Someone recently asked us who our first readers are. Eighty percent of first readers have some type of advance writing or literature degree. They work at the direction of Creative Byline’s editorial director using specific criteria, which we’ll talk more about in a later post. We’ll supplement those readers with readers who have specialties. Most large publishing houses have also used first readers in order to lighten the editors’ loads and get through the backlog of slush. Like those first readers, our first readers do not judge whether or not a manuscript is good enough to be published—only whether it meets certain quality standards.
If a first reader rejects a manuscript, the writer will be given a basic explanation of why. This is more than most writers get under the current submission process, since there are not enough hours in the day for editors to respond to every one of the manuscripts they receive every year. Second, the writer may re-submit that manuscript once to Creative Byline at no additional cost, and we’ll route it to a different first reader. We recommend that the writer use the first-reader feedback to revise the piece before resubmitting, but that’s totally up to the writer.
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