!
I wonder if I’d been given constructive advice would I have amended that first attempt to a more publishable standard? Or instead would I have started on something else with more knowledge and completed a more mature attempt?
So, when I come across those manuscripts, which I assess as not ready for publication, I think back to my younger, wide-eyed self, and gently tell her, ‘I believe in you but you can do better’.
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