posted
I would like to hear your individual experiences with taking stabs at being published. Has anyone here submitted a novel to a slush pile? Which publishers and how quickly did they respond? I have a political sci-fi that is just about ready for its maiden voyage to a publisher and I'm now starting to wonder about this next phase of the process. Your experience would be enlightening.
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posted
I must have made over a thousand submissions over the last thirty years. (About a hundred and eighty stories, but multiple times.) I've had them back so fast I doubt they even read them, to several MSS that went out and never came back.
Of course if you're just starting out you'll wind up in the slush pile. If you've got connections that can get you a quick read, use them. But otherwise you have to count on being read by minions who think of how cold it is and fondle matches in one hand while holding your manuscript in the other. "Certainly the game is fixed, but it's the only game in town." Maybe you'll get past that, but you've got to try.
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Are you going to try a publisher or an agent first? This is a question I'm still pondering as I put the final polish on my novel before sending queries SOMEWHERE (agent or publisher?? Lady or the tiger???? Who knows??????). A small press publisher invited me to send it there (I met her at a writing conference), but I'd like to try for the big guys first - or is that just a foolish dream?? *sigh* I know I should try for the big guys first, but I don't want to wait for YEARS to hear from them, either. Argh. . .
posted
To date are there any trully established and highly successful authors who were first discovered in a slush pile?
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posted
There's lots of examples. One of them is Kevin J. Anderson who sent in over eighty submissions before being published, entered the Writers Of The Future contest many times without winning, and often showed off his stacks of rejections at writing groups he attended before "making" it. And now he's made the bestsellers lists many times and written over 50 novels.
Persistence and fortitude are two of the things that get you there, but breaks help too. One thing that you shouldn't discount, like Robert says, is using any connections you get. If you don't know anybody now, then it'll be up to you to make them. A lot of authors haver attended workshops like Clarion and OSC's Boot Camp, and gotten connections there. Others attend conferences, and do anything they can to meet authors, agents and publishers. It's called networking by business people, but it's the same thing for writing. You have to work at it.
Even with all of this, as Robert can attest to, there's no guarantees. The best you can do is to write the best work you can and never give up on it, even if it seems like all you're getting is rejections.
Just so you know, all of this information I've written here are things I've read by other sources and some of it may be inaccurate, but it's true to my knowledge. I myself am still trying to get my first pro sale and I enter the Writers Of The Future Contest every quarter, and submit regularly to many markets.
[This message has been edited by luapc (edited January 05, 2007).]
posted
Almost all of the most prolific authors make their way through the slushpile. That's why big publishing houses bother to undertake the significant costs and difficulties associated with hiring small armies of slushkillers and full-scale mailing departments associated with their submissions department. This isn't something that they do for fun, or for their public image.
"Cultivated writers" tend to only be good for a couple of books aimed at a niche audience. True, most writers submitting to the slushpile will never even be good for that much, but those who do emerge from the slushpile are usually the ones that will write dozens of books which appeal to a large audience. This isn't an ironclad rule or anything, though. You also have academics and celebrities. Celebrities tend to only produce a single book, and it often has to be ghost-written, but the mass-market buys their (initial) books pretty reliably. Some celebrities write multiple best-sellers, which each book doing better than the last. Academics are a mixed bag, usually their books are the result of years of study, and thus they don't tend to produce a lot of them. They also don't necessarily have the most readable style or engaging treatment of the subject matter, which limits their popularity in general.
The slushpiles with the fastest turnover and the highest rates of real success tend to be in short fiction markets. There are several reasons for this. One is that a short fiction market has to buy from more individual writers to produce the same amount of published material. The other is that it's much easier for writers to learn from their rejections in the short fiction market, you can realistically do a complete rewrite of a short story before sending it out again, or you can write a completely different short story. With a book, every rejection is a devastating blow to that book's chances of ever being published.
And a writer who has established a presence in the short fiction market has a much better chance of avoiding the book slushpiles altogether.
posted
I'd say a majority, though hardly all, did start out with their stuff coming over-the-transom.
Heinlein comes to mind. I gather he sent his first submission to Astounding in with nothing but a cover letter, and (as far as I know) wasn't known to the editor at the time. (Asimov, by way of contrast, took the subway down to the Astounding office and handed his first story to the editor, John W. Campbell, personally. And he had written letters published in the magazine letter column, too. Of course, Asimov's first submission didn't sell, and Heinlein's did...)
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Addendum to my first post here yesterday: Make that "over two thousand" rejections. I completely forgot the bad poetry I churned out in the early eighties and sent 'round. About the same ratio: about two hundred poems and over a thousand rejections. (And a few acceptances---but nothing that paid money.)
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No, it's not all, but it really is close. The thing is, prolific writers have much better odds of getting through the slushpile. They usually start writing and submitting stories (and other material) before they know much of anything about the publishing industry, and their ability to write literate prose in volume helps them get noticed through their writing before they make contacts in the industry. The letters-to-the-editor slushpile is certainly easier to conquer than even the short stories slushpile, but it is still a slushpile and Asimov did conquer it in order to develop a relationship with Campbell. If I really wanted to count Asimov, on which point I'm not particular (no, really, I like him, I just don't own him or anything).
I've been advised by many sources (not just agents who collect their percentages) that if you have a great script, and you know it in your bones, it is worthless to submit over the ransom with the knowledge of landing in the slushpile with your fingers crossed. Only 3 in 900 mss ever get pulled out for a second look by a senior editor at a big house, or so I've read.
The advice given to me is to get an agent to accept it for shopping around. If s/he likes it, s/he will most likely want a 3-book contract with you and try to sell same to publisher.
Even prolific writers of reknown have agents. Don't look to make big bucks on your first novel is another piece of advice I've heard bandied around.
Along these lines, and as I've briefly touched on, the agent will want to know about your next two books in the same genre as the one you've just handed over.
Does anyone know if you have to actually pay the agent before s/he sells your work? I think not, but not sure on this. Anyone?
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Well, I did conquer the letter column slushpile---for a period in the early eighties, Asimov's published every letter I wrote---but did it get my foot further in the door than a straight submission? I don't know. Maybe I got a faster read...all I got were rejections.
(I did run into a former SF magazine slushpile reader later on in my Internet Fan Fiction period---he was doing just what I was doing, and he was a professional---and we discussed the matter briefly. As I recall (and I wish now I'd copied it down or printed it out, so I could be sure), he said it didn't matter, and he didn't recognize my name when he slush-read, or later when we ran across each other.)
*****
As for paying an agent...I've never had one, but I would think really hard before I signed with an agent I had to pay to represent me. The agent is supposed to sell your work, and collect a percentage of the amount. How well can an agent sell your work if you're paying him? What's his motivation? He's already got his---where's yours? (I can tolerate a reading fee from a beginning writer to an established agent to get a few pages of comment...I think. I've never done it, either way.)
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The thread got me curious, as I'm currently trudging through said slush, with a submission that may take up to a year, according to the publisher's listing in Writers Market (Baen, if you're curious).
I happened across a site that actually lists many of the major publishers, combining online experience to show just how long it took them to respond. It also gives a pretty good indication to your chances, seeing as how at least 90% of the reported listings are rejections.
Can't quite remember the policy on hot-linking, so just search for an organization site called Critters, and check out their BlackHoles section. Quite interesting to see... Baen took up to 700 days to respond to one query.
The majority of publishers I've tried so far have gotten back to me in the time stated on Writers Market, which is usually 6 months.
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What I've learned along the way is that an editor will not bother with a ms unless it is introduced by an agent s/he has a working relationship with. The idea is to pick your agent by genres they deal in, Then "sell" your story, ie. give your pitch, etc., sign contract with agent and s/he shops it around. I can't believe anyone would send their blood, sweat and tears to a slush pile and let it sit there for a year. The world of publishing is a lot different now compared to the days of Heinlein and Asimov.
If there's any comparison, a production company may receive as many as 5,000 screen plays a month. What are the odds that yours would get a second notice?
And by the way, I'm not an agent, just so you guys know I'm not promoting my own trade.
posted
Survivor: Just so you know, an established author with a good track record does not go through the slushpile. This kind of author has book deals, say a 3-book contract with a publishing house to produce those books in a certain time frame, maybe 5 or 6 years.
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posted
An agent takes a percentage of what you earn off a contract. A good agent will usually earn her own wage (that is, be able to negotiate your contract up more than enough to cover her expenses).
How or when or where or to whom you submit your work doesn't matter. There is no one way to do it. The only WRONG way is to not do it at all.
posted
For clarity, I meant that most established writers with prolific output (say at least ten books or the equivalent in short stories) made their initial contacts with the publisher by submitting to the slushpile.
That doesn't mean that all of them actually got their first sale that way (though it does seem that most of them did), just that they did, at the beginning, send stuff to the slushpile.
For clarity, "slushpile" refers only to material sent to a market which accepts unsolicited submissions. If a market does not accept unsolicited submissions, then they will say so very clearly and you shouldn't send them unsolicited submissions. This is closer to what we'd call "over the transom" submissions. Sending stuff over the transom rarely works...if a publisher really wants unsolicited manuscripts, they don't go to the trouble of having a policy against them.
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