A List of Rejections and Failures

My fingers are crossed but I'm not holding my breath. Not yet.

A couple of weeks ago, I began submitting unsolicited copies of my manuscript for Dark Water. I chose Canadian publishing houses that focus on Canadian content from Canadian authors, with most of them specializing in crime fiction.

Almost immediately after submitting one manuscript, the publisher wrote me back to simply say that they only accept submissions at the beginning of the year, and if Dark Water hadn't found a home by then to resubmit it.

Fair enough.

Almost every other publishing company to which I have submitted the manuscript had an automatic reply letter that acknowledged the receipt of my book but gave me a heads up that I shouldn't expect a direct response for anywhere from four to six months.

Again, fair enough. These publishers probably receive lots of submissions and it takes time to read and assess a manuscript. I get that. I want them to take their time.

Only one publishing company didn't respond back to me. It's also the only publishing company that didn't offer online submissions. Instead, it provided an online form from which I could contact them, and I used it to enquire about the process for submitting a manuscript.

I copied and pasted a prepared query letter into the space provided, and tweaked it to make it appeal specifically to this publisher. I said, at the end of the query, that if they were interested, to please let me know of the next steps.

It took a week to hear back. For me, that's still quick: actually, it was the second quickest, after the publisher who asked me to resubmit next year.

The e-mail came from the marketing director for the publishing company. In her letter, she said that my overview of Dark Water was "fascinating." And she invited me to submit the manuscript.

It's a writer's wish that people will read their work and enjoy it. I can't remember when I read my first review of Songsaengnim: A Korea Diary. But having a publishing company call your story "fascinating" and ask for the manuscript is another high that gave me all kinds of good feelings.

The marketing director also asked me for link to my social-media presence and to provide a bio. Apart from this blog, my Bluesky account, and my YouTube channel, I no longer have the footprint I had before the tangerine turd got into office—I closed my Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp accounts more than a year ago.

Ooh, I forgot to include my LinkedIn account in my response to the marketing director. Oh well.

But the biographical information was the challenge and was something that I should have anticipated because the other publishing companies, with their online submissions, asked me to list my writing accomplishments (I didn't have much to say apart from being a technical writer for 25 years, my newspaper experience that is decades old, Songsaengnim, and this blog).

I decided it was high time that I wrote a biography that I could give to anyone who asked. So I sat down and wrote one. Here it is:

Ross Brown was born in Montreal but has called Ottawa his home for more than 55 years. A graduate of the Print Journalism program at Algonquin College, he was a founding member of the college newspaper, The Algonquin Times, in 1986–87. He has also written for The Ottawa Citizen and The Low Down to Hull and Back News, in Wakefield, Quebec.

Writing fiction has always been his passion, with his first novel, JT, written in the mid 1980s. It was rejected by several publishing houses and never published, but a hand-written letter that accompanied one rejection letter urged Brown to continue writing, and he took that letter to heart.

Brown wrote a spy trilogy—The Spy’s The Limit, Spy Will Be Done, and Clear Spies Ahead—but never submitted them for publishing. These stories introduced Roland Axam, a character that Brown would use in several short stories afterward (also unpublished).

After teaching English language for two-years in Jeonju, South Korea, Brown wrote and published Songsaengnim: A Korea Diary (iUniverse, 2012). The novel re-introduced Axam, a Scottish-Canadian who leaves Canada for South Korea to escape his tragic past. The novel hints at his days working for CSIS.

A sequel, Gyeosunim, continued where Songsaengnim left off but added two timelines: one, 20 years after the main timeline (1998–99); and another, in 1988, when Axam remembers back to the time that was covered in The Spy’s The Limit.

For 25 years, Brown was a documentation specialist for Corel Corporation, iFathom, PCI Geomatics, and Motorola Solutions. He proved himself as a skilled technical writer but his first passion continued to be fiction and blog writing.

Since 2011, Brown has written and published posts for The Brown Knowser, an Ottawa blog that covers Ottawa, travel, photography, opinions, and more. In 2019, he started The Brown Knowser channel on YouTube, which chronicles kayaking, travel, and cycling adventures, and more. As he puts it, the YouTube channel is a visual extension of his blog.

In 2025, Brown started work on his Calloway and Hayes Mystery series, when he completed the Ottawa-based crime story, Dark Water. He has begun work on the next mystery, The Watcher, whilst he awaits a publisher.

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After reading what I wrote, it read more like a list of rejections and failures to me than it did a list of accomplishments. Regardless, I converted it to a PDF and attached it to the e-mail with the manuscript and synopsis.

Wish me luck as I wait to hear back.

Because I listed this blog in my bio, I wonder if the marketing director, editor, or publisher will read The Brown Knowser and whether they'll stumble upon this post. If so, I hope they enjoy Dark Water and I want them to know that they are one of my top choices for publishing companies. They are a regional publisher and that's what I'm all about.

Stay tuned.