If you are reading a book and you don’t like it, put it down. Give it away. But there is no law that says you have to keep reading, so don’t.
There was a very successful book that won all kinds of awards and sat on bestseller lists for months. Everyone urged me to read it. I felt trepidation, because it was about something that bothered me. But everyone said no, no, it’s not like that. It’s very uplifting. You’ll love it.
So I read it. It was well written, but I didn’t love it. And I did not find it uplifting. The thing that bothered me was not okay. It bothered me.
Now imagine that you are an editor. You have 40 manuscripts waiting to be read. You are very busy and have no time to waste. You start reading. And it’s not bad, but you don’t love it. A few pages later, you start to realize that you’re forcing yourself to read it. At that moment, you stop. You might be on page 10 or you might be on page 100, but if you know you’re not going to love it, there is no point in continuing.
If you think that editors read the entire manuscript, you are wrong. They rarely read more than 100 pages. Don’t think you don’t know what it’s like to be them. You do know. Because the last time you put a book down because you weren’t loving it, you were in their position. There is a lot more to being an editor than just that, but that’s where it starts. The proof is in the reading.
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