Book publishers say it is now too expensive to pay employees to read slush that rarely is worthy of publication. At Simon & Schuster, an automated telephone greeting instructs aspiring writers: “Simon & Schuster requires submissions to come to us via a literary agent due to the large volume of submissions we receive each day. Agents are listed in ‘Literary Marketplace,’ a reference work published by R.R. Bowker that can be found in most libraries.” Company spokesman Adam Rothberg says the death of the publisher’s slush pile accelerated after the terror attacks of 9/11 by fear of anthrax in the mail room.
A primary aim of the slush pile used to be to discover unpublished voices.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. “We are being more selective in taking on clients because the publishers are demanding much more from the authors than ever before,” says Laurence J. Kirshbaum, former CEO of Time Warner Book Group and now an agent. “From a publisher’s standpoint, the marketing considerations, especially on non-fiction, now often outweigh the editorial ones.”
Jez, you’d swear the poor dears in the New York publishing houses couldn’t get to the door on the way home but for the piles and piles of manuscripts impeding their thankless day’s work. The gate-keeping practice by large publishers is a bit like Macys pulling the shutters down on their stores half way through the day and declaring, “We’ve made quite enough money today, thank you, please f*** o**, your custom probably won’t make us any more money than the time we’ll spend serving you.” I worked in the retail industry for many years, and the old adage ‘the customer is always right’ still holds firm, but they never tell you about the caveat at the end of that adage – ‘as long as the customer is actually spending money’!
I blogged about this, too. I thought the article was short-sighted. The publishers still need writers, but the writers don’t really need publishers– not anymore.
It would behove them to be a little more polite to us.
Hi, I found this article interesting; I can even say extremely interesting.
I too am a writer who has been trying to get my non-fiction book – Die in Paris – published. I’ve received the most wonderfully encouraging rejections from publishers; I say wonderfully encouraging because they all said that they loved the book but decided all the same not to make an offer. (Die in Paris is the story of the WW2 serial killer, Dr. Marcel Petiot.)
Desperate now, I am in touch with a publisher with whom I will share his publishing expenditure.
Yes, I want to get my book published THAT MUCH!
The reason: I believe in my book and in myself. I KNOW that I have a book here that people would want to read. So what am I to do? Leave the MS on my hard disk. No! No! No! I will pay to have it published.
Hi Marilyn,
I can understand your frustration, as many writers will. I would be interested to know what specific kind of publisher you have gone, an author solutions service, or a system of partnership publishing.
Your book is in a particular are of non-fiction. Does you publisher have a track record of publishing this kind of book, and do they have distribution channels to high street bookstores?
Mick.
Hi Mick;
My apologies for replying only now – I did not see your reply …
and time flies so!
I chose partnership publishing. The publisher is someone you blogged about. You wrote that you had found no negative comments about them, so I decided to publish with them.
And yes I understand that they do have bookstore outlets in North America, the U.K., South Africa and Australia.
I am trying to be discreet for various reasons, but you probably know who I am talking about.
All best
Marilyn (if you wish to speak to me privately my email address is mztomlins@gmail.com)