What IS the truth about the competition, please?

Writing Jedi said:

I guess in the end I am just trying to get a sense of the size of the mountain looming ahead. LOL. I am mailing out my very first query letter today. (*shivers and bites nails*).

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God, don't start biting your nails now. What are you going to do after your first six books get rejected, cut off your fingers?

Julie Worth said:

God, don't start biting your nails now. What are you going to do after your first six books get rejected, cut off your fingers?

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Hey all. New person here.

Never been published, writing first serious attempt now after twenty years of screwing around writing stuff without a direction.

Personally, I'm looking forward to my first rejection letter. I already have the frame for it.

My bottom line is this: I believe in my project, and it's the first one I've ever felt strongly about. I'm not trying to make a living with this. If I get the chance to share the story via a publisher, that will be cool. Nothing can ever take away the feeling I'll get when I finish it.

That said...I'm curious to see the answer to the original question...

Writing Jedi said:

First, I read that most submissions suck so badly that editors are just salivating to find one decently written novel to publish.

Then, I read that editors are flooded with "good" submissions, "good" isn't good enough, that the competition is fierce, and that unless your book is "brilliant", don't even bother.

Which one closer to the truth?

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My sense is these aren't mutually exclusive points. The majority of the slush can probably be bounced after a glance at the first page. (Heck, I'm told one editor realized he could predict bounces almost perfectly just from looking at the cover letters. He couldn't predict which ones he would buy, but there were some cover letters that screamed "my story is crap." He'd check the story, and yup...)

Anyway, let's say 90% is completely unpublishable. Given the size of the slush at most publishers, the remaining 10% is still a formidable hill of "good" work.

Getting into that top 10% is a good thing, but you still need your book to stand out in the editor's eyes.

Unfortunately, I don't know any guaranteed way to do that. One of mine which I thought was brilliant got bounced. Another that I was convinced had less potential got picked out of the slush.

To answer the OP's question - one does not, of necessity, preclude the other.
Yes, the slush piles are filled with crap (you've read Slushkiller, right?). At the same time, there are a lot of good manuscripts around and the competition is pretty fierce...

The competition is fierce. Quite frankly (and I am very willing to put myself in this category) if, as many of the professionals say, 90% of the stuff they recieve is crap, then 90% of us cannot recognize our own crap when we see it. I personally (and I'm unpublished, so this doesn't come from experience) think that a good indicator of how well your novel will be accepted by publishers, is how well it is accepted by beta readers. (real beta readers, not your parents/spouse/etc. My father thinks I've written a million dollar book . . . I know he's wrong.)
I don't want to come across as a sour grapes person, because I really do believe that writing an excellent book counts for 80%. But I also believe that sheer luck counts for 20%. Having a next-door neighbor who is a famous author who will refer you, being put in the wrong pile by some editor's assistant and ending up being put right on her desk, catching the right agent right after he gets laid, seriously. Luck is involved.
But still, even with all of that, it happens! This board is a witness to that. Good authors get published every day. And that's what keeps me going. <shrug> Hope that helps.

Maprilynne

Let's say that the real competition in the Boston Marathon is among ten guys. The other 15,000 runners are there, sure, but they don't have a prayer.

Even among those ten, there's only going to be one winner. But you still want to be one of those ten, don't you? And in another marathon, another day, same ten top guys, another one may well come in first.

That's why you go out and run ten miles a day, every day.

My personal experience is with slushing shorts for a litmag, although I'm told it's littledifferent for novels.

90% of everything submitted is unreadable. Of the remaining 10%, 90% just isn't very good, or is unoriginal and derivative, or is plain boring. Of that remaining 10%, 1% will excite you enough to want you to pay money for it.

Slush

From my experience, about 70% of what comes through the slush is utterly, hopelessly, God-awful bad in every possible way. You can reject it by reading a page or two, and you'd better, because it only gets worse after those first couple of pages.

It's astounding how many new writers actually do not know enough grammar and punctuation to make it through the first three pages. Nor does having someone fix teh grammar and punctuation help because without these skills there are no writing skills, either.

You do not have to be an expert on grammar and punctuation, but you have to know something. A writer who doesn't also lacks storytelling skills, characterization skills, doesn't understand syntax, pace, flow, rhythm, etc. Grammar and punctuation skills are directly linked to writing skills in general.

About twenty percent of what comes in isn't terrible, it simply isn't close enough to professional level to be considered. Much of it is just same old, same old that any agent or editor has read a thousand times. There's simply nothing that makes it stand out in any way. The biggest fault this twenty percent probably suffers from is that, while it may not be horribly written, it isn't written well enough, and it is horribly boring.

There's always four or five percent where quality really doesn't matter because it's completely inappropriate to wherever it was submitted.

From my experience, prettyclose to 100% of all accepted material comes from the top three or four percent of submissions. Most of this three or four percent won't make teh cut, either, of course, but it is, at least, in the running, and some of it will find a home elsewhere. This three or four percent is where the "good, but not good enough" comes from.

Most agents can only represent a limited number on new writers each year, and all editors have a limited number of slots to fill. Because of this, they take what they consider to be the best of teh best, meaning the best of this three or four percent, and pas, sometimes very reluctantly, on the rest.

Much of this three or four percent isn't quite good enough, or doesn't fit what the public wants well enough, to even find a home, but this is also where the novels come from that go through several agents or many publishers before finding a home, and often striking it big.

What makes the competition so incredibly tough is not the ninety percent of writers who are either really and truly bad, or the twenty percent who just aren't good enough, but the fact that slots are limited, and tehre is a limit on how many new writers a given agent can take on in a given year.

As a whole, they need well under one percent of what they see, but three or four percent of the writers are at least in the running. This may not sound like much, but three or four percent is a lot of writers.

But also from my experience, really good novels always do find a home somewhere, unless the writer gives up too soon, or blows his chances in some other manner. There just are not very many really good, unpublished novels out there, except for those that are in the submission process looking for a home that will be found, if the writer doesn't quit.

Having said all this, teh world of publishing really is an inverted pyramid. The choke point is at the bottom, and that's where you find teh 90% of writers who just aren't good enough. They're all trying to squeeze through, and there simply isn't enough room. But the better you are, the higher you go in the pyramid, and there's always room at the top. Limited slots or no, there's more than enough room for any number of writers at the top, if they can write the kind of fiction, tell the kind of story, and fill it with the kind of characters the reading public is begging for.

Maprilynne said:

The competition is fierce. Quite frankly (and I am very willing to put myself in this category) if, as many of the professionals say, 90% of the stuff they recieve is crap, then 90% of us cannot recognize our own crap when we see it. I personally (and I'm unpublished, so this doesn't come from experience) think that a good indicator of how well your novel will be accepted by publishers, is how well it is accepted by beta readers. (real beta readers, not your parents/spouse/etc. My father thinks I've written a million dollar book . . . I know he's wrong.)
I don't want to come across as a sour grapes person, because I really do believe that writing an excellent book counts for 80%. But I also believe that sheer luck counts for 20%. Having a next-door neighbor who is a famous author who will refer you, being put in the wrong pile by some editor's assistant and ending up being put right on her desk, catching the right agent right after he gets laid, seriously. Luck is involved.
But still, even with all of that, it happens! This board is a witness to that. Good authors get published every day. And that's what keeps me going. <shrug> Hope that helps.

Maprilynne

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I think it goes without saying that very, very few writers can tell anything about the quality of their own work. I'm not real fond of using beta readers for quality control, either. Beta readers can help in several areas, but beta readers are usually no better, and are often much worse, at judging actual quality than the writer.

I think the differential between "90% crap" and "90% good but not good enough" is dependent on the personality of the agent or editor reading it.

I don't know if Miss Snark reads the same kinds of material that Kristin Nelson does, but imagine Snark would be much more blunt in her opinion than Nelson would.

I guess what I'm saying is that the opinions may be very close, but how they each express it is different.

Wesley Smith said:

I think the differential between "90% crap" and "90% good but not good enough" is dependent on the personality of the agent or editor reading it.

I don't know if Miss Snark reads the same kinds of material that Kristin Nelson does, but imagine Snark would be much more blunt in her opinion than Nelson would.

I guess what I'm saying is that the opinions may be very close, but how they each express it is different.

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Every agent and editor I've known pretty much agrees with what crap is. Most of what lands in any slush pile is absolute and utter crap by anyone's definition. It's that top three or four percent that agents and editors disagree on. There's a firm and solid concensus on the rest.

I'm not sure anyone really knows what great writing is, but everyone knows what crap is. Having ten agents or editors pull the very best manuscript out of a given slush pile is going to cause all sorts of arguments, but if you ask them to pull out the crap, the truly horrible writing, they'll all be in comlete agreement, and they'll all be blunt about the lack of quality.

Really, go to any critique forum that has a few hundred stories posted. Start reading. If you don't very shortly reach the conclusion that at least seventy percent of what's there is bad in every possible way, you're a rarity. You should also find boring story after boring story with nothing at all new to offer. You should also find an amazing number of "stories" that aren't even stories at all.

Really bad writing is not opinion, it's fact, and easily recognized by pretty much anyone. . .except the writer and his friends.

I really wish we had a place to see rejected manuscripts. I just want to see these things and judge for myself. Sure it may be easier to read published novels and and judge from that, but even so, there are novels out there that are utter crap.

MasterRegal said:

I really wish we had a place to see rejected manuscripts. I just want to see these things and judge for myself. Sure it may be easier to read published novels and and judge from that, but even so, there are novels out there that are utter crap.

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Check out the web sites of Publish America authors.

Sassenach said:

Check out the web sites of Publish America authors.

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Ouch. Not quite true. PA novels aren't all rejections, though some no doubt have been rejected before being submitted to PA.

A collection of PA novels is simply slush--not necessarily the lower 90% of slush, not necessarily all crap, not necessarily rejects--just slush, period. They have undergone no editorial review to become published. That's all. One in ten PA novels may well show potential. One in a thousand may well stand a chance in the slush at Tor or Random House or [insert Publisher here]. But it's still slush: a collection of manuscripts thought by their own authors to be publishable in their current form. A few of those authors may have been right in thinking so. Most of them were probably dead wrong.

Writing Jedi said:

If I am rejected, is it because my book is just more crap, or could it be my book is damn good but only the exceptionally brilliant get published?

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I thought that only the exceptionally-brilliant-already-published get published. Don't forget that we unpublished writers are also competing against authors who are seeking new agents (and some of those agents are only seeking previously published authors). Then there are the oh-so-lucky ones like Naomi Novik (His Majesty's Dragon) who not only write well but have an agent as a friend.

As a few others pointed out, if you have the talent and the goods, but are as yet unpublished, then your only remaining advantages are time, luck, and perseverance. Sometimes going to a conference or taking a writing class can increase your odds, but those involve financial investments.

MasterRegal said:

I really wish we had a place to see rejected manuscripts. I just want to see these things and judge for myself. Sure it may be easier to read published novels and and judge from that, but even so, there are novels out there that are utter crap.

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I doubt there are many, or any, published novels that are utter crap when compared to slush pile manuscripts. As many an editor has said, I think Gardner Dozois was the last I heard say it, "If you think what I buy is bad, you should see what I reject."

It's true. Compared to the vast majority of slush pile novels, the worst published novel you can find is Nobel Prize material. Even the worst published novels are so much better than just about anything you find in a slush pile that there simply is no comparison.

I mean it. You have no idea how bad most slush novels are, and I mean bad in every possible way. And even the twenty percent or so that aren't truly awful still do not compare at all to even the worst published novels.

There are published novels you might say are crap IF you compare them to the best published novels out there, but when compared to the bottom 90% of slush pile novels, they're solid gold.

Writing Jedi said:

Yes, and I find that very frustrating. After finding some agents that I wanted to try, I found a couple of them only wanted to deal with "established authors only". To me, this makes the agent seem lazy and/or insecure in their own judgement (and thank goodness they don't know who I am, LOL). Then, there was one who will no longer accept "unsolicited queries". What the heck? How is it even possible to get your foot in the door if they won't even look at queries now? Just how do you break in??

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A small hijack here, and a question for Jedi: Are first-time authors still able to get published in Canada without an agent? I've searched for Canadian agents on the web, and I come up almost totally empty-handed. I was planning to sub to Can publishers who do accept unsolicited ms (there are still lots in the med. to small size). Thanks for any help.

Jamesaritchie said:

There are published novels you might say are crap IF you compare them to the best published novels out there, but when compared to the bottom 90% of slush pile novels, they're solid gold.

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This is so true. It seems I can't get out of bed in the morning without someone telling me how bad a writer Dan Brown is, for example, but the real arbiters - the people who part with cold cash for his book - disagree.

I wish I was that bad.

Writing Jedi said:

Then, there was one who will no longer accept "unsolicited queries". What the heck? How is it even possible to get your foot in the door if they won't even look at queries now? Just how do you break in??

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For every one agent who says they won't take unsolicited queries (which one would think they meant to say "unsolicited submissions," quite a different animal), there are twenty other agents who still do.

Scratch that one off the list, and move on to the next.

CaroGirl said:

A small hijack here, and a question for Jedi: Are first-time authors still able to get published in Canada without an agent? I've searched for Canadian agents on the web, and I come up almost totally empty-handed. I was planning to sub to Can publishers who do accept unsolicited ms (there are still lots in the med. to small size). Thanks for any help.

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I'm not a Jedi (though I do play one in the bedroom on occasion...) but:
There are a number of small presses in Canada that accept unsolicited MS, and I believe a couple of the majors do as well. Grudgingly, and without much enthusiasm or effect.

Out of curiousity, Caro Girl, are you a Canadian writer? I ask only because many of the small to medium houses rely on granting for operating and publishing capital, and as a result are pretty closed to all but Canucks.

Odd that you came up nearly empty on your Canadian agent search, however. Start with these (the big 5 or 6 when it comes to Canadian agents):

Anne McDermid (my agent) www.mcdermidagency.com
Denise Bukowski www.thebukowskiagency.com
Helen Heller www.helenhelleragency.com
Westwood Creative Artists
Transatlantic www.tla1.com
Dean Cooke www.cookeagency.a

willietheshakes said:

I'm not a Jedi (though I do play one in the bedroom on occasion...) but:
There are a number of small presses in Canada that accept unsolicited MS, and I believe a couple of the majors do as well. Grudgingly, and without much enthusiasm or effect.

Out of curiousity, Caro Girl, are you a Canadian writer? I ask only because many of the small to medium houses rely on granting for operating and publishing capital, and as a result are pretty closed to all but Canucks.

Odd that you came up nearly empty on your Canadian agent search, however. Start with these (the big 5 or 6 when it comes to Canadian agents):

Anne McDermid (my agent) www.mcdermidagency.com
Denise Bukowski www.thebukowskiagency.com
Helen Heller www.helenhelleragency.com
Westwood Creative Artists
Transatlantic www.tla1.com
Dean Cooke www.cookeagency.a

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Yup, I'm Canadian, which is why I want to query Canadian publishers. I know that many encourage new Canadian writers to add their voice to the writing culture.

Thanks so much for the links. Several of those names look familiar; those must be the ones I came up with. But, in comparison to a US list, that's a pretty paltry number of agents/agencies, isn't it?

CaroGirl said:

Yup, I'm Canadian, which is why I want to query Canadian publishers. I know that many encourage new Canadian writers to add their voice to the writing culture.

Thanks so much for the links. Several of those names look familiar; those must be the ones I came up with. But, in comparison to a US list, that's a pretty paltry number of agents/agencies, isn't it?

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Well, those are the A list, the creme de la creme (look at their client lists and you'll see what I mean). I could give you a dozen or so in the B's, and so on down the line. Given the size of the industry in this country, and the money involved, I think it's actually a fairly significant number.