America's most beloved publishers, God love the bean counters and droids who work there, have been known to do some of their best work creating form rejection slips to send back home to writers along with their manuscripts.

I've spent years hacking into publishers' form rejection slip databases to uncover the top ten form rejection slips you never want to see anywhere close to your work:

1. Thank you for sending us whatever you sent us. It doesn't meet our needs whatever they may be.
2. We ahtimatically sneds back manuscrips which have mispeled words an other grandmalitcal errs in it.
3. Inadvertently, we read your manuscript in the can and found an appropriate use for it. Thanks.
4. Roadkill, we think, will appeal to more readers than your story.
5. If we were the last publisher on the face of the earth and you were the last writer, nothing would happen, don't even think about it.
6. Frankly, we don't care who you are, we're don't publish romance novels about lemmings since there's no happy ending in them.
7. The last time we published stuff like yours, we got in trouble with the mob and/or the Homeland Security Department.
8. Your stuff will choke a goat. We know and we will miss Little Bertie, may she rest in peace.
9. When the brains were handed out, we didn't get enough to figure out just what the hell you're saying or if you're saying anything, but we appreciate the fact you hoped we'd measure up to the challenge of Chick Lit in latin.
10. We were so discouraged when we saw your manuscript, we flat closed down the company because none of us want to work at a place where we might inadvertently see another unsolicited manuscript like yours.

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Copyright (c) 2008 by Malcolm R. Campbell