I save rejection slips. In graduate school, someone mentioned an acquaintance who had wallpapered her bathroom with them, and I liked that idea. There was something honest and humbling about it. So when I started submitting my own stories to literary journals, I saved the rejections, imagining I might do the same one day. It [...]

With self-publishing on the rise, anyone can be an author. No more slush pile! No more snooty agents and editors as gatekeepers! The public will decide which books succeed through the glories of democracy!
But what happens to the readers in this scenario? That’s what Laura Miller asks on Salon.com. [...]

The slush pile: Beginning writers get lost in it. Beginning editors sift through it. The Wall Street Journal points out some of the effects of its disappearance:
As writers try to find an agent—a feat harder than ever to accomplish in the wake of agency consolidations and layoffs—the slush pile has been transferred from [...]