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

facilitating clear
thinking in a number of fields of activity: for example, Card
Playermagazine tells us that they are applicable to the game of poker. It
will therefore be useful to go through each of the points made in Part 1
and to examine their relevance to the book trade in general and the
writer's position in particular.
The first thought that struck me, on reading Taleb's draft chapter for his
book on black swans, was that the experiment with rats is closely
analogous to the process of selecting books from the slush pile. And,
just in case there is anyone reading this who doesn't know what a slush

pile is, let me explain.
Defining the slush pile
Unknown and unpublished writers tend to be, as remarked in Part 1,
wildly ambitious and eager for fame, money, and literary reputation. To
achieve these objectives they have to get published. And to get
published they have to arrange, as a first step, for their work to be
offered to 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