An abundance of exceptional writing remains unpublished and will remain undiscovered like treasures at the bottom of a vast, beautiful ocean. 

Why?

For one thing, the ground has shifted fundamentally since the breakout era of the great commercial storytellers—the Ludlums, the Kings, the Grishams. Major publishing houses are no longer the patient patrons of craft; agents are no longer talent scouts and mentors. They act more like risk-averse investment firms and risk-mitigating portfolio managers. 

And not without reason. They are in business. A business in which there simply is not the space to let a debut manuscript breathe or build a steady readership over time. They have to yield immediate, predictable returns—or be abandoned. In a fiercely competitive world, low-performing books are a liability that a business simply can’t afford to carry. And the same goes for books that start slowly, even if they perform well later. More and more, business favours next quarter’s results over returns two or three years later.

The reason, I believe, is a profound shift in the landscape, and cultural much more than institutional. Reading has become content consumption. The world has become defined by fragmented cognitive focus and relentless digital noise, and, increasingly, books are treated as fast-moving commodities packaged into binge-reading micro-genres. This rewards high-speed output and predictable tropes, rather than dense, stylistic prose and a substantial investment of time and emotion. 

Add to that the ocean of automated noise. Literary agencies and editorial houses are overwhelmed by submissions across the whole spectrum—from low-effort, AI-generated submissions to decent and mediocre writing, to exceptional work. Slush piles mushroom, signal-to-noise ratios plunge. Excellent, painstaking work gets lost in the wash. It is simply not viable to resource enough capacity to filter the surge.

When supply so radically outstrips the capacity to evaluate it, the nature of judgment changes. In the contemporary marketplace, rejection ceases to be a metric of talent or quality; it becomes a metric of mathematical necessity, timing, and personal taste. Arbitrary measures are needed to make the volume manageable. Inevitably, commercial certainty will outweigh what only shows great potential.  The bird in the hand survives the cull while no one ever discovers what the two in the bush may have become.

But let’s face it: even so, the reasons for rejection go far beyond “capacity management” alone. An excellent manuscript may be commercially awkward. The opening did not capture the reader. A submission was opened at the wrong time. The query letter sucked. Or the writing was, very simply, not of the required quality. 

So it becomes near-impossible to know what a rejection tells us. Was it simply a function of extreme oversupply? Would the book be more difficult to position than other good stories? Was the writing poor, the premise unfashionable, or some unknowable combination of things?

For authors who sit alone in the quiet hours, craft with care and refuse the “assembly line”, this feels like a silent verdict. Every rejection makes it harder to believe that the silence of the marketplace is not necessarily proof of your failure. The problem is, you just don’t know. Or perhaps you just can’t know.

Where does that leave the majority of hopeful, aspiring writers? Unpublished, not wronged, though equally painful.

How to deal with it? The options are few, but simple: toughen up, take it and keep writing, write for the love of it, or just give it up. 

Me? I’ll just keep writing.