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It was one year ago, yesterday, that the (still) most famous of literary agent bloggers decided to hang up her stilettos and retire, ending a three-year run of advice, rebuke, clarification and consternation. (Granted, in the first year she only made a couple of posts, but the last two years were much more fruitful.)
At the time, I posted a farewell message, which had the distinction of being one of the last outgoing links on her blog, before the lights went out and the dynamically-generated archives were cached for the last time. The sentiments I expressed are still true.
Patricia Wood’s blog yesterday hosted a virtual get-together of old Snarklings, which was virtually attended by Miss Snark herself, in the comments.
While the “Snarkives” are still of immeasurable value, both to unpublished writers looking to understand the submission process, and to social researchers looking for a corpus of whiny protestations from hapless rubes convinced that the process will magically alter itself to accommodate them, Miss Snark’s voluminous advice can essentially be reduced to two simple principles:
It was the general inability of the unpublished writers of the world to understand and apply these principles that drove most of the content on Miss Snark’s blog, and ultimately led to its abrupt conclusion.
With the glorious advantage of hindsight, it’s clear that Miss Snark fell victim to what should be known as Blogger’s Ennui — the tipping point where the demands of maintaining a blog outweigh the pleasure of it. In Miss Snark’s case, though, she was essentially a victim of her audience, and the narrowness of her topic. There are only so many issues relating to queries and submissions that can be discussed in general terms, and as her audience grew, so did the number of nitwits (a proportional constant in any population) — who would ask either the same questions again, demonstrating their inability to grasp the simple concept of search, or ask essentially the same questions frustratingly modulated from the original by some absurdly trivial point of contention.
It takes a lot to crush the spirit of someone who purposefully armors themselves with sarcasm, but the hapless rubes managed it. I imagine that by the end, her gmail account must have become a slushpile in itself, yet another accumulation of inane and unremarkable queries to sift through looking for a question worth answering — for no pay, no commission, no hope of reward other than the dwindling, and eventually non-existent fun of it.
It’s fitting (though entirely coincidental) that the anniversary of her blog’s closure falls in International Slushpile Awareness Month. If the divine Miss S had managed to hang on until the comforting catharsis of International Slushpile Bonfire Day (May 31st), she might still be blogging.
The open-air slushpile at a major New Orleans-based publisher. (Photo: FEMA)
International Slushpile Awareness Month is an annual celebration of the unsung heroes of the publishing process: the Slush Readers, those hardy adventurers who pan for gold at the edges of the vast wasteland of sediment at the mouth of the River of Unreadable Shit.
Without them, modern publishing would be entirely (instead of mostly) written-to-formula potboilers from established hacks, cash-ins by Internet celebrities, political gasbag rhetoric assembled by interns, and stream-of-consciousness doorstops where the glue is still warm.
For writers, it’s also a chance to think about the Slushpile, and your place within it. Are you truly expecting that someone will jump at the chance to publish/represent you, or are you just hoping for validation and a free critique? Is your work really that one-in-a-thousand that deserves consideration, or are you merely hoping to skip the next nine-hundred-and-ninety-eight drafts?
For editors, agents and assorted slush readers: we feel your pain.
For those of you who missed last year’s event, here’s a roundup:
They screen out the unpublishable, the unpalatable, the unreadable short stories and novels, in search of that one manuscript in a thousand that is original, well written, proofread, spellchecked and printed in 12 pt Courier, and which might be good enough for agents and publishers to invest time and money to release to a public who might be willing to pay to read it.
#10. You addressed your submission to "The Slushpile".
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.
A sizeable proportion of every slushpile is comprised of randomly, punctuate’d, fonetikly riten first drafts so bad, so head-shakingly wrong that they would make proofreaders weep and copyeditors resign, if they didn’t initially make slush readers shudder with fear as they drop the submission into the Burn This pile.
We also ran a couple of polls. You can view the original results, and vote (again):
We’ve published several Slushpile-themed Demotivators here at Reasons Central:
Click on the images to see a larger version, download wallpaper, or add a comment.
International Slushpile Awareness Month culminates on May 31 with International Slushpile Bonfire Day, a universally-recognised tradition where agents and publishers take the opportunity to hand over their accumulated backlog of unsolicited submissions to Nature’s own impartial and inexhaustible reader, the naked flame.
ISBD in 2007:
It’s an opportunity for agents, publishers, their assistants, readers and interns to meet, socialise, vent, and publicly exorcise the curse of their profession, the thing that has made the offices unworkable, their schedules and budgets incalculable and their front doors impassable: the unsolicited manuscript.
If you’re new to the biz, or your office is too far from the nearest organised bonfire, or you’;re hopelessly agoraphobic, fear not. You can still join the festivities.
Without a doubt, deep in the shadows of your fragile heart, you know that some of the stuff you’ve written has all the literary merit of initials carved in a tree the day before a forest fire. Why not discover the healing powers of ISBD for yourself, by making your own contribution?
The city’s publishing establishment came together this evening in Times Square to celebrate International Slushpile Bonfire Day, an annual festival to purge the industry’s ever-growing backlog of unpublishable manuscripts. New York’s literary elite mingled with industry professionals to swap stories of the worst of the worst writing to come over the transom, while truckloads of paper holding the creative output of thousands of untalented writers were dumped into a prescribed area and ignited.
Paul Riddell explains the origins of ISBD, for those of you who can stand the metafiction.
It’s always good to see the writers of unread books focusing on the important things in life. Since such scams as authors putting in orders for unreturnable books with fake names and credit card numbers don’t have quite the success they allegedly had (and I say “allegedly”, because ordering a book and then refusing to pick it up in order to increase sales figures has about all the aplomb and craft as protecting one’s copyright by mailing copies of an unreadable story to oneself), enthusiasts of POD mills such as PublishAmerica have struck back at the real enemy keeping them down.
Are they trying to augment or overhaul the existing book distribution system? Are they trying to find audiences for the nearly 300,000 books published every year? Are they trying to prepare for the nearly inevitable collapse of Borders Books and Music chain by constructing alternatives to the ever-decreasing number of Frumpy Fiftysomething’s Used Books and Quiet Desperation Emporium franchises? (And has anyone noticed that the same people who bitch up a storm about how terrible it is that the big chain bookstores have driven Frumpy Fiftysomething’s to near-extinction are the same ones who’d set fire to a bus full of paraplegic nuns for the opportunity to have their books carried by those same chain stores?) Could they be focusing how bookselling is a business and not a workfare program for otherwise unemployable English and journalism majors, and that small publishers and bookstores alike might want to stop waiting for angel investors to swoop in and save them from their fiscal and promotional incompetence?
Naah. The real concern is that Amazon.com won’t allow POD publishers print their books through any printer other than Booksurge. And since PublishAmerica and other such vaunted and highly respected publishers of high-quality reading material want to maximize their return by printing the books bought by these writers by the long ton for “promotional purposes,” it’s not in the vanity publishers’ interests to give Amazon their business. Oh, woe, the whole of the publishing world is about to collapse!
To take a quote from one of the champions of the POD industry and put it very slightly out of context, “Authors slap books up on Amazon.com all the time, don’t market them, and sell zero copies.” Yet somehow they look surprised when someone at Amazon decided to take the POD money sink (in server space, in moderation of comment boards, and responding to the paranoiacs who are certain that Amazon is keeping their works of genius from bestseller status) and find the only way to turn it into a source of revenue, however small. A word to the wise: if your book sells so poorly that the lack of a “Buy” button on an Amazon.com page makes that much of an impact upon your sales, you might want to consider your place in the publishing food chain and stop writing.
– Paul Riddell has advocated stopping writing for the last six years, and tries his best to practice what he preaches. This is why his blog is shutting down in June.
SLUSHPILE
Looking for a needle in a field of haystacks, and having
to tell each stalk that it’s not the needle you’re looking for.
click for larger version (widescreen)
Photo by P. Winberg, of MorgueFile.
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.
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.
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