One of the side effects of having an author writing in a fairly scary-but-almost-real universe like Manna Francis’ Administration is that, occasionally, I have edits like this:
Really, really important question: are you terribly attached to that [unusual in the English-speaking world] name for the torture victim? Only, I think my sister might get all paranoid and think I deliberately had the character named after her…
I’m glad to report that after Manna had stopped laughing hysterically, she was only too happy to change the name, so my sister will still talk to me come Christmas (maybe).
I also had some longer exchanges recently with a writer who was preparing to give a work shop on small presses, and who asked me to give him some feedback on the pros and cons of running one. I almost replied, “Dear Santa, for Christmas, I would like everyone who queries us to have read at least one of our books.” Manic D Press actually has it as part of their submission guidelines for reasons similar to mine, and as with them it isn’t necessarily a question of sales (though we’d be turning a profit this year if it happened). Rather, it’s a question of getting submissions that are appropriate to our editorial vision and up to the writing standard we expect. (Conversely, as an author, I would never, ever want to sign a novel to a publisher whose work I hadn’t seen and studied in some detail to make sure they could turn out a professional-looking product.)
A little anecdote concerning the question of appropriateness: I’ll never forget that practically the first submission we got after Mouth of the Lion was published with the, I thought quite obviously, deeply ironic tag line “Family Values for the 21st Century,” was a submission for “a Republican chick lit novel that would also appeal to a Conservative male readership.” Now, anybody who’s read Mouth of the Lion could probably tell that this would not be a good fit, not in a million years… I grant you it’s hard to judge a publisher by just that one novel, but now that we’re up to five novels, with three more coming out next spring, it should be getting a lot easier to get a general idea of where we sit on every fence.