Slush
(Excerpt from How to Be Your Own Literary Agent by Richard Curtis)

When the nation was younger, and publishing still known as the Gentleman’s Profession, most book publishers were happy to consider manuscripts submitted by unrepresented writers, and many a good book got published that way. But as publishing developed after World War II into big business, and literary agents rose to dominate the marketplace, publishers sharply veered away from unrepresented authors as significant sources of publishable material and began depending more and more heavily on agents to screen good properties from bad.

At length, the consolidation of the industry, aided by recessionary trends in the economy, completed the movement in that direction, and we are now at the point where very little unsolicited material is read by major trade-book publishers in the United States. For it is clearly cost-ineffective to retain editors to read “unagented” manuscripts when the ratio of acceptances to rejections is something on the order of one in ten thousand. (Unfortunately, the Merriam-Webster Dictionary does not yet recognize the verb “to agent,” but everyone in the business uses it, and so must you if you’re going to be doing your own . . . um . . . agenting.)

There are exceptions, but they only serve to prove the rule. Ordinary People by Judith Guest was plucked out of the unsolicited pile at Viking Press and went on to become a very big book and an even bigger movie. But according to the New York Times, it was also the first such manuscript accepted by Viking in twenty-seven years!

Manuscripts submitted to publishers by unrepresented authors are described by the depressing term slush, and slush they are, whether the work of a genius or the ravings of a lunatic. Insofar as any manuscript comes into a publishing company “over the transom” (uninvited), it falls under the official designation of Slush.

Although statistics are not available, I would guess that most trade publishers today do not read slush. They return it with printed rejection slips, frequently with a statement that they read material only if submitted by literary agents. As I say, the reasoning is cold-bloodedly economic. Assuming a publisher gets 5000 unagented manuscripts in a year (a figure I’m told is on the modest side), and a skillful editor can read and judge four every working day, and figure 225 working days a year, that’s less than 1000 manuscripts evaluated per editor per year. So you need four or five editors to plow through those 5000 manuscripts. Figure salaries for junior editors at this writing to be around $25,000 per annum, and you have an annual salary cost of $100,000 to $125,000 per year for the slush-pile staff. Then add fringe benefits and Social Security contributions. Recommended manuscripts must be read by senior editors, whose time must also be paid for. And what about the astronomical cost of returning all the rejected manuscripts whose authors have not included postage?

And so, if it is true that only one manuscript in thousands is worthy of acceptance by a publisher, you’re talking about a cost of well over $100,000 to discover it, not including the cost of publishing it. With a bottom line like that, it had better be one helluva book! But because most publishers don’t believe they will find such a consummate masterpiece under those bushels of over-the-transom submissions, they consider it more cost-effective to leave the sorting-out to the agents and spend the $100,000 where it can do more good– or at least where they think it can do more good. For this reason, it can be stated with some accuracy that an editor will read the most dismal piece of junk submitted by a literary agent faster and maybe even more attentively than he will a good book that comes in on the slush pile.

Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Copyright (c) 1983. 1984, 1996, 2003 by Richard Curtis. All rights reserved