It's not that it isn't possible to cut through the slush and get published. It is. It's just so rare as to be borderline miraculous to get discovered that way. Why?
Because it's a very negative process, going through slush. It's a horrible mountain of horribleness that we have to take apart bit by tiny bit. And the way we do that is: we eliminate.
I have to read this whole thing?
Slush-divers start the day looking for positive elements or potential for improvement. As we watch the pile imperceptibly shrink, though, we look for the first indication of the inappropriate, the bad, the amateur, and the mediocre, with a constant eye out for The Crazy. Good might not be exciting, but a problem to deal with. It's awful, but that's really what we sometimes think when we read something decent hours into the hunt.
It's not that bad everywhere. Baen Books found an ingenious way to crowdsource the slushpile (great article here), and Harper-Collins launched a similar site last year, Authonomy. The first book discovered through the site came out last month, just months after it was chosen to be reviewed by an editor.
This is not the norm. Everywhere else, slush is an agonizing process and will remain so indefinitely, or until the house gives up and relies solely on agents. For us, they stop the mediocre and The Crazy from distracting us from the good stuff. For you, they get you in the right door to the right person.
Find an agent.
No comments:
Post a Comment