Would You Like A Side of Rejection With That?

Dear Dr. Me:
Thank you for your proposal for the manuscript "A Poetics of Being Two." This book sounds interesting, but I'm afraid we can't take it on here. It is very difficult these days to sell enough copies of a study such as yours to earn back the cost of publication. Library budgets have plummeted, and reliance on inter-library loan has dramatically increased, so that we now have to rely largely on sales of books to individuals, and I couldn't project enough in this case to make the numbers works.

Other publishers may feel differently, of course, about the book's sales potential. Thank you for thinking of Fancy Pants Uni Publisher, and I wish you the best in placing this book with another publisher.

Sincerely,
XXXX
Associate Director
Fancy Pants Uni Publisher

Thank you! Thank you! This is useful information in terms of shaping the project. There are several problems here I have to consider and work with.

• One, the library budget and inter-library loan thing is an escalating feedback loop. I Know All about it, since doing research at SIUE is nearly impossible. They hold about ten books published after 1964.
• Two, my book is The Kind of Book wide-angle literary critics write. They excavate trends in the history of literature, and offer fruitful methods of reading and connecting said lit to the history and future. And it's feminist, and interdsiciplinary, and comparative, and culturally inclusive. Not to sell, but because that's what the project called for. --- Then there's the other kind of lit crit book: Flower Motifs in Poetry by Angels. Fine, if what you want to know is about flower motifs.
• Three, since my buying audience is now individuals (??), and not say university classes, libraries, so forth, reshaping this project is now a whole new, and rather long term, project.
• Four, the book may be looking too hard to get at a kind of criticism for the post-post-modern era. Maybe they're not ready to move out yet. (I'm not bragging. I'm just really trying to burn enough rocket fuel to get out of the Simulacrum gravity well.)
  
• Said press publishes lots of work on Irigaray, but mostly in Philos or Theory, not in Lit Crit. Perhaps some flexibility would be good. Irigaray's thought is not only a philosophical/political conundrum. It has implications in and for nearly Everything.
• Whining: It's really hard to finish a book when people keep telling you no thanks. Really. Really.
  

At least there's some kind of useful information here. What this all bodes for the future of literary studies, I dare not consider just now. But none of this is good for the future of Really Good Ideas.