Word count 352

The story of an author I’ll call D and a publisher I’ll call O.

D notes publisher O does audio.  That would be something new for him so he submits “Dark And Stormy” and follows O on Twitter.

As is his habit, he retweets O and adds a self-promotion.

O DMs D and calls his practice disrespectful in a less than tactful manner.  No other publisher that D retweets has complained, but D agrees.

D can’t think of a reason to retweet O – there hasn’t been anything valuable there, so responds OK no retweets.

O wants to be retweeted in a way that they approve.  D doesn’t agree and his irritation with O grows.

Now O asks for submissions from D.  Again, D is more irritated because O has done nothing for him, doesn’t follow him, wants only retweets that they like, and yet is still asking for favors.  Oh yes, as already noted, he has submitted to them.

At this point, D is willing to go along if O responds with something like “Sorry our oversight.  Thanks for submitting.”  Big nope.  O seems to want sympathy for their backlog.  Sympathy left town and antipathy moved in.

If it isn’t obvious by now O really doesn’t understand diplomacy.  They are asking for his support while giving him reason to avoid them.  There are probably twenty publishers he has reason to support and hundreds on which he has no opinion.

D examines publisher that he likes.

He enjoys reading them.

Don’t object to self-promotion.

Publish him and generally respond quickly.

Friendly.

Features like artwork and blog likes.

Nothing on O like that.

Duotrope confirms that O not only is slow to respond but has a 0% acceptance rate.  D suspects O asks him to submit so they can beef up their rejections.  At this point he sees no chance of any of his submissions being accepted.

O becomes D’s 4^th on his ignore list.  He withdraws his submission which O didn’t even know and unfollows D on twitter in recognition of the way O operates.

The submission which was withdrawn is accepted elsewhere. This submission written to be rejected got a boiler plate rejection sometime later.