101 Reasons to Stop Writing

New York — At the end of a week filled with news of layoffs at some of America’s biggest publishing houses, editors and literary agents are reporting a dramatic increase in the volume of unsolicited manuscripts and query submissions — many of which are considered “unpublishable, even unreadable”. Editors and agents interviewed for this story claim that their slushpiles have more than doubled since the 1st of December, a pattern that has been repeating and escalating for the last ten years, and no-one is sure what is causing the increase.

“Some [submissions] are only just over 50,000 words, and one was exactly 50,000. Another had ‘done for the day’ every 1,600-1,700 words.”

“I don’t know where all this is coming from,” said one editor who wished to remain anonymous and employed. “By Wednesday, my email Inbox looked like I’d somehow subscribed to a live submission feed from BookSurge or Lulu. By Friday, the mail was stacked up floor to ceiling in the hallway outside the company offices. With the financial crisis, we can’t even afford to feed our interns, so I’m stuck going through the slush. And all of it seems so … unpolished, like a first draft, like they’d just finished writing it the day before. Who’s writing all this stuff, and why are they sending it to me, and why now? Why does the end of November always mean a deluge of crap?”

An anonymous literary agent agreed: “Most of the submissions I’ve received this this week are too short to be contemporary novels. Some are only just over 50,000 words, and one I got via email was exactly 50,000, cutting off mid-sentence. Another one had ‘done for the day’ or something about going to bed every 1,600 to 1,700 words or so. It’s a lucky standout that even has an introductory paragraph before the opening. Tell you what, though: judging by the subject matter of these submissions, poor is the new cancer.”

Barry Lyndon, editor of poetry journal The Contented Dodo, reported that he received over a thousand submissions during the week. “We usually get seven or eight. Twelve is a busy week, and that includes responses to funding requests. I think we might have opened the floodgates by amending our submission criteria to include ‘prose poems’, but really, none of the submissions I glanced at even mentioned dodos, and each issue of TCD only runs about 5,000 words. Someone would’ve had to write the Divine Comedy of dodo poems for us to dedicate ten issues to it.”

One literary professional interviewed was upbeat about the situation: Edwin Drood, editor of online literary journal The Unconscious Novella, said: “This spike in submissions is wonderful. We have enough material to publish a randomly chosen novella every day for the next decade. We can’t pay contributors, of course, but you can tell these submissions weren’t written with real publication in mind.”

Stephen Jayson Harris covered the publishing industry for What Fish is That? magazine until he was laid off in September. He now works as a bouncer at a Starbucks establishment, and is writing a book about the upcoming death of publishing.