Suspend Your Disbelief

Posts Tagged ‘slushpile’

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Pubslush your way out of the slushpile

by Lee Thomas

via Mashable. There’s a new route to publishing your book: find the audience first. You’ve heard of Kickstarter, yes? Well, take that model, apply it to your unpublished manuscript, add in a dash of philanthropic good-will you’ve got a potentially game-changing new company: Pubslush. Been trying to find an agent, publisher, anyone to take your manuscript seriously? Perhaps it’s time to take it to the people: The process is simple. First, authors submit ten pages and a summary of their book. Then, we let you browse the submissions based on your preferences. You read a brief overview, and if it […]


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Rejection Love

by J.T. Bushnell

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 would be a necessary complement, I imagined, for a living room mantel cluttered with prestigious awards, framed reviews, and my many excellent books. I’ve long since backed off both the wallpapering and the cluttered mantel, but I haven’t stopped saving the slips. And I have […]


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All right, Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my slushpile.

by Celeste Ng

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. As she puts it, is the public prepared to meet the slush pile? You’ve either experienced slush or you haven’t, and the difference is not trivial. People who have never had the job of reading through the heaps of unsolicited manuscripts sent to anyone even remotely connected with publishing typically […]


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The Death of the Slushpile

by Celeste Ng

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 the floor of the editor’s office to the attaché cases of representatives who can broker introductions to publishing, TV and film executives. The result is a shift in taste-making power onto such agents, managers and attorneys. Theirs are now often the first eyes to make a […]



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