The Wall Street Journal has just realized something that writers have known for decades: publishers have stopped accepting submissions directly from authors, requiring them to submit through literary agents.

“Now, slush is dead, or close to extinction,” writes Katherine Rosman. “Film and television producers won’t read anything not certified by an agent because producers are afraid of being accused of stealing ideas and material. Most book publishers have stopped accepting book proposals that are not submitted by agents. Magazines say they can scarcely afford the manpower to cull through the piles looking for the Next Big Thing.”

Despite these discouraging tidings, Rosman’s article The Death of the Slush Pile has some amusing, entertaining and even inspiring stories of successful books pulled out of the heap before publishers closed their doors on unsolicited submissions. And there are still a few exceptions to publishers hanging the Keep Out sign on their doors “One slush stalwart—The Paris Review—has college interns and graduate students in the magazine’s Tribeca loft-office read the 1,000 unsolicited works submitted each month,” says Rosman. “Each short story is read by at least two people. If one likes it and the other doesn’t, it is read by a third. Any submission that receives two “Ps” for “pass” as opposed to “R” for “reject” is read by an editor.”

Before submitting your story to The Paris Review, read Rosman’s kicker: “The literary journal publishes one piece from the slush pile each year. That leaves each unsolicited submission a .008% chance of rising to the top of the pile.”

Unfortunately, your odds are scarcely better with an agent. As I wrote elsewhere, shutting down the slush piles “didn’t lower the odds – it just shifted them from one pair of shoulders to another, and when the rejection-to-acceptance ratio turned out to be about the same for agents as it had been for publishers, around 20,000 to 1, the conditions were ripe for an author stampede. All that was needed was a less expensive means of indulging one’s vanity – er, excuse me: publishing one’s own books. The late 1990s provided it in the form of such modern miracles as print on demand, photoshop software and other other cheap and easy production and graphics programs. The stampede began.”

And there is no end in sight.

If you’re interested in the financial logic underlying publishers’ closing of slush piles, read Slush by the Numbers,” excerpted from my book How to Be Your Own Literary Agent.

Richard Curtis