101 Reasons to Stop Writing

This year, to mark International Slushpile Bonfire Day, 101 Reasons is proud to reprint the article that started it all. Edgar Harris’ groundbreaking coverage of this previously secret industry event was originally published in RevolutionSF.

New York – One of the most onerous tasks in the magazine and book trade is the sifting of the slush pile. Slush piles, the collection of unsolicited and unagented manuscripts sent to publishers by beginning or would-be authors, are sometimes the source of future literary successes, but more often than not are the source of headaches and indigestion. Many editors privately complain and scream about the uselessness of slush piles, but fearing a backlash from beginning writers who already assume conspiracies keep their work from being printed, very few speak out about the quality and quantity of the material received.

With this in mind, the international literary community announced a special amnesty day for those long-suffering editors forced to sift through manuscripts where everything but the name of the author was misspelled on the title page. April 31, 2002 marks International Slushpile Bonfire Day, where editors and publishers are encouraged to collect all of the unreadable or unusable manuscripts that have built up in their offices, in some cases since 1968, and burn them while drinking wine and singing songs. Since one of the worst offenders is the science fiction / fantasy / horror triumvirate, SF, fantasy, and horror editors are allowed to place the first documents and light the pile when complete.

New York editors gather for Slushpile Bonfire Day

"We’re burning everything," said Pablo Redondo, the organizer of the event and the only editor willing to appear on television. "All of the manuscripts with no merit other than the tag ‘Member, SFWA"’ on the cover page. The manuscripts where the author didn’t bother to read the submission guidelines and dumped off the copy to a magazine that doesn’t buy that sort of fiction, or doesn’t buy fiction at all. The manuscripts where the author already registered the story for a copyright ‘to keep editors from stealing their work’. The Wesley / Worf slash fanfiction sent in ‘just in case we had an interest.’ The manuscripts sent in on toilet paper or on Hello Kitty note paper, and the manuscripts sent with death threats against any editor who plans to reject it, and the 3000-page ’sequels’ to popular books written because the author didn’t like how the original ended. We’re making a big pile in the middle of Times Square, and every editor with a slush pile is invited to pitch in. Big magazines, small book lines, Webzines, rantzines, and weekly newspapers: every editor in the world is welcome to start the healing here."

In return, the rest of the publishing community will protect the identity of the participants in the bonfire and blame the disappearance of the manuscripts on the Postal Service. "After all, they were all contaminated with . . . um . . . anthrax!" said Redondo. "That’s right: anthrax and Dutch Elm Blight! Maybe a bit of tobacco mosaic and some cane toad venom, but anthrax was definitely involved somewhere. Of course, considering the number of manuscripts we’ve received with any number of bodily fluids all over the envelope, nobody will be surprised in the slightest."

If this seems a bit extreme, the words of an editor who wished to remain nameless explained the situation. "We’re constantly reading in Locus or Speculations about the bad editors who take more than a week to accept or reject a story or novel, but these people don’t know what it’s like. An intern who takes eight weeks to reject a story is most likely needing that eight weeks to recover from jamming a set of ten Lee Press-on Nails in her eyes. By the time she’s able to see again, that same author may have sent another eight to ten stories to the slush pile, and the cycle begins again. Even at our best, we can only afford to publish three short stories and a novella a month, which means we publish a grand total of 36 short stories a year, and we get eight to ten THOUSAND manuscripts a month. This is the only way we can keep up with the overload without going insane and shooting at school buses once we got off work.

"Let’s put it another way," the editor continued. "I hear from one writer who suggests that because of the delay in response to his submissions, we call out HAZMAT teams to pluck his envelopes out of the incoming mail and decontaminate them before opening them. I can’t bring myself to tell him that we can’t afford a HAZMAT team, and each and every one of his stories makes me scrub my arms with carbolic acid whenever I open it. Each one of his stories literally takes away my will to live, and I shudder every time I see his return address on an envelope. And he’s one of hundreds out there, maybe thousands. I have to buy elbow-length rubber gloves on credit just to keep up."

Electronic manuscripts are no exception. "Since the advent of the Web, we’ve been receiving material from people who apparently learned to type by throwing their cats at the keyboard, and some of it is so horrible that we don’t let it dare escape," said Redondo. "Some of it is so foul that we’ve decided to include hard drives in the bonfire, because any hard drive or mail server that contained that story is obviously too contaminated for future use. The New York Fire Department had problems with this at first due to environmental issues, but when we explained the evil that would be removed from the universe by its extirpation, they understood."

An unsolicited submission is thrown on the fire

Surprisingly, no news of this action appeared in any of the journals dedicated to collecting existing and new writing markets, such as Writer’s Digest, The Writer, The Gila Queen’s Guide To Markets, and the innumerable Web sites cataloguing every market that pays in money, credit, advertising space, or raw meat still on the bone. Redondo said that this was deliberate. "The only publication that contained details was the American Editor’s Association newsletter Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash, and anyone who leaked the details to the general public was to be appointed the person in charge of dealing with the repercussions. I myself am going into hiding in New Zealand after this, and I’m not returning to work until after I’ve had extensive cosmetic surgery."

The response from the beginning writer community was, as expected, swift and terrible. A representative of the Eltingville (New Jersey) Science Fiction Writer’s Circle and Costuming Guild released a statement that read, in part, "We decry any efforts to rid the world of our works, and the ESFWC&CG will start up a GeoCities site to hold all of these orphaned stories until the New York literary establishment comes to its senses and buys them back for their full value." When the representative was contacted and asked whether starting up a magazine or book line might be of more value than lambasting the existing editors, the response was "Of course not. They’re supposed to pay us for our work; we’re not supposed to pay to get it published. It’s not our fault that everyone submits stories but nobody pays to read the stories submitted, and we’ll all go to SFWA to complain if the magazines go under. Now go away: I have a Buffy / Farscape crossover novel that I have to get off to St. Martin’s this evening."

Although the editors and publishers in other countries were sympathetic to the idea, it is currently unknown whether or not they will participate. At least one Australian editor expressed support for the bonfire, saying "Australia has only six million people, and between the four science fiction magazines in the country, we’ve received submissions from at least four million. Either we have a lot of razorback hunters and crocodile skinners with plenty of free time in the evening who will suddenly buy subscriptions so they can see their stories in print, or we’re going to have a bonfire of our own in our future."

– Edgar Harris is the former Sports Editor at “Science Fiction Age”. After this article was first published, Harris retired from most forms of journalism, and now makes his living as a horticulturalist specializing in carnivorous plants. He is attempting to breed a species of Sarracenia that will feed on unsolicited manuscripts, to provide a year-round, ecologically-friendly alternative to the bonfire.

101 Reasons is proud to welcome a new contributor to our ranks; one with impeccable credentials and decades of experience, both as a journalist and in the publishing industry. Sir Thomas de Kay’s column "Balderdash" has appeared for many years in the Guardian newspaper (South Gloucestershire edition). This is the first time he has written for a Web-based publication.

In an industry besieged by variables, there is but one reliable constant in publishing — everyone thinks they know how to make the business better (more profitable, more reliable, more efficient, or "fairer", whatever that means in their perspective), and they are all wrong.

To further understand their wrongness, the set of everyone must be divided into three groups:

• People outside the publishing business, who look at a few public statistics and performance indicators and shake their heads in wonder at how anyone in the industry makes any money at all;
• People with a professional stake in the business, who look at their own performance indicators and wonder if they could be making more money if they had control over the other segments of the industry; and
• Whiners.

It’s this third group that provides the most fun — mostly because they think they’re in the first group.

In my Guardian column, I frequently lampooned the half-baked, self-centred, hopelessly flawed and often counter-productively idiotic theories of journalists, authors and social commentators who pointed their rose-tinted telescopes at a segment of the publishing industry and pronounced it any number of unflattering adjectives — usually without explicitly stating their central complaint, that no-one was buying their book. Begging your indulgence, it’s a tradition I wish to continue.

Sramana Mitra’s column at Forbes.com

In this instalment, we will examine the argument presented by one Sramana Mitra, in a recent column for Forbes.com called "How Amazon Could Change Publishing". Now, I know little about Ms Mitra beyond her biography, which says she’s an entrepreneur and strategy consultant. Please remember this fact.

If you haven’t read the article, fear not: I’m told that you can click on the words in blue in the previous paragraph. However, the thrust of her argument is that Amazon (the web retailer, not the river) could — nay, should — dominate the publishing industry, removing the "middle-man", and the entire concept of publishing as it is known today, by printing and retailing every book directly.

I’m going to leave that elephant in the room for a few minutes, and deconstruct some points in her argument. Mitra states that:

• the publishing industry is "archaic beyond belief" — without providing any archaeological evidence. Yes, books are essentially the same medium of dark ink printed on light paper that they’ve been since Gutenberg, a system almost as archaic as the outmoded practice of growing food in the ground.
• the industry "treats its most important asset–the author–badly" — though the only suggestion of bad treatment is that authors don’t get a big enough piece of the pie.
• Amazon is "the largest bookseller in the world" — which may be true, but it still only accounts for around 15% of the book market.
• Vanity publisher iUniverse’s biggest seller to date is Amy Fisher’s memoir, a "NYT bestseller" that sold 34,000 copies. I’m sure there’s a more interesting story in why that book wasn’t published by a traditional publisher, involving the words "market disinterest" and "shitness", but 34,000 copies of a "celebrity" memoir is pretty unremarkable, and really only serves to demonstrate how ineffective the vanity press approach is.
• "The agent takes 15% to 20%" of the gross proceeds from book sales. This is flat-out wrong, and its inclusion demonstrates a fundamental flaw in Mitra’s limited understanding of how publishing works. Agents take 15% of the author’s contracted payment for a book, not the gross (on a typical 10% royalty-after-advance contract, this amounts to no more than 1.5% of the gross). Even if this ridiculous number was true, the other figures she gives — 50% to retailers, and 20% to publishers — leaves 10-15% completely unaccounted for.
• "On a book that costs $24.95, the author gets at most $1 to $1.50" — or so says the CEO of a print-on-demand publisher, always the first choice for accurate statistics on revenues from traditional book publishing.

This is a blinkered, seriously inaccurate summation of the economics of traditional book publishing. But it’s the necessary foundation for Mitra’s absurd theory:

[Amazon] could directly engage with authors and cut out the middlemen: the agent and the publisher. That would free up 30% to 40% of the pie, which can easily be split between Amazon and the author.

It gets better:

Let’s say, in the new world, Amazon becomes the retailer, marketer, publisher and agent combined and takes 65% of the revenues, offering 35% to the author–we end up with a much better, fairer world.

And the result of this:

Amazon likely will use its power to build direct relationships with authors and gradually phase out publishers and agents. It will first go after the independent print-on-demand self-publishers and get the best authors from that world [like Amy Fisher]. Amazon will then take on the large publishers.

It’s difficult for a man of my years to be sure he grasps all the implications of such outstanding wrongheadedness. But let me try to elaborate how I interpret this:

• Mitra’s main issue with the publishing industry is that it doesn’t pay authors enough.
• The solution to this is to let one company completely dominate the publishing industry, essentially becoming the publishing industry.
• Once Amazon has established its monopoly on the printed word, it will freely decide to give authors more money, and authors will all be delighted.
• Every existing "middle-man" in the industry — agents, publishers, and all other retailers — can just fuck off, and die.

Let me just reiterate that this plan is coming from an entrepreneur and strategy consultant — someone to whom those "middle-men" would usually turn, to consult on a strategy to avoid this exact scenario. Nowhere in the article does Mitra hint at how other companies could combat this, or even survive in such a market. (The article is clearly written for Forbes’ ambitious-but-uninformed-writer demographic.)

There are any number of minor concerns you might have about such a "change" — such as, the death of free speech and independent thought — but my chief concern is the staggering hubris and myopia demonstrated by one of Mitra’s remarks in the commentary after the article:

As for authors choosing to work with Amazon - well, if Amazon can guarantee that using their recommendation / co-branding / merchandising system, they can sell a million copies of my book, why wouldn’t I work with them exclusively? I don’t know about you, but I certainly would.

Not only is this a blunt statement of Mitra’s prejudice — she’s only thinking as a (possible) author, not at all as a rational economist — but it’s also prima facie stupidity. Amazon is not going to guarantee to any author, save maybe Dan Brown, that they’ll sell a million copies. Given their 15% share of the book market, only the uber-bestsellers like James Patterson are even likely to sell over a million copies of a title through Amazon alone (Amy Fisher is certainly out of the race). Based on Mitra’s figures of 35% royalties on a book selling for $24.95, that’s an advance of $8.7 million dollars. (There’s the solution, then. Authors should agree to work with Amazon exclusively if they guarantee payment of $8.7 million dollars per book.)

There are problems in the publishing industry, certainly — but the solution to this, and indeed any economic problem, has never been "Let the big guy own everything". The publishing industry will survive, as long as it continues to refrain from taking advice from unpublished authors.

Sir Thomas Evelyn de Kay’s long-running Guardian column "Balderdash" won an unprecedented five straight Jonathan Swift Awards ("the Swifty") between 1983-88, for Best Use of Metaphor or Allegory In Social or Artistic Criticism.

If you would like to recommend an article about books or publishing for the Balderdash treatment, please send the URL to balderdash@101reasonstostopwriting.com.

It was one year ago, yesterday, that the (still) most famous of literary agent bloggers decided to hang up her stilettos and retire, ending a three-year run of advice, rebuke, clarification and consternation. (Granted, in the first year she only made a couple of posts, but the last two years were much more fruitful.)

At the time, I posted a farewell message, which had the distinction of being one of the last outgoing links on her blog, before the lights went out and the dynamically-generated archives were cached for the last time. The sentiments I expressed are still true.

Patricia Wood’s blog yesterday hosted a virtual get-together of old Snarklings, which was virtually attended by Miss Snark herself, in the comments.

While the “Snarkives” are still of immeasurable value, both to unpublished writers looking to understand the submission process, and to social researchers looking for a corpus of whiny protestations from hapless rubes convinced that the process will magically alter itself to accommodate them, Miss Snark’s voluminous advice can essentially be reduced to two simple principles:

• Follow the damn directions
• Don’t be a nitwit

It was the general inability of the unpublished writers of the world to understand and apply these principles that drove most of the content on Miss Snark’s blog, and ultimately led to its abrupt conclusion.

With the glorious advantage of hindsight, it’s clear that Miss Snark fell victim to what should be known as Blogger’s Ennui — the tipping point where the demands of maintaining a blog outweigh the pleasure of it. In Miss Snark’s case, though, she was essentially a victim of her audience, and the narrowness of her topic. There are only so many issues relating to queries and submissions that can be discussed in general terms, and as her audience grew, so did the number of nitwits (a proportional constant in any population) — who would ask either the same questions again, demonstrating their inability to grasp the simple concept of search, or ask essentially the same questions frustratingly modulated from the original by some absurdly trivial point of contention.

It takes a lot to crush the spirit of someone who purposefully armors themselves with sarcasm, but the hapless rubes managed it. I imagine that by the end, her gmail account must have become a slushpile in itself, yet another accumulation of inane and unremarkable queries to sift through looking for a question worth answering — for no pay, no commission, no hope of reward other than the dwindling, and eventually non-existent fun of it.

It’s fitting (though entirely coincidental) that the anniversary of her blog’s closure falls in International Slushpile Awareness Month. If the divine Miss S had managed to hang on until the comforting catharsis of International Slushpile Bonfire Day (May 31st), she might still be blogging.

The open-air slushpile at a major New Orleans-based publisher. (Photo: FEMA)

International Slushpile Awareness Month is an annual celebration of the unsung heroes of the publishing process: the Slush Readers, those hardy adventurers who pan for gold at the edges of the vast wasteland of sediment at the mouth of the River of Unreadable Shit.

Without them, modern publishing would be entirely (instead of mostly) written-to-formula potboilers from established hacks, cash-ins by Internet celebrities, political gasbag rhetoric assembled by interns, and stream-of-consciousness doorstops where the glue is still warm.

For writers, it’s also a chance to think about the Slushpile, and your place within it. Are you truly expecting that someone will jump at the chance to publish/represent you, or are you just hoping for validation and a free critique? Is your work really that one-in-a-thousand that deserves consideration, or are you merely hoping to skip the next nine-hundred-and-ninety-eight drafts?

For editors, agents and assorted slush readers: we feel your pain.

Previous Coverage

For those of you who missed last year’s event, here’s a roundup:

• International Slushpile Awareness Month: They screen out the unpublishable, the unpalatable, the unreadable short stories and novels, in search of that one manuscript in a thousand that is original, well written, proofread, spellchecked and printed in 12 pt Courier, and which might be good enough for agents and publishers to invest time and money to release to a public who might be willing to pay to read it.
• Top Ten Reasons You’re Stuck in the Slushpile: #10. You addressed your submission to "The Slushpile".
• Calling for a Slushpile Armistice: An end to the partisan bitterness which prevents people on both sides from properly accepting blame for their part in the slow downfall of publishing.
• Reason #14: Youre Speling is Atrowshus: A sizeable proportion of every slushpile is comprised of randomly, punctuate’d, fonetikly riten first drafts so bad, so head-shakingly wrong that they would make proofreaders weep and copyeditors resign, if they didn’t initially make slush readers shudder with fear as they drop the submission into the Burn This pile.

We also ran a couple of polls. You can view the original results, and vote (again):

• Poll: What Do You Think of the Slushpile?
• Poll: What’s the longest you’ve waited for a response to a submission?

Slushpile Demotivators

We’ve published several Slushpile-themed Demotivators here at Reasons Central:

Click on the images to see a larger version, download wallpaper, or add a comment.

International Slushpile Bonfire Day

International Slushpile Awareness Month culminates on May 31 with International Slushpile Bonfire Day, a universally-recognised tradition where agents and publishers take the opportunity to hand over their accumulated backlog of unsolicited submissions to Nature’s own impartial and inexhaustible reader, the naked flame.

ISBD in 2007:

• Announcing International Slushpile Bonfire Day: It’s an opportunity for agents, publishers, their assistants, readers and interns to meet, socialise, vent, and publicly exorcise the curse of their profession, the thing that has made the offices unworkable, their schedules and budgets incalculable and their front doors impassable: the unsolicited manuscript.
• ISBD For Editor, Agents, and Slush Readers: If you’re new to the biz, or your office is too far from the nearest organised bonfire, or you’;re hopelessly agoraphobic, fear not. You can still join the festivities.
• ISBD For Writers: Without a doubt, deep in the shadows of your fragile heart, you know that some of the stuff you’ve written has all the literary merit of initials carved in a tree the day before a forest fire. Why not discover the healing powers of ISBD for yourself, by making your own contribution?
• Breaking News: International Slushpile Bonfire Day a ‘Blazing’ Success: The city’s publishing establishment came together this evening in Times Square to celebrate International Slushpile Bonfire Day, an annual festival to purge the industry’s ever-growing backlog of unpublishable manuscripts. New York’s literary elite mingled with industry professionals to swap stories of the worst of the worst writing to come over the transom, while truckloads of paper holding the creative output of thousands of untalented writers were dumped into a prescribed area and ignited.
• Five Years Later, Did We Learn Anything? Paul Riddell explains the origins of ISBD, for those of you who can stand the metafiction.

It’s always good to see the writers of unread books focusing on the important things in life. Since such scams as authors putting in orders for unreturnable books with fake names and credit card numbers don’t have quite the success they allegedly had (and I say “allegedly”, because ordering a book and then refusing to pick it up in order to increase sales figures has about all the aplomb and craft as protecting one’s copyright by mailing copies of an unreadable story to oneself), enthusiasts of POD mills such as PublishAmerica have struck back at the real enemy keeping them down.

Are they trying to augment or overhaul the existing book distribution system? Are they trying to find audiences for the nearly 300,000 books published every year? Are they trying to prepare for the nearly inevitable collapse of Borders Books and Music chain by constructing alternatives to the ever-decreasing number of Frumpy Fiftysomething’s Used Books and Quiet Desperation Emporium franchises? (And has anyone noticed that the same people who bitch up a storm about how terrible it is that the big chain bookstores have driven Frumpy Fiftysomething’s to near-extinction are the same ones who’d set fire to a bus full of paraplegic nuns for the opportunity to have their books carried by those same chain stores?) Could they be focusing how bookselling is a business and not a workfare program for otherwise unemployable English and journalism majors, and that small publishers and bookstores alike might want to stop waiting for angel investors to swoop in and save them from their fiscal and promotional incompetence?

Naah. The real concern is that Amazon.com won’t allow POD publishers print their books through any printer other than Booksurge. And since PublishAmerica and other such vaunted and highly respected publishers of high-quality reading material want to maximize their return by printing the books bought by these writers by the long ton for “promotional purposes,” it’s not in the vanity publishers’ interests to give Amazon their business. Oh, woe, the whole of the publishing world is about to collapse!

To take a quote from one of the champions of the POD industry and put it very slightly out of context, “Authors slap books up on Amazon.com all the time, don’t market them, and sell zero copies.” Yet somehow they look surprised when someone at Amazon decided to take the POD money sink (in server space, in moderation of comment boards, and responding to the paranoiacs who are certain that Amazon is keeping their works of genius from bestseller status) and find the only way to turn it into a source of revenue, however small. A word to the wise: if your book sells so poorly that the lack of a “Buy” button on an Amazon.com page makes that much of an impact upon your sales, you might want to consider your place in the publishing food chain and stop writing.

– Paul Riddell has advocated stopping writing for the last six years, and tries his best to practice what he preaches. This is why his blog is shutting down in June.