Some years ago my Philadelphia-based agent received the following letter of decline from Michael Pietsch, a New York–based editor:

Dear Mary Jo,
I was very impressed by the subtlety and loveliness of Vincent Czyz’s writing, and by his ability to bring a large cast and several distinct settings to life. But for all the author’s skill, Sun Eye Moon Eye strikes me as a very difficult novel to sell. The story unfolds at a very stately pace, and Logan is a tough nut to crack. It will get good reviews, but I can’t foresee selling many copies. So I won’t be offering for Little, Brown.

Mary Jo and I were encouraged, in fact, celebratory. If we’d come so close with Little, Brown, we reasoned, it was a matter of months, maybe a year, before we found the right editor for the novel.

Mary Jo, however, was overly optimistic, and I was hopelessly naïve. After more declines that praised various aspects of the book but raised similar sales concerns, I overhauled the manuscript, cutting some 300 pages and restructuring the rest (it was originally over 800 pages.)

That ought to do it, we thought.

A short time later, a chapter from Sun Eye Moon Eye attracted a fellowship from the NJ Arts Council—but still no publishing contract.

Two years after that, Mary Jo quit the business in frustration and disgust.

Unagented, I tried the indie presses. One of them, Persea, sent a scribbled-on form rejection: “I regret that we cannot take this on. Gorgeous prose; you are a real spell-caster.”

The novel, it seemed, wasn’t commercial enough for the larger houses, while smaller presses balked at its size (550 pages), or it just didn’t suit their tastes. An editor at Dalkey Archive recommended it for publication but was overruled by the editorial board. In retrospect, I can see it really wasn’t their kind of work. I moved my ever-fattening folder of declines to a filing cabinet.

I was discouraged, of course, but one of Rilke’s letters to a young poet had persuaded me that I needed to be patient: “There is here no measuring with time, no year matters, and ten years are nothing.” https://www.quotes.net/quote/53285#google_vignette

The opening chapter of Sun Eye Moon Eye eventually landed me the Truman Capote Fellowship at Rutgers University. Excerpts were published in a total of seven journals. One was a finalist in the Jerry Jazz Fiction Contest. Another was anthologized. Days, months, and years continued to click over, though, and I began to doubt Rilke’s advice—or at least to suspect it didn’t apply to me. Waking at 3 or 4 in the morning in mild panics, I was certain that the manuscript would never see print.

My only recourse, I decided, was to make Sun Eye Moon Eye a better book. The only way I could think of to do that involved yet another round of revisions with, as ever, an eye to cutting the page count and polishing the remaining sentences. I trimmed it down to 528 pages.

When the offer from Spuyten Duyvil finally came, it sat in my spam folder for 17 days (I spotted it purely by accident). Certain it was a rejection, I reread the email several times, but no matter how I tried, I couldn’t turn “I can send a contract over to you and get the ball rolling” into a decline.

Chronologically speaking, Sun Eye Moon Eye was my first book. In order of publication, it became my fifth.

While the novel was in production, I picked up Dan Sinykin’s Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature. There, on page 15, I came across an old acquaintance: Michael Pietsch. Pietsch, according to Sinykin, “had little interest in midlist.” As Pietsch himself explains, “It’s hard to make money on books that sell only 10,000 copies. We’re looking for writers who can break through to a larger audience.”

I finally understood that it wasn’t about cutting or revising or writing a better novel; it was about writing a different novel, one with more market appeal.

Fair enough. I just wish I had known, as a 28-year-old tapping away on a Smith-Corona typewriter, what I now know as a 61-year-old long-acclimated to a Hewlett-Packard laptop.

BIO: Vincent Czyz (Vincent Czyz – Wikipedia ) is the author of a short story collection, which won the Eric Hoffer Award for Best in Small Press, two novels, a novella, an essay collection, and a collection of short fiction due out in 2025. He is the recipient of two fiction fellowships from the NJ Council on the Arts, the William Faulkner-William Wisdom Prize for Short Fiction, and the Capote Fellowship at Rutgers University. His stories and essays have appeared in New England Review, Boston Review, Shenandoah, AGNI, The Massachusetts Review, Tin House, Copper Nickel, and Southern Indiana Review, among other publications.