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

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 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