Manuscript reviewing

Just had a difficult, if happily brief, conversation with an author about her YA manuscript. Not that it was so bad - it wasn't. It just didn't stand out. The writing was good, the voice was realistic, the dialogue was fun, but the plot was the same old thing the market has seen several hundred times. There just wasn't anything different or unique about it.

As an agent, it is so very very much easier to send out a form rejection than to sit in front of an author for 30 minutes and tell them you're just not interested in reading their novel.