Don’t count on agents and publishers to polish your diamond in the rough

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From Nathan Bransford:

Some authors have heard that agents engage in pre-submission editing prior to submitting to publishers. Failing that, they know that editing is literally in an editor’s job title.

So if you just have a great idea for a book, an agent and editor will help you polish it up into something publishable, right?

Don’t count on it.

Yes, sure. Some agents really do offer pre-submission editing. But typically these are situations where agents are taking a book project that’s nearly there and helping it that last extra mile across the finish line. They’re taking books that are already in the 99.5th percentile and getting them to the 99.9th. They’re not taking a hot mess and turning it into gold.

Ideas are highly, highly overrated. Execution is what matters. Your writing needs to be competent at worst, ideally much more than that. However you feel about [insert traditionally published bestseller with a reputation for being poorly written], it is way better than the vast majority of what goes unpublished.

. . . .

Unless you are writing on a highly topical nonfiction project with a very specific bombshell, current events don’t tend to matter much in the book world, particularly for fiction. It doesn’t pay to rush.

Link to the rest at Nathan Bransford

PG worked for a large advertising agency a long time ago. Shortly after he started work, he had a visit from one of the agency’s attorneys to discuss what to do if he received a letter with an idea for a commercial or other advertisement.

Basically, when PG realized that he was receiving an unsolicited idea from outside the agency, he was to immediately stop reading the letter and mark the place where he stopped reading. He was then to walk the letter over to the legal department and hand it to someone who would draft and appropriate response to accompany the returned idea letter back to the sender.