I only say that because I ' ve been working on a novel and I started off with a prologue . My mom ' s cousin before EBooks started to take over physical copies used to own a company that bound and mass produced books for publishers . He usually didn ' t have contact with the actual publishers it was usually a middle man , but from time to time he met some of the heads of the companies he published for . He got kind of close to someone who worked at a company called Allison or something like that with an A I ' m not sure . He told me he learned some secrets of the publishing companies years ago when he talked to that guy and said that most publishers hate prologues and I should reconsider writing it . He said his friend said they usually don ' t even read the novel at all if they see a prologue replacing the first chapter . It gets tossed out . They have too much to read to go through everything that gets submitted to them .