• First readers filter out manuscripts that don’t meet quality standards.
• Our proprietary software filters out manuscripts that are inappropriate to the house. For example, it won’t allow coffee table books to be submitted to a house that publishes only novels.
• Editors create profiles for themselves and set their preferences about what they want to see. Each preference set results in an additional filter. For example, an editor could indicate she’s looking for mysteries—and she’d get lots of submissions. Or she could indicate she’s looking for “mysteries” that are also “young adult” and she’d get far fewer submissions. Editors can change their preferences any time, and the system immediately responds, allowing through manuscripts that meet the new criteria. 

Wait. It gets even better. As part of his profile, an editor can also indicate how often he wants to be informed that there are new manuscripts in the system matching his preferences.  If he chooses weekly, then once a week our system will generate an e-mail to him with a list of the manuscripts that fit his preferences and a link to each one. He clicks on the link, which takes him to the manuscript query package, where he can read as little (cover letter) or as much (e.g., synopsis or first three chapters) as he wants. In this way, Creative Byline makes reviewing query packages a part of an editor’s workflow.

Why do you care if Creative Byline is great for editors? Because if it’s not great, they won’t use it. And if they won’t use it, you’re stuck with the old way, submitting your story to an editor that you heard might be interested in what you have (although that could change by the time he gets around to reading your manuscript), and waiting six to twelve months for a form rejection. Is that what you really want?

We didn’t think so.