Today, I’m going to share another installment of our popular column, World’s Worst Book Proposals. Yes, we can learn from others’ mistakes! Featured below are real quotes from book proposals submitted to me over the past few months.

Chapter 1, Sentence 1:

The title for the pages presently held in your had, stem from one single question…

Chapter 1, Sentence 2:

We are all in relationship.

Not the way to attract a publisher…

I have a book of poems I want to print, if it gets sales or not is not my main priority

After gently telling an author his book contained too many errors, and that I’d be happy to take a look if he has it professionally edited in the future, he responded with this:

TOO MANY ERRORS IN WHICH WAY? SPELLING, ENGLISH WHAT? UNFORTUNATLY I WOULDN’T WANT YOU TO TAKE AN OTHER LOOK. IT SEEMS THAT YOU LACK COMPETENCE IN THE SUBJEC AND I USUALLY DO NOT DEAL WITH IGNORANCE.

After gently pointing out a misspelled word and a missing word in just the first few pages of a real estate agent’s novel, and telling him I’d be happy to take another look if he has it professionally edited in the future (meaning we refused to take any money from him), he responded with this:

You are full of bullshit.

Um, what???

I recently completed a novella of 160 pages written as a dairy by a radical Islamic while scouting potential targets in the US. The dairy covers 3 weeks with each day in I printed 100 copies and have had no success in selling them

An editor is a writer’s best friend…

It is written boldly in-your-face honest

Punctuation challenged…

I have a vampire one will you like to look at this manuscript

Um, what again?

Schools in the mountain past the school were no one has dared travel before.

This one left me speechless:

fins a way out of his compound and becomes a mesenger boy for all the other animals in the zoo. Later he ventures outside the zooon further adventures. this is anew area to me and in life I have found if it’s new be part of it and sucess will usually follow. as requied for sucess I am at this time retired so my time is my own.

Chapter 1, Paragraph 1, Line 1:

Vicious, lightening lit up the afternoon sky

Chapter 1, Paragraph 1, Line 2:

Everyone has there idea of what success is.

From a period-challenged author:

Readers aren’t going to notice that I’ve used commas instead of periods. I just want my book on the market NOW.

A writer claimed she was too shy to submit her work in book form, believing she didn’t have any talent. She asked if I’d take a look at something she’d written. I did and it was, admittedly, pretty bad. I sent her a note saying we would not be interested in publishing her manuscript. She wrote back, saying:

Go _ _ _ _ yourself.

For more, see the previous installment of World’s Worst Book Proposals HERE.