Since I’m on the verge of hitting 100 reviews, likely keeping my 4.7 star average, and having sold WAY more copies than most newbie authors… I’d like to share the most brutal rejection letter I received when I was looking for publishers.
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Acquisition Reviewer Notes:
Zane Grey meets Sir Arthur Conan Doyle when prehistoric beasts, including myriad dinosaurs under the control of a race of huge, carnivorous bipedal apes, living in a parallel world, discover a portal into the human world where they proceed to wreak unspeakable and savage havoc in the Wyoming Territory of 1885, beginning with the spread of outlaw cum respected rancher, Jedediah Huckleberry, and gradually moving to a tense showdown in the little town of Granite Falls.
To be successful, any book, I think, must create a world in which the reader is able to suspend disbelief, if only within the pages of that book. Obviously, the farther the subject is from the known world, the more difficult it is to create that acceptance, and with a book that is this far from the “known,” the task is huge. It simply doesn’t work for me. While the characters are, to some degree, compelling (Jedediah Huckleberry makes a very good anti-hero), the author just tries to do too much, and it’s just too hard for the reader to buy in. The ending, which leaves so many loose ends tangling, makes one think that the author finally grew just as weary of the whole thing as his reader does.
It would appear that the author here is striving to occupy a niche, and in that, he is surely successful. The problem is that he is alone in that niche. I simply can not imagine a reader group who would join him there.
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Hey there, Publisher… How you like my reader group now? 
Gunpowder and Ink! 