On Friday, The Wall Street Journal published an article by Katherine Rosman lamenting the end of the slush pile. Choosing what to publish is now just as much about marketing, she says, as it is about discovering new writers.
“A primary aim of the slush pile used to be to discover unpublished voices. But today, writing talent isn’t necessarily enough. It helps to have a big-media affiliation, or be effective on TV. … From a publisher’s standpoint, the marketing considerations, especially on non-fiction, now often outweigh the editorial ones.”
M.A. Orthofer at The Literary Saloon thinks big publishers lose the slush pile at their own peril.
“The death of the slush pile (suicidal for the publishers, in my opinion …) will just accelerate the move to self-publishing (and, indeed, self-published books already form a new sort of slush pile, from which conventional publishers occasionally pluck out something), and leave great opportunities for nimbler small publishers who actually care what they put their imprint-name on…”
I agree entirely with Orthofer. And as a little-published writer who’s sending work to slush piles the world over right now, I can only ask, “Wait. Where’s the problem?”
Here’s where I take issue with Rosman: I don’t see how anyone who is paying attention at all can say no one reads through slush piles anymore. The real problem is with the maddeningly small scope at which Rosman and many of the people she interviewed look at the creative world. There are hundreds of new sites that thrive on slush piles. There are countless small journals that do so, too. Does nothing count unless it’s Random House or The Paris Review? (note: the latter is a great magazine, but I’m not sure I like the low numbers of slush publications cited in the WSJ article.)
HTMLGIANT just posted a hilarious and accurate “five steps to publishing” that compares the steps writers take to get published to the steps you go through when grieving. In the final step, acceptance, the writer says, “You know, it’s actually surprisingly easy for me to just do this myself. Maybe I’ll just start my own small press.”
And though they’re (kind of) kidding, that impulse, I think, is the best reaction we new writers could have to the total disaster that is the big publishing houses and the staggering odds we’re told by everyone, from our mothers to the WSJ, that we face. Because when we branch off, when we create or become a part of a literary (as opposed to profit-driven) institution, we help to build the community, and we also learn to be better writers, and we’re both sending to and reading from slush piles, and on top of all that we gain supporters, and all of the sudden, our odds aren’t so low anymore, and when and if the big publishing houses totally destroy themselves, we’ll be there to take over.
Or maybe our odds are still crap, but in that case, at least we won’t be alone when we fail.
4 responses
It’s not failure not to be read en masse!
One of my favorite online poetry journals right now is Redheaded Stepchild, and I sent to them because of their attitude toward the slush pile. They request poems that have been rejected elsewhere, and they want you to include the names of the journals which rejected them in your submission. It’s brilliant, I think, and not just because they published one of mine.
I couldn’t agree more with the point about building community. I’ve been self publishing a zine for five years. It gets a bad rap- self publishing- but guess what? My zine now has a greater circulation than a lot of journals, I’ve met tons of other great writers, artists and entrepreneurs, bookstore owners, etc. I’ve built up quite a little community all outside of the mainstream publishing world. I get tired of the “keep on plugging away and someday they’ll recognize you” attitude surrounding getting your work published. That has its place but it’s not the only way.
And I have a friend who has recently started her own small press. She became tired of rejection slips from big publishers, so she started a small press, initially to publish her own book. Because of her experience in semi-prozine publishing and editing, she knew what to do, chose her own artist and produced something beautiful to look at, then promoted it through her links in the SF community. And now she has published a second book by someone else and is on the point of publishing a third. Only a few hundred people will read the first edition of each book, but they’ll read it. And maybe she can re-print. It’s so very easy in this day of whizz-bang technology!
I must admit, I couldn’t do it. If someone isn’t willing to pay me for my book, I’d rather not do it myself. But one size doesn’t fit all.
I should say, though, as a person who reads a lot of slush myself, I’d suggest that you study your market before submitting. I read for a science fiction magazine and I wish I had a dollar for every non-genre story I have had to read, and I know, just KNOW, that many of these come from people in writing classes who have been given a list of potential markets and just fired their masterpieces off to every market on the list, whether appropriate or not.
Have mercy on poor wslush readers – and, in the end, yourself.It will spare you a lot of rejection slips.
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