Lesson 3: Skiing
across the slush pile
In this country, the big publishers each receive 3-5,000
unsolicited fiction manuscripts a year. That’s around a hundred a week. The
situation is much the same in the UK, Canada and the US – publishers receive an
absolute deluge of manuscripts week in and out, even when they state that they’re
not accepting unsolicited manuscripts.
Publishing is a competitive and low profit
business, and no publisher can afford to pay people to read all those manuscripts.
Many publishers simply return them if postage is provided, or shred them if it
isn’t. Where they do look at manuscripts, it will only be the professionally
presented ones – perhaps half the total. Of that 2,500, say, 90% will be
rejected on the first page and 98% by the end of the first chapter. That leaves
30-50 manuscripts, and they’re the only ones that will receive serious
consideration. In a good year, ten of those might be published (out of the
original 5,000). In a bad year, less than five.
Most published books come through agents, but no
agent can afford to spend a lot of time reading manuscripts from unknowns
either. Most agents won’t even look at an unsolicited manuscript and again, most
manuscripts an agent does consider will be rejected on the first page. For the
key faults a top NY agent sees in submitted manuscripts every day of the year,
and how to fix them, see Don Maass’s terrific 2009 book, The Fire in Fiction.
The lesson is obvious: your story has to start in
the first paragraph, with an interesting character facing some kind of problem
that captures the reader’s interest or concern, and your very best writing has
to be up front. Once you’ve done that, work on your contacts because agents get
most of their manuscripts from referrals – it’s the only practicable way to
filter out the few good books from the vast morass of manuscripts that aren’t
publishable. Before you send your work off, make sure you follow the submission
guidelines on the publisher’s website, and present your work in standard
manuscript format. If you don’t, it’s likely to be discarded without another
glance.
But how do you get your work in front of that
agent or editor in the first place? Make contacts at book fairs, writers’
workshops and festivals, and other places where the industry gets together,
then use them. Write to your contacts
with your idea and perhaps a couple of sample pages (the first pages, obviously).
If they like what they see, your manuscript is now a solicited one. It still won’t be published if it’s no good, but at
least it’s at the top of the queue to be read.
For advice on those major Aussie publishers who
are taking manuscripts, see my recent post: http://ianirvine.blogspot.com/2011/10/publishers-looking-for-manuscripts.html.
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