One fascinating match-making experiment, and one that can be conducted anywhere with a decent number of people (new enrollees in an MFA program?! or at a particularly bloodless faculty meeting?!), is to affix to everyone’s forehead a playing card that is visible to everyone except the person wearing it. From there tell everybody to try to match up with somebody who has the highest card value. Most everyone will aim high, only to get rejected if their own card is poor. Thus, ultimately, people tend to end up with someone who has roughly the same card value as what they have. The metaphor between this and finding a mate could not be more apparent.
Also apparent is how this relates to finding a publisher. Are you the son of a Pulitzer Prize winner? Then perhaps the card on your forehead is pretty high. Did you go to graduate school in New York, or in a certain strange place in the middle of the Iowan cornfield? Then perhaps the card on your forehead is pretty high. But did you grow up in a nondescript area, with non-academic parents, and without much money? The card on your forehead is not a good one, and it will take many gifts, labor, and luck to find a high-class mate.
And patience. But don’t even say “talent” to me, especially given the role of luck in all this, from an amazing poem slipping through the cracks of the slush pile at a small journal, to just happening to be the book manuscript a prize judge read when in a good mood versus an exhausted one.
If you don’t take much stock in the idea of the fickleness of mood having an impact on decision-making, check this horror out: magistrates/judges grant parole at higher rates right after they have eaten, ostensibly because they’re in a good mood, while when they haven’t eaten in a long time, they are much more likely to use the rejection stamp. It’s much better to cross the desk at 1:30 than 11:30. This has been proven, and it shows that even a monumental decision like whether one is granted parole doesn’t necessarily have as much to do with whether parole is deserved, as it does with whether the person in charge of that choice just ate or not. Accordingly, editors are prone to the same whimsical decision-making.
Additionally, from the publisher’s perspective, there are always those nagging financial pressures. For an example at the high-end of publishing, a publicly-traded company can be sued for breach of fiduciary responsibility if they knowingly engage in action that reduces profits. Back in 1919 Henry Ford was sued by his stockholders for raising the minimum wage of his workers because it cut into profits. Laws like this make perfect sense in a Randian world, but in the world we live in they often end up leading to dirty behavior, because you must maximize profits at all times, lest you potentially put yourself in line for the wrath of your stockholders.
If I were a crusty shareholder for a big publishing house, I would take a hard look at poetry: is this going to expand the business? Am I willing to lose money for “art”? Perhaps we should publish another one of those 4-minute abs books, the last one did quite well…
Fortunately for us, sometimes companies don’t quite know what’s best for them. Ray Kroc himself needed to be convinced of the validity of super sizing. The McDonald’s patriarch thought that if people wanted more they should just buy another order of fries or buy another soda. But his advisors had a greater understanding of human psychology, recognizing that people are conditioned against going back for seconds, and don’t want to order double because it makes them look like gluttons. The advisors also realized that people would “seek value” in a larger serving. Eventually Kroc was convinced of super sizing’s efficacy in the market, and, as they say, “the rest was history.”