On slow submissions

This stock rejection form from the Essanay Film Management Company of Chicago back in the day has been making the rounds in the literary blogosphere for a few years, popping up on blogs like Literary Rejections on Display. We laughed out loud when we first saw it; it's a gas! Then we 'shopped it up nice and sharp and framed it for our press office wall.

Authors have a lot of time on their hands around the holidays, when the business of their workaday jobs slows down, and many shops turn out their employees for seasonal time off. This means that the pace of correspondence in a literary press picks up, since authors have the time to follow-up on submissions, and check in on projects that have been hanging fire, and buzz the tower about forgotten commitments.