Does the slush pile still live? (old thread)

Lindo said:

Is anybody aware of publishers who have an open door to un-agented manuscripts?

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You may have heard of authonomy.com It's HarperCollins UK's 'electronic slush pile'. It's a sort of cage match among thousands of authors to reach the top of the heap, where HC 'might' consider your MS.

If nothing else, it's worth exploring as a cross section of what publishers are receiving over the transom these days. Most is, well, slush, but the 2% or 5% that bubbles to the top makes me pause and examine my own writing again.

PeeDee said:

Lord of the Rings is effective because it has an End.

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As has often been pointed out here, LOTR is also about the most inappropriate model to cite when discussing trilogies or series. It was written as a single stand-alone book, and was only subdivided into three volumes at the insistence of the publisher, because the single tome was so ginormous.

Oh no! It's the Night of the Living Dead Threads!

As for LotR, the great irony is that single volume editions of the novel have long been widely available.

Gillhoughly said:

Yuh-huh--write well, find agent who sell.

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Yup... I just read that Sara Gruen had over 129 rejections until a small agency took her on... and that's after her ms. sat in the slush for 8 months. And it almost didn't get sold (you know how editors are... ). And now it's a best-seller and a major motion picture. So write a good book, and persevere. That's all you can control. But if you write a good book, chances are it will find a home... sooner and later.

Phaeal said:

Oh no! It's the Night of the Living Dead Threads!

As for LotR, the great irony is that single volume editions of the novel have long been widely available.

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Someone just sold his 1000-page novel to an indie press... Now, I want to see that turn into a trilogy.

Well, with the rise of e-books, length would logically be less a factor. And, yes, a thousand page MS is an impressive sell, especially if it will appear in paper.

LOTR was divided into three volumes because of the limitations of then-available book-binding technology.

That's also why it took so long for Dune to find a print publisher, and why it eventually came out from a press that had never previously published fiction but did publish very physically thick books. (There wasn't a question of Dune being unpublishable because of its content, or its quality or sales potential being unrecognized by those stupid editors -- it had already been serialized in a magazine, and was an award-winning novel before it came out in book form.)

James D. Macdonald said:

LOTR was divided into three volumes because of the limitations of then-available book-binding technology.

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That's not exactly right. Books much larger were being printed and bound in 1954, but the price point was not considered cost-effective for fiction.

(The thousand-page and multi-thousand-page books being printed and bound in those days were generally academic reference works, which carried a hefty pricetag because of the limitations of the technology, but which people would buy nonetheless because they needed that specific information, whereas a thousand-page novel was competing against more affordable books.)

I say this not to be the most nitpicky of nitpickers, but because I often hear people state "Printers couldn't print books more than 400 pages long in 1954" when the issue was that they weren't able to print books of that length affordably enough for them to be competitive in the fiction marketplace.