101 Reasons to Stop Writing

London — At a press conference earlier today, a committee comprised of representatives from many of the world’s leading publishing companies announced that starting this year, no participating publisher would accept submissions of unsolicited manuscripts or queries during the month of May. The so-called ‘Slushpile Moratorium’, planned to run in conjunction with International Slushpile Awareness Month, is designed to reduce the strain on editorial departments, who have reported steadily increasing numbers of unsolicited submissions over the last five years.

An artist’s impression of the slushpile at a mid-sized independent publisher, for the months of April to June.

"No more submissions, the slushpile is closed," said Jane Friedman, President and CEO of HarperCollins. "You have no idea how long I’ve waited to say that."

Under the moratorium, editorial departments are given discretion to shred or delete any submissions they receive between the first and last days of May, with exceptions granted for submissions postmarked during April, and staff are encouraged to use the time saved during the month to process any backlog of submissions from previous months. At the end of the month, to mark International Slushpile Bonfire Day, editorial departments are invited to incinerate any remaining backlog at designated bonfire sites in major cities, or to stage bonfires of their own.

"It’s been a long time coming, but we’ve finally got industry-wide agreement on how to deal with one of the most pervasive problems threatening our business," said Friedman. "Everyone who’s ever worked in publishing has dreamed of finding that gem in the slushpile, the next Confederacy of Dunces or Skinny Bitch Diet. But now, with every subliterate numbskull with a blog thinking he can be the next Doris Lessing, the gems are rare and getting rarer. Even the interns give up on the slush after a month or two of opening four-pound packages containing six hundred pages of eighth-grade drivel. Many big firms and imprints stopped accepting unagented submissions years ago, but do you think that stops Joe Writer-Guy in Poughkeepsie from sending out a thousand copies of the same submission to every editor he can find, even if they’re in the same building? We’re already renting containers on the docks to store all the ‘memoirs’ we get, and every once in a while one of those containers accidentally finds itself on a ship bound for a sneaker factory in China, but it just isn’t making a dent. So this May, and every May, we’re not even going to check the post office box, and anything that turns up at the office in a yellow envelope is going straight on the fire."

Patricia Schroeder, CEO of the Association of American Publishers, said most AAP members were honoring the moratorium. "Our members are reporting that they receive as many as 50,000 submissions a year, and that’s just the stuff that arrives through the postal system — it doesn’t include the manuscripts that mysteriously find their way into editors’ handbags, gym lockers and bedrooms. In our last survey, 15% of editors reported receiving submissions that took the term ’slush’ literally. The AAP is very supportive of initiatives that streamline the publishing process, and anything that reduces the burden of having to write the sentence "Not right for us" over and over is going to give editors time to concentrate on more important tasks, like editing the works of established writers. And fact-checking."

Many independent publishers stated they intend to honor the moratorium. "The slushpile is a growing problem for every publisher, big or small, mainstream or niche," said John Stamos, former Full House actor and now acquisitions editor for Jane’s Information Group, publisher of Jane’s Infantry Weapons. "Granted, every publishing company has its own submission guidelines, and they’re not always obvious, but really, why would anyone think that a firm specialising in defence and intelligence reference material is going to want to publish a passionate story of lesbian awakening in the Alaskan wilderness? It’s a full-time job just carting this stuff out to the dumpster. I can’t imagine what it’s like for the suckers at other companies that have to open and read it."

The Association of Unpublished Writers (AUW) was approached for comment, but had not responded by press time.

Sidebar: What Is The ‘Slushpile’?

The ’slushpile’ is industry vernacular for the accumulation of manuscripts and query letters sent unsolicited to the editorial departments of publishing companies by prospective authors. According to industry guidelines, each submission should be evaluated by editorial staff to determine its ‘publishableness’, a report compiled detailing the submission’s ‘bestsellerosity’, and copies of each submission and editorial report delivered to the company CEO and an editorial board consisting of at least four vice-presidents and six career authors, where each submission is read aloud and discussed. Submissions that pass this stage are sent for focus group testing and market analysis prior to making an offer to the submission’s author, while unsuccessful submissions are returned to the author, along with the publishability report and a thorough review by a New York Times staff writer.

In practice, however, standards and processes for dealing with the ’slushpile’ vary, from only opening every fifth submission, to building towers and only evaluating the packages that don’t topple over, to simply writing ‘Addressee Unknown’. Simon & Schuster only recently abandoned the policy of forcing debut authors to evaluate one submission for every dollar of their advance.

– Stephen Jayson Harris reports on the publishing industry for the Association of Unpublished Writers newsletter. From 1995 to 1998 he was the Fiction Editor for The New Republic magazine.