3. Prisoner Novels
A lot of prisoners use their time wisely and write a book while they’re in jail. Whether that book is good or not is questionable, but a lot of them end up in slush piles, waiting to be read by an editorial intern. Many prisoner novels are either hand-written or typewritten. Many of them are very unsubtle religious manifestos. Many are very unsubtle erotica. Many of them are over 500 pages long. Whenever I sent a standard rejection letter, they often came back, unopened with a note saying that the inmate was no longer at that prison. That was how long the submissions process usually took.
2. Stay-at-Home Mom Advice
We got daily submissions from stay-at-home mothers with ideas for a book of “home-cooked,” “hard-learned” “life lessons.” Some of these were memoirs, detailing how they kicked drugs and their deadbeat husbands to successfully raise a kid. Other were straight-up advice books with vague paragraphs that were clearly plagiarized from Deepak Chopra and Suze Orman. They were big fans of the New Age and clip art. They also spent a lot of time on their presentation, making sure their packets were written in an array of fonts and colors.
1. The Saddest Letters You Will Ever Read
Because the process was so slow, we got a lot of letters asking what was taking so long. Sometimes they’d find our phone number, and I’d instantly recognize the reason for calling by their abrupt, no-nonsense tone. Sometimes they’d be really sad, and as a fellow writer, I’d get sad, too. Many of them didn’t have agents, which is the only chance of getting published at a giant behemoth of a publisher. But a lot of these writers didn’t know this. The saddest series of (hand-written) letters I got was from an old man, who had submitted his novel years and years ago and was still awaiting a reply. His novel had probably been lost, either in the mail or in the slush pile, but no one had the heart to tell him. I just collected his letters in a pile and passed them on to the next intern.
