Sometimes, it’s helpful to see the writing process from another point of view. I certainly feel that my experiences, short-lived though they were, as a submissions editor have given me some new perspective on the writing process.

First, some background. A few years ago, I met a very talented writer and artist who was a friend of my fiancée. I’d been trying to start up an independent comic anthology for a while and hadn’t made much headway, but I still had some ideas kicking around. I showed the script to this artist, and we started talking about working together. She was planning on moving to my area at the time, and it wasn’t long before we were planning a full scale magazine project. The result was Kinships, a magazine that lasted six issues, with a modest print run that was distributed in about 25 stores in the Northeast. It never made a profit, but we had not been expecting it to make money immediately. Small press magazines are seldom profitable. The magazine was a good promotional device for other projects that we were working on, and it was a way of getting our name out and having a finished project that we could show people, so we stuck with it until my partner had to move out of state. At that point it became apparent that the project was not feasible over a long distance and we ceased publication.

There are many measures of success. While we weren’t raking in the bucks, one area in which we did quite well was in locating quality fiction and poetry submissions for the magazine. We dropped flyers with our guidelines at a few cons and got listed on some online market listings and that was all we needed to get a steady stream of submissions headed our way.

The submission editing job went to my fiancée at first, but she found that she didn’t like the idea of rejecting people’s work, and the job was passed my way.

Rejecting people’s work was not something that I found difficult. The hard part was carefully reading the submissions that looked promising. Fortunately, most submissions did not get anywhere near that treatment.

My guess is that I was doing the same thing that most submissions editors have done since the publishing business started, and I’m really hoping most of you will not be shocked by what I am about to reveal. Those precious manuscripts that you slave over, making sure every last word is perfect? Submissions editors don’t read them. Or rather, the submissions editor stops reading after the first paragraph. I would say that 90% of my decisions to reject were made before I got halfway down the first page. And if the rest of the story was the best piece of fiction ever written, I will never know.

I have a feeling that I am probably typical of small press editors. I kept my day job. I had other interests and obligations, and even within the magazine project I had dozens of tasks. Reading manuscripts was just one of them, and I usually had a backlog of submissions to be looked at. My goal was to reject as many as possible in as little time as possible. Hence the half-page approach. If I wasn’t hooked by halfway down the first page, then I saw no reason to read any further.

When I did that first look, there were a few things that would immediately flag the manuscript for rejection. The first was bad grammar or spelling. If the author couldn’t be bothered to edit, then I couldn’t be bothered to continue reading.

The next largest source of instant rejections was clichés. Vampires and other immortals were often rejected at the first mention. So were bards, elven warrior-mages, loveable rogues, former street urchins turned assassin, assassins in general, prophets, people who were prominently featured in prophesy, strong silent heroic loners, cyberpunks, samurai, ninja, young apprentices to anything, slayers (of whatever), and the ever-popular mischievous gnome/Halfling/hobbit/kinder/whatever. Want to use an idea that’s popular genre fiction? Then you’ve got about five sentences to convince me that yours is different in a major way from all the other examples of the archetype out there.

Finally, there were the stories that simply failed to get going fast enough. If I was bored, I figured that our readers would be bored too. The same went for stories that were confusing. I didn’t have the patience for stories where you couldn’t figure out what was going on until the end. Some mystery can be good, but it needs to hook the reader in and keep the reader’s attention.

Once I made it past the first page, the story was certainly not in the clear, but by that point I would be asking different types of questions about it, the kind that could lead toward it being seriously considered for publication.

Seeing things from the editor’s point of view won’t necessarily save you from rejection, but it may help you with some decisions about how to present your work in the most favorable possible light. With most editors, that first half-page deserves your utmost attention. Otherwise, it may be all that ever gets read.