On the Survival of Rats in the Slush Pile | Page 8

publishers.
In the past, it was common for novelists to submit their completed manuscripts to publishers themselves. Every day the postman would deliver, to every publisher in the land, a pile of ten or twenty manuscripts. These unsolicited submissions are known in the book trade, throughout the English-speaking world, as the slush pile.
The term 'slush pile' gives a clear flavour of the contempt in which unsolicited submissions are held. It is widely agreed in publishing circles (on the basis of countless years of experience) that many of these manuscripts will be unreadable, unpublishable junk. But it is also the case (as history demonstrates) that the slush pile will occasionally contain a black swan.
One point to note is that every writer, and every novel, is at some point in someone's slush pile. With absolutely no exceptions.
At some stage, and possibly at many different stages, decisions have to be made on whether to continue to consider a book for publication, or to send it back to its author with a rejection slip. This iterated process has its parallels with the rats-in-the-vat experiment. The rats which were submitted to radiation included every type of rat: fat, thin, strong, weak, young, old. Similarly the slush pile contains writers and manuscripts covering the whole range of ability and quality, from masterpieces to illiterate rubbish.
The role of literary agents
For over a hundred years there have been individuals within the book trade who undertake to handle the business side of writers' affairs for them. These literary agents, as they are called, will submit manuscripts to publishers, negotiate a contract, and check royalty statements; they may well give advice on market demands, provide detailed comment on content, undertake editing, and generally act as an intermediary between writer and publisher when things go wrong (as they all too frequently do). In return for these services, an agent will receive an agreed percentage of a writer's income.
The unknown writer, let us say a single mother living on a council estate in Gateshead, will these days find it impossible to submit a novel to a major publisher; the publisher will simply send it back to her, unread, accompanied by the advice that she should try to find an agent to represent her. So the unknown young woman from Gateshead will end up in an agent's slush pile rather than a publisher's.
If, at some point, the writer is accepted as a client by an agent, the agent will then offer the book to a publisher, usually to an editor with whom the agent is on first-name, let's-do-lunch terms. The book is then part of the editor's slush pile.
If, in the course of further time, our young lady from Gateshead happens to generate a black swan which amazes the entire universe with its brilliance, she willstillfind that her next novel willstill end up in the editor's slush pile, in the sense that its publication will have to be subject to a conscious decision. The new book may rise immediately to the top of the editor's reading pile, and the decision to go ahead with publication of the second novel may be uncontested, but a decision will have to be made, none the less.
And by the way, publication of book number two, or number twenty-two, even to follow a big success, may not be uncontested; it may be a matter of considerable debate. In 1986, after Dean Koontz had published fifty-four novels, he appeared on the US hardcover bestseller list with Strangers. He then wrote Lightning, which involved him in a bitter struggle with his editor, who prophesied the end of his career if it was published. Koontz insisted that publication should proceed, and in due course he was proved right, because Lightning became another hardcover bestseller. The editor concerned was Phyllis Grann, then at Putnam. What the slush-pile process is designed to do The purpose of the experiment with rats was to find the 'strongest' rats - strength being regarded, by the designers of the experiment, as the most desirable of all possible characteristics. To this end, increasingly high doses of radiation were administered until in the end there were only a few rats left.
But what is the slush-pile process - whether undertaken by agents or publishers - designed to do?
Everyone in the book trade is anxious to find the 'best' books. Different participants in the trade will have differing definitions of 'best'. For some it will mean the books which generate the most income. For others it will mean the books which get the most favourable reviews from the highbrow critics. But if the submission and selection process has any purpose at all it is to select the 'best' books from the point of view of the organisation conducting that process. In particular, it is surely the hope of most parties that the