Confessions of a slush pile reader

From the poems of Mrs. Jesus Christ to Santa's naughty diary, the unsolicited manuscripts that deluged our office made my publishing job a trial by ordeal.

By Patricia Chui

Feb 25, 2002 | The query letter was written on pale pink stationery and dated Feb. 14, with a return address in Yonkers, N.Y. After describing her collection of love poems, the author wrote:

"Many end their prayers with: 'In Jesus' name.' Very few are entitled to use His name. I am one of them.
Sincerely,
Mrs. Jesus Christ."

We felt as though we'd stumbled upon King Tut's tomb. Who knew? Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior, was married and living in Yonkers.

The quality of the poems aside (they, like so many religious artifacts before them, have sadly been lost to history), divine intervention didn't seem to be working much in Mrs. Christ's favor. Hers was only one of thousands of unsolicited, unagented submissions, better known collectively as the slush pile, that were sent annually to the publishing house where I worked as an editorial assistant.

Some publishers consider reading slush a waste of resources and no longer accept it; some bribe their assistants to read it by throwing slush-and-pizza parties (presumably figuring that nothing makes cheesy fiction go down easier than a little cheese and pepperoni). My publisher welcomed all slush and handed me the reins. Thus for two years, in addition to fulfilling my normal editorial duties, I hired freelance readers, generated form rejection slips, evaluated the rare promising submission and fielded phone calls from every would-be Frank McCourt with a manuscript in his drawer and an Oprah's Book Club Pick in his dreams. I wish I could say that serving as a conduit between the publishing elite and the uncorrupted masses taught me valuable lessons in compassion and grace. Instead, it convinced me that the world is full of lunatics.

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Diary entry written after one week on the job:

The sad thing is that I have this attitude now toward authors who send in unsolicited manuscripts. Before, I thought that the slush pile was great because you could discover some talented genius and that all these authors laboring away in obscurity without agents were so noble. Now, I consider every unagented author to be slightly psychotic and deranged, and every unsolicited manuscript to be bad.

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It's a worthy sentiment to give every aspiring writer a shot, no matter how long that shot may be. After all, every slush writer fervently believes that his manuscript is just as good as what's being sold at Barnes & Noble and that all he needs is a snappy cover letter and a foot in the door to get a publisher to realize it, too. Yet the sad truth is that the vast majority of slush is, to put it kindly, unpublishable. Not good or bad, just ... there, bland and forgettable, like an unadorned rice cake. If the odds of discovering something special in the mix are slim, it isn't because publishable manuscripts are sprinkled with pixie dust, but because so much of what's submitted seems like varying degrees of the exact same thing.

The same holds true, in fact, for submissions sent directly to acquisitions editors. Every editor's in box is piled high with mail from big agents, small agents, writers met at conferences, friends of his wife's dentist and people who plucked his name off a book's acknowledgments page. Some of these submissions, generally the ones sent by respected agents, will be read carefully; some will get little more than a glance. There's really no other way to do it.

So overwhelming is the volume of mail to be read (and, given the current perilous state of book publishing, so arduous the acquisitions process even for a worthy project) that often a weary editor's guilty wish isn't to fall in love with a manuscript, but to be able to reject it quickly before moving on to the next. As Walker Percy wrote of his reluctance to consider the manuscript for "A Confederacy of Dunces," "My only fear was that this one might not be bad enough, or might be just good enough, so that I would have to keep reading."

This gap between inspiration and publication is epitomized and exaggerated by the slush pile, a teeming smorgasbord of mediocrity sprinkled with healthy doses of the awful and the insane. Fair or not, there's a kind of self-selection process that governs the pile, the perception being that good writers are the ones who manage to stay off of it in the first place. The job of our readers was to sift through the pile and find the exceptions to the rule. It was a Sisyphean task at best. Every day, boxes of self-help, pet-inspired wisdom and near-death experiences would cycle through my office to be read and rejected in what seemed a never-ending stream of futility. Being on the slush pile was the literary equivalent of being on death row.

Next Page: A novel called "Bill Cosby in Heaven"

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