International Slushpile Awareness Month is your opportunity to take a moment and think about the slushpile, and what you are doing about it.
The “slushpile” is a necessary evil in the publishing industry. Depending on your role, it may be more necessary than evil. To misquote Winston Churchill, “it may be the worst form of [submission process], except all those others that have been tried from time to time.”
Agents, editors and other slush readers regularly claim that the thrill of finding that one quality submission makes up for the slog through thousands of sub-literate cookie-cutter knockoffs, in the same way that telemarketers claim that the one person who says “why yes, I am interested in changing my long-distance carrier” makes up for the thousands of hangups, death threats and “why don’t you get a real job, you cold-calling motherfscker”. But you know if it really was that exciting, they’d read through it faster.
Writers, of course, hate the slushpile, but at the same time they hope to float to the top of it. They want the slushpile to work (for them), mostly because they’re too lazy to self-publish, and they just want to win the Next Big Thing lottery. But they hate the whole submission process, because it forces them to accept that people cannot see between the words on the page to what they “really meant”.
The problem with the slushpile isn’t the capriciousness of editors, the sadism of agents or the philistinism of slush readers — it’s the incapacity of the bottom 99% to realise that they are nowhere near the top 0.1%.
I’m calling for a Slushpile Armistice, an end to the partisan bitterness which prevents people on both sides from properly accepting blame for their part in the slow downfall of publishing.
Here’s what you can do.
Writers
- Remember, and repeat as necessary: The slushpile is not the enemy. You are. What’s keeping you in the slushpile is your inability to detect the flaws in your execution.
- Stop submitting. At least, give your work the redraft you know it needs.
- Go through the list of agents and editors you routinely submit to, and delete the ones that don’t take the genre you write.
- Read and follow the submission guidelines.
- Just stop submitting.
Agents/Editors/Slush Readers
- Before you open the next query or submission, take a moment to reflect that this represents the hopes and dreams of another human being. Perhaps this is their first submission, and there’s an actual piece of their soul embedded in the words. Perhaps they’ve been down this road enough times to have their own postal worker, and they’re only one “Not right for us” away from seeing if the nearest emergency room takes unsolicited submissions. Whoever they are, they’re somewhere on the continuum between youthful naïveté and paranoiac despair, and no matter how carefully you word your response, it’s going to push them a little further toward the latter.
Fsck ‘em. Your listing in Writer’s Market might say “accepts unsolicited submissions”, but that wasn’t meant as an invitation to shred a Harry Potter hardcover and randomly glue the pieces together. You shouldn’t have to waste time putting a form rejection into an SASE to let the same writer know for the fourth time that your company publishes peer-reviewed psychology articles and has no plans to expand into young adult SF erotica. You shouldn’t have to deal with the health implications of submissions written in human blood, not always belonging to the writer.
- Blog frequently about the downside of working the slushpile. Maybe some of them will take the fscking hint.
- Work with your peers to develop a form rejection letter completely bereft of emotion or subtext. I’m sure you know a few writers who could help.
- Insist on a signed disclaimer, available on your website, indicating the writer has read and adhered to the submission guidelines. Change the date on it every month.
- Stop publishing the mediocre junk that makes each new generation of bad writers think they have a shot
Our target this year: to reduce the average slushpile by 25%. Let’s put aside our differences and fight the good fight, people.
![[Logo]](/images/101ReasonsLogo.png "101 Reasons to Stop Writing")
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LOL!
Too funny. hehehe
Where’s my participation badge for my blog?
You slacker.
I’m in, where’s my badge?
How about for the editors/agents section:
“Quit making a big show of prancing about in public and giving the most untalented of the lot the impression that they stand a chance if they kiss your ass in public? You may like having a gaggle of sycophants jamming their tongues so far up your rectum that the two of you could be mistaken for a centaur, but that continues to feed the wannabe paranoia that ‘I don’t have the connections in the Industry, so I’m going to self-publish/start my own book line/start up my own magazine/offer ‘advice’ to other wannabes’. Precious few people decide to pick up a novel because of its editor, and giving the wannabes a face (usually one able to make a sundial run backwards) just means that they want to become editors and publishers, thereby increasing the slushpile. Or do you like the number of cowpats in your incoming mail from people whose sole published credits are connected to delusional twats with a stolen copy of Adobe FrameMaker and a complete inability to accept that they’ll never make the front cover of Publisher’s Weekly?”
Um, yeah, what Paul said.
I think there’s an unintended bias in my diatribes towards novel-length fiction, and the agent/editors who handle it.
On the other hand, small press publishers and magazines are doing their best to subtly discourage writers, through their flaky business practices, nepotistic editorial strategy and overall marketplace transience.
Stop publishing the mediocre junk that makes each new generation of bad writers think they have a shot.
Your whole post can be distilled into that one piece of advice. Miss Snark repeatedly says, “Good writing trumps all.”
Well then, let’s see good writing trump all. I certainly want to read it. I’ll even pay money for it.
Sean, the magazine and weekly newspaper industry, especially the small magazine market, is a daily affirmation of Riddell’s Law: “Any sufficiently developed incompetence is indistinguishable from incompetence.” Watch the science fiction magazine market long enough, and you start to expect that everybody in it based their business plans on too many repeat viewings of The Producers…if they weren’t all taking bets on each other on how much money they could lose in the quickest time possible.
Paul, I know you meant “Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from conspiracy.” It’s your Law, after all.
The Secret
If I Did It
The Road (omigod, let’s all walk down a road for a long time in a post-Apocalypse world - it’s bound to get a Pulitzer or something)
You’re right. Why should the rest of us bother. It appears that crap sells and even wins awards.
I love this blog. However, I will continue to produce my crap until my incompetence is indisputably the most obvious in the world, hahaha!
I loved that line in your previous post, something like, “If you must be an asshole, be funny.” You do this well, Heh.
Pause to consider that slush is sent by human beings, check.
Devise rejection letter devoid of emotion, subtext, and comment hooks, check.
Blog about slushpile, check.
Require signed disclaimer from author saying he or she has read submission guidelines: no. Too much trouble to administer. Can only lead to questions, obsessive author worries, getting cornered at conventions.
Stop publishing mediocre junk: check. Note: everyone thinks mediocre junk gets published. No two people agree about what is and isn’t mediocre junk. Note also: it’s functionally impossible to distinguish “mediocre junk” from “stuff for which I have no taste or sympathy.” Note the third: are you willing to have that happen even if it’s your book and there are people who want to buy and read it?
Fsck ‘em: no. We agree to let them send us their manuscripts to be considered for publication. Our duty is to say yes, or please send me the rest of this, or no (if they sent a letter-size SASE), and possibly return the manuscript (if they sent a large envelope and sufficient postage). That’s it, that’s all. If we had to think about the effects these responses have on the authors, we’d go nuts.
So, Teresa, the parts of my plan that are good are not original and the parts that are original are not good?
Re Submission Disclaimer: Writers who have difficulty with this are exactly the ones you want to avoid wasting time on. The 30 seconds you don’t have to spend reading their wordspew would really add up.
(Besides, the submission process is already about as transparent as it could be, without you collecting manuscripts in person, and the nutbags still complain.)
If you’re worried about convention stalkers, I suggest this self-defence strategy. Say “If you do not move away from me in three seconds, you will be on the permanent blacklist.” (They already think you have one.)
Re Mediocre Junk: This is actually a very easy step. Pick the worst novel you’ve ever represented/published. Nail it to the nearest wall, at eye level. Write next to it in permanent marker: “I will never stoop this low again”.
Re Fsck ‘em: I think saying “No” is fsck enough. I wasn’t suggesting you go out of your way to fsck ‘em. Who has that kind of time?
Note also: it’s functionally impossible to distinguish “mediocre junk” from “stuff for which I have no taste or sympathy.”
Nah, beg to differ. Unless you’re considering that stuff with TECHNICAL flaws is automatically below mediocre. (I dunno, do rampant misspellings and punctuation that’s MIA indicate a really, really bad editor-typesetter-proofreader team, or can those myriad of flaws generally be traced back to the author?) You see, I’ve read some works that had a good basis, but I do expect anything put out in bound form by a publishing house to have
Marveen, Teresa just likes using the word “functionally”.