SEEN ON THE INTERNET: Someone plagiarized Jane Austen and then submitted the work to eighteen major publishers. This would be pretty stupid in its own right, but the bloke receives something of a reprieve because it was, in fact, a stunt. He typed out the manuscripts, using a pseudonym that cleverly alluded to Jane Austen’s early pen-name, and submitted them to see what kind of reaction he would get.
So why does this guy deserve a prominent spot on The List of Idiocy?
Because he actually thought that this would be some sort of meaningful demonstration of the difficulty of getting a novel published.
Wait. It gets better: He actually uses the boilerplate rejection letters he receives as “evidence” that the publishing industry wouldn’t publish a piece of classic literature if it arrived at their doorstep.
Think about it for a second: If you’re reading a manuscript (one of many dozens that you receive every day) and you quickly realize that what you’re reading is, in fact, the plagiarized opening chapter of a Jane Austen novel, would you bother writing out a lengthy response explaining that you would publish this novel if it were not, in fact, plagiarized? Probably not. You’re just going to grab your standard rejection letter, stuff it in this moronic plagiarist’s SASE, and stick it in your Outbox.
Or you’ll simply dump the whole package into your trash bin, which is what many of the publishers apparently did. (And, hilariously, this too is used as “evidence” that Jane Austen couldn’t get published today.)
The only thing this “experiment” manages to “prove” is that someone blatantly plagiarizing Jane Austen can’t get published today.
Now, if you want to talk about the possibility that short-sighted publishers are rejecting manuscripts which later go on to be huge successes with massive readerships… well, you don’t have to look too far. A sequel to The Hobbit was requested by the publisher, who then rejected The Lord of the Rings twelve years later (before a fortunate chain of events led to the book being published). Madeleine L’Engle’s Wrinkle in Time was rejected 26 times before it was published. More recently, J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was rejected by at least a dozen publishers before being purchased by Bloomsbury.
Is it possible that there are authors just as talented as Jane Austen who have never been published and whose work has been lost to the misty tides of history? Almost certainly. Has this somehow become more prevalent in recent years? Almost certainly not.
For example, let’s take Jane Austen herself: She originally sold Susan (the novel which would later become Northanger Abbey) to an extremely minor publisher in 1803, four years after it had been completed. This minor publisher never actually got around to publishing the book, however, and it was not until 1811 that Jane Austen’s first novel, Sense and Sensibility, was published… at her own expense.
That’s right, Jane Austen herself was originally published by the 19th century equivalent of a vanity press.
So even if we were to accept this idiot’s premise that submitting blatant plagiaries of Jane Austen’s work demonstrates anything at all about the likelihood of escaping the slush pile, the only thing he’s demonstrated is that absolutely nothing has changed in two hundred years. (At least, when it comes to editors being gifted with some unique insight into what will or won’t be embraced by the public.)
