On the Survival of Rats in the Slush Pile | Page 9

process of selecting books from the slush pile will throw up an occasional black swan.
How the slush pile is dealt with
If, every day, the postman brings even as few as ten manuscripts into an agent's office, the agent must assume (if she is willing to consider them at all) that among these unsolicited and unpromising submissions there may perhaps be the twenty-first-century equivalent of Sherlock Holmes, James Bond, or Harry Potter; or perhaps a Booker Prize winner. She therefore has to give at least some serious consideration to these manuscripts.
Perhaps our agent is super-conscientious, a mistress of the management of time, and can manage without sleep. In those circumstances she may even do the initial trawl through the manuscripts herself. But that is unlikely to happen. It is more than probable that the busy agent will employ a reader to do the job for her. The reader will discard the manuscripts which are judged to be hopeless and leave a relatively manageable number for a final decision by the boss.
Over the past fifty years or so much has been written about the role of the slush-pile reader; the experiences described are mainly those of individuals who worked in publishers' offices in the days when big-time publishers were still willing to consider submissions from the public; but we shall be safe, I think, in assuming that the process is much the same wherever it occurs.
Since the job of sorting through the slush pile is generally reckoned to be soul-destroying, it is almost invariably given to the newest and most junior member of staff: the one who is in no position to refuse. Such people are seldom given any training. (Until recently no one got any training in publishing anyway, unless it was in the form of 'Sit by Nelly and watch what she does.')
The volume of work is such that the reader cannot possibly give more than a few minutes to any one manuscript, unless it proves to be unusually promising. Often, those who have done the job claim that to read one paragraph is sufficient to enable a rejection decision to be made.
Here is what one publishing professional, Andrew Taylor, had to say about the task, writing in The Bookseller in 1996: 'In an average day's work at a publisher's office, I aim to assess 7 to 10 submissions and write reports on each of them which vary in length from 2 to 500 words.'
Mr Taylor is more generous with his time than some publishers' readers. Giles Gordon once stated that when he was the slush-pile reader at Gollancz, he learnt how to tell whether a manuscript was any good within 15 seconds. 'It's just a matter of practice,' he said airily.
Literary agent Pat Kavanagh takes much the same view. 'Two pages will tell you if a book from the slush pile is worth pursuing.'
The results of the search through the slush pile
It is generally reckoned that, however carefully or otherwise the slush pile is read, it is rare to find anything in it which is worth even the most cursory consideration as a candidate for publication.
The agent Pat Kavanagh, mentioned above, was asked how often she had found a book in the slush pile that was worth pursuing. 'Never,' she said. 'I don't believe it has ever happened to me.'
Barry Turner, in The Writer's Handbook, once mentioned an agent who fared a little better than that, but not much. In 14 years of reading 25-30 manuscripts a month, the agent found 5 good ones. Another agent, at Curtis Brown, personally received 1,200 manuscripts in one year, and took on 2 of the authors as clients. One agent at perhaps the largest UK agency remarked recently that she was having to read 3,000 manuscripts in order to find 1 client.
In 1989, The Timesreported that the well-known British imprint Hutchinson was receiving about 1,000 manuscripts a year. One of these unsolicited manuscripts might be publishedevery couple of years or so. Maybe.
At Chatto and Windus the Timesreporter was told that about 10 manuscripts arrived every day. Were they all read? Long pause. 'Yes.' Were any ever taken on? Long pause. 'No.'
The largest publisher of romantic novels in the UK is Mills & Boon, or Harlequin Mills & Boon, to give the firm its full name. The Mills & Boon editorial director has stated that the firm receives 6,000 manuscripts a year from hopeful and so-far-unpublished writers. Out of these submissions, the company takes on, in a good year, about 10 new writers.
In 1995, the owner of two small publishing firms in the USA reported in Publishers Weeklythat he had received nearly 7,000 offers of books in the previous twelve months, and had decided to accept 12 of these submissions.
A much larger and more prestigious American firm, Viking, agreed to publish only one