How Not to Get a Classic Published

It's the silly season, as they say in the UK, and that very silly plan, "let's type up some old novel and submit it to a bunch of publishers," has come around again. (I guess journalists get as bored in the summer as anyone else.) As always, the exercise results in a pile of rejection slips, and the papers scream "Gotcha."

This is very, very stupid, as anyone who knows anything about publishing can attest. The Penguin Blog does the best job of demolishing the story this time, and Grumpy Old Bookman took it on the last time around.

A book by Jane Austen has a certain value. A book supposedly written in the modern day -- by someone who is not Jane Austen -- that feels like an Austen pastiche, has a very much lesser value.

The lesson here is the exact opposite of what the gotcha types think it is: publishers are not dumb. They have a good sense of what is a plausible seller and what isn't. If that fails to coincide with some outside person's sense of what is "good," then that's not actually the publisher's problem.