Confessions of a Big Six Editor: The Triumph of the Slush Pile

Thanks to everybody who came by and/or commented on last week’s post on Amazon reviews. You gave the blog its own Black Friday, with a record 1200 hits on Friday alone. 9000 visits, 140 comments, and counting. It’s now our #1 post of all time!

But I seem to have seriously miffed a lot of professional reviewers who thought I was lecturing THEM—telling them not to give negative reviews.

Major, major apologies, reviewers! NOT what I meant to say at all.

Without negative reviews, the positives wouldn't mean a thing.

NOTA BENE, SCRIVENERS: BOOK REVIEWERS ARE DEITIES WHOM WE ALL LOVE AND ADORE. They are our helpers, not the enemy. They are the new gatekeepers. To learn more about how phenomenally important they are, read my post THE NEW GATEKEEPERS and my interview with book reviewer Danielle Smith here. 

The purpose of my post was to tell the non-Amazon-savvy readers in my own demographic they now have more power than they realize, and that it’s easier to exercise than they may think.

But it seems the non-savvy Boomer was me. I talked about review conventions that are kind of obvious to anybody who’s been to Amazon a few times, but are apparently (sotto voce) THE FACTS THAT MUST NOT BE NAMED. 

I didn't know. Seriously. Sorry.

But, since humans are always more likely to be more vocal with complaints than with praise, I will continue to urge fans to support their favorite authors and reviewers. 

If that gets me more cyberbullying, so be it. I still think that if you love a book, it's good to say so. And it only takes a minute. 

As I said in last week’s post, if a review is useful, whether positive or negative—say that too. Good reviewers need our support just as much as good authors. Publishing is a business, and professionalism should be rewarded.

I also want to apologize to any Boomers who got their feelings hurt when I said some of us don’t automatically think of leaving an Amazon review and may not be acquainted with online review conventions. Ruth and I are both Boomers ourselves, specializing in what Ruth laughingly calls “biddylit”—that is, women’s fiction for grown-up ladies--many of whom tell us they're terrified to leave reviews.

I assumed this was because most of us born before 1965 treat tech as a second language, and don’t have the automatic tech instincts of Millennials and Gen X-ers, but to the Bill Gateses and Steve Jobses (we’ll miss you, dude) out there: sincere apologies.

Yes, the whole durn computer/Interwebz thing was invented by us Boomers. Yay Mickey Mouse Club, the Beatles, and Woodstock!

A number of people argued that, with Amazon becoming one big slush pile, the reviews should have stricter guidelines.

I agree. 

There’s no doubt a lot of not-ready-for-prime-time stuff is getting uploaded to Amazon every day, and (OK, I'll whisper it: A LOT OF AUTHORS DO GET FAUX RAVES FROM THEIR SISTERS AND THEIR COUSINS AND THEIR AUNTS.) Those are just as unhelpful as the ones written by trolls who leave semi-literate 20-word negatives for 1000s of books they’ve never read. (Which, BTW, happens to Big 6-ers as much as indies.)

The Kindle revolution means that we bypass the gatekeepers. Which turns us—the readers—into gatekeepers.

So how do we tell if a book is part of the Konrath’s tsunami of crap  or a brilliant new find?

We have to learn a new set of skills. 

Readers can learn which one of these is more positive:

“*****5-stars: The author is a friend from church who got me to write this in exchange for bringing her tuna surprise hot dish to the Sunday social, and I guess her book is OK if you like a bunch of filthy sex in a romance novel.”

“**2-stars: This is the most brilliantly written romance novel I’ve ever read. Strong, believable characters, eye-opening insights, and a page-flipping story, but hey, it’s a romance--not exactly A la Recherche du Temps Perdu.”

But unfortunately the Amazon algorithms can’t read between those lines. They only read the stars, so that leaves more work for us, the readers. A 3-starred book is going to be way harder to find, but keep looking.

As a customer, you can also look at the book description, the blurbs and, if you’re in the US, get a hefty sneak peek into the book—usually several chapters.

That makes you a new version of the old gatekeeper: the publishing house slush reader.

So who is better to teach us than Ruth Harris, former slush reader for Bantam?

Ruth went on to become a senior editor at both Bantam and Dell—and then publisher at Kensington, as well as the author of a whole lot of NYT bestselling novels. She knows the business from all sides.

In this piece, she reminds us of three hopeful things:

1) Great careers DO start in the slush pile.

2) There are a lot of seriously clueless people out there, so if you can read and write English, know how to follow directions, and are taking your meds, you’re way ahead of the game.

3) Somebody does actually read your submissions, (although nowadays that somebody is unlikely to be paid.)

TRIUMPH OF THE SLUSH PILE

by Ruth Harris

Back in the twentieth century when I started out in publishing, publishers did not insist that all submissions be agented, and direct submissions, aka the slush pile, served as training wheels (more like hamster wheels as it turned out) for young editors.

Beginning a new job at Bantam, I was assigned a desk in the secretarial bullpen where a monster stack of manuscripts waited for me. My job was to read them to see if any might be worth passing on to one of the older, more experienced editors.

Conscientious and wanting to impress the senior editor who was my boss, I began to read, at first assiduously finishing one manuscript (I had learned by then they were referred to as “ms” in written communications) after another.

The quasi-literate (they were the ones who loved "big" words and used them incorrectly), sub-literate and illiterate were sandwiched at random between the religious visionaries, the sexually shall-we-say peculiar, and the politically febrile.

There were the demented, the deranged and the delusional, submissions from jails and penitentiaries.

Most of all there were would-be writers who had never met a comma or, sometimes, even a paragraph, who had no idea how to shape a scene or introduce a character much less write a line of dialogue that any human being might actually have uttered. To those wannabes (that word didn’t exist then), quote marks also often seemed a galactic mystery as did sentences containing both a subject and a verb.

I was no literary snob and my reading choices embraced the entire range from Willa Cather to Mickey Spillane—but the slush pile did me in.

No matter how fast I plowed through the mss (that’s the plural of ms), attaching Bantam’s form rejection letter to the top and placing them in the required SASE (Self Addressed Stamped Envelope), the pile never diminished.

Every morning and every afternoon (two mail deliveries a day back then) the mail room guy dumped another stack of mss on my desk.

They were typewritten, smeary, sometimes single-spaced, sometimes sans margins, punctuation or paragraphing; some were hand written, scrawled in old-fashioned school notebooks, the kind with the marbelized black-and-white cardboard covers. They were held together by rubber bands, string, yarn and, once in a while, ribbon.

The pages were occasionally pristine but more predictably smudged, dog eared, defaced by icky, unidentifiable substances, or dotted with coffee stains and cookie crumbs left by previous editors who had read—or made a valiant effort to read—the submission in question and, as they say in the trade, “passed.” 

I quickly learned to read the first one or two pages, maybe scan a few more, then flip to somewhere around the middle to see if anything had improved and, if any shred of hope remained, look at the last page or two to see if a more careful reading might be called for. (Dream on.)

The only further communiqué from these would-be authors was an occasional complaint that they’d left a piece of white thread on page 125 and, when the ms came bouncing back, the piece of white thread remained in place.

Why, they wanted to know, hadn’t the entire ms been read? How could we (the nameless editors because no one ever signed a name to a form rejection) reject their masterpiece without reading it in its entirety?

Let me count the ways.

I moved on and so did the slush pile: to agents who weren’t about to pay a young assistant to get the slush sorted—by now, it was their unpaid interns who slogged through the mess. (As opposed to the mss.) There was to be a double benefit: publishers no longer had to pay salaried employees to sift through the slush pile and, in the bargain, submissions had now been vetted before appearing on an editor’s desk.

As time passed, we arrived somewhere in first decade of the twenty-first century and reading the slush pile had gone from paid labor to unpaid labor.

A sort of progress, I guess, but one last glimmer of progress beckoned:

The Internet.

The quick and easy upload that earned Amazon a 70% cut every time a 99c book was purchased. Amazon had managed what once had seemed the impossible: it turned a huge time and money sink into a profit center.

Or, as my Mom would say: Someone had finally figured out how to turn shit into Shinola.

And guess what? The same problems that beset me years ago at my piled-to-the-rafters desk persist today in cyber-ville.

• Mangled grammar? Check.

• Run on sentences and run on paragraphs? Check.

• Typo infestations? Check.

• Terrible formatting,

• No discernable plot,

• “Characters” unrecognizable as human beings,

• Blobs, clunks and chunks of back story bulldozed in,

• Hopeless attempts at description,

• Even more hopeless efforts at narrative,

• Character names that change from one chapter to the next.

• And so on. And on.

About the only thing that’s different is that today’s digitized slush pile comes sans icky unidentifiable splotches and the coffee stains and cookie crumbs left by previous readers.

...and the little piece of white thread on page 125.

PS: Lest you think me excessively bitter and cynical, I will add that the SP is not absolutely, totally 1000% hopeless.

There are writers who have made it out. Stephanie Meyers (Twilight) was rescued from an agent’s SP. Philip Roth back in 1958 from a Paris Review SP (you can look it up on Google). And, IIRC, Kathleen Woodiwiss, one of the queens of the Bodice Rippers, was originally pulled out of the SP as was Rosemary Rogers. At Avon. By a talented editor who knew what Freud didn't: she knew what women wanted.

*******

Please Note: We are very much aware there are lots of thoroughly professional indies, who are producing work as good or better than what was vetted by those slushpile readers of yesteryear. (Ruth is self-pubbing these days, and Anne is with two small publishers.)

But because self-pubbers aren’t vetted, it’s up to you the reader to learn to weed out the bad ones—but I’ll bet you won’t have to read as far as that “white thread” page to spot them.

How about you, scriveners? Do you feel competent to do your own vetting, or do you think interns do a better job? Do you want your book to get the stamp of approval of the Big Six before you’ll feel OK about seeing it for sale?

This week, MWiDP is launching its second Saffina DesforgesPresents anthology: Kindle Coffee Break Collection. Anne's story VIVE LA REVOLUTION appears in the anthology (caution: very noir Hollywood humor there. For fans of dark satire only.)

What Readers WON’T Miss about Corporate Book Publishers When They’re Gone.

Last week the Wall Street Journal published an article by Eric Felten called “Cherish the Book Publishers—You’ll Miss Them When They’re Gone” .

A lot of self-published writers responded with suitable outrage and derision. You can read Konrath’s “Tsunami of Crap” rebuttal here. But what offended me was not only Mr. Felten’s condescending attitude toward self-publishers, but his scorn for readers.

His argument was that, although some indie publishers may be making “earnest efforts,” the rest are unscrupulous scammers who are “creating books by the ream merely by grabbing a few pages of text from websites and dumping them into ultraquickie e-books.” 

He’s sure the readers of the world will rush en masse to Amazon to buy scores of un-previewed copies of  non-books without noticing they have no content.

Without our ever-watchful Big-Six Brothers, Mr. Felten fears, we’ll become brainless book-scarfing zombies, consuming everything on offer in the moldering pile of dreck that is Amazon.com.

Yup. I’d sure miss having a bunch of corporate guys in New York telling me what to read. How would I know I love zombipocalypses and dystopian steampunk this year if nice Mr. Simon and Mr. Schuster hadn’t told me?

And even worse, when those poor corporate publishing conglomerates get driven out of business by the evil Kindle-insurgents (not that I’m sure that’s going to happen) the mindless reading public might start buying some of those genres the Big Six have pronounced “dead.”

In fact—I hope this doesn’t shock you—there is evidence this kind of literary necrophilia is already happening in the dark corners of Cyberia as we speak.

Yes, it's true: customers who are forced to vet their own books are allowing these zombie genres to attack their brains. Here are a few:

Westerns: Westerns are as defunct as Buffalo Bill—everybody knows that. The last bookstore where I worked insisted we shelve the small collection of westerns on the bottom shelf of the darkest corner in the back, because “nobody buys them.”

So every time an adult male would come in, looking a bit lost, I’d ask if he was looking for the westerns. His face would light up and he’d go forage in the darkness and emerge with three or four titles (usually saying he’d have bought more if squatting to look at that low shelf weren’t so hard on his knees.) We could never keep the inventory stocked. So eventually, there were no more westerns in the store. So our western sales numbers plummeted. Which proved they don’t sell, right?

But, um, remember that John Locke guy—the one who just sold a million self-pubbed titles? Guess what he writes.

Yup. Westerns.

Chick Lit: It’s axiomatic that everybody hates Chick Lit. Except, well…chicks. Women love romantic comedies. But because the Big Six overbought a bunch of inferior Bridget Jones-wannabes in the middle of the last decade, the genre has been deemed as out-of-date as a pair of 70’s platform shoes.

But oh, gee: one of the first self e-pubbed books the idiot readers made #1 on Amazon was Elisa Lorello’s romantic comedy, Faking It. Amazon Encore has since launched Faking It as well as many other Lorello comedies in paper and she now has a very nice career.

And with the indie revolution, scores of websites like Chick Lit is Not Dead, Chick Lit Central the Blog  review great romantic comedies weekly. Most of the books are self-published. That’s where I found the fantastic books of indie superstar, Sibel Hodge who has re-invented the 1930’s style screwball comedy/mystery—proving chicks can be funny and smart, too.

Sexy Commercial Fiction: Remember big, sexy, guilty-pleasure beach books? They were pulpy, fun fiction for grown-ups that didn’t involve either the high school prom or gruesome child-rape-murders as a central plot device. From Anita Loos’ Gentlemen Prefer Blondes to Grace Metalious’s Peyton Place, to Jacqueline Susann and Judith Kranz, then Ruth Harris, Olivia Goldsmith and Terry McMillan, the 20^th century provided big, yummy books to shock a little and entertain a lot. They were favorite companions for beach and travel or escape from almost anything. There were no vampires, werewolves or Halloween creatures of any kind. The only man-eaters were busty blondes with dark pasts. The books appealed to women of all ages. Even some men.

When was the last time you found a book remotely like them offered by a Big Six publisher? But guess what? Ruth Harris has re-released her 80s and 90s titles on Kindle and they’ve been consistently top sellers ever since. I sure hope we get more.

Unsentimental Women’s Fiction: Oprah’s book club did much to promote women’s fiction of a particular heartfelt, victimized-woman variety. But the scramble for the magic Oprah stamp-of-approval meant that tougher, funnier, more ironic women’s fiction fell by the wayside. Oprah’s club is gone now, but I don't see the return of the books it pushed aside. Will indie publishing provide us with our next Dorothy Parker, Muriel Spark, Fay Weldon, or Erica Jong?

I sure hope so. Erica Jong herself friended me on Twitter last week. Kind of made my day. She has a sexy new book out called Sugar in my Bowl. OK, it's nonfiction, and it's a collection of essays by 26 women writers. But I’m going to take that as a sign that her tough, sexy attitude may return to the mainstream of women’s fiction. As she said, “The trick is not how much pain you feel—but how much joy you feel. Any idiot can feel pain. Life is full of excuses to feel pain, excuses not to live.”

Crime Novels that skip the torture-porn: Anybody who’s ever worked in a bookstore knows that most book buyers are women over fifty. They’re always asking for something new and exciting. But they usually ask that it not be gruesome. For some reason, a lot of women don’t find rape and torture of other women that entertaining. But they still enjoy an exciting mystery or thriller.

Self-publishers can now provide an alternative to the books churned out by the writing stable that is known as James Patterson. (Although Patterson-brand fans will be happy to know that he sold his next 13 books this week—all of which will debut before 2014.)

Reality-based romance: Older romance fans are not as likely to fantasize about having sex with characters in children’s fairy tales as the younger set. They tend to prefer romance novels with a little more plotting and a little less boinking, but they don’t necessarily want preachy religious fiction.

So what? Nobody cares if Grandma buys books, do they? Well, um, maybe somebody does. I’ve heard a new ebook company is going to re-release the “sweet” romances of the 80s and 90s. Big sales predicted to new retirees, who are going to be in the market for a lot of reading material.

So—sorry Mr. Felden—I’m not going to miss having the marketing departments of a handful of New York companies telling me what I’m allowed to read.

I don’t mean to say that the Big Six don’t publish fantastic books in the approved genres. Their authors worked very, very hard to get those great book deals.

Thing is: these days, the writers getting the great book deals are increasingly starting out as those “earnest” self-pubbed authors Mr. Felten showers with condescension.

Like Mark Edwards and Louise Voss, who have had phenomenal success in the UK in the last few months with their self-pubbed thrillers Killing Cupid and Catch Your Death. This week they have signed a big deal with Harper Collins. There’s an inspiring write-up on their success from fellow Kindle bestseller Mark Williams at his blog this week.

As Mark says, “funny thing about the gatekeepers.  They claim to be protecting us from the drivel that self-publishers stick on Amazon. Yet the moment that ‘drivel’ starts to sell it suddenly acquires some hitherto non-existent star quality that the gatekeepers are desperate to get the rights to.”

In other good publishing news: literary Author Samuel Park—a regular visitor to this blog—has had his new novel This Burns My Heart (Simon and Schuster, debuts July 12, 2011) selected as one of the Best Books of July by Amazon. 

How about you, fellow bookpersons? Are there book genres you remember fondly that have disappeared from the shelves? What genre would you like to see brought back from the dead?

********

Next Sunday, we’ll have a guest post from a writer who is hedging her bets and taking all three publishing paths: Big Six, small press, AND indie. Kim Wright is the author of Love in Mid Air   (Grand Central: paperback release July 14, 2011), and she’s got a nonfiction book coming out in September, as well as a self-pubbed chick lit series (I can’t wait!) She’s going to give us the skinny about all three experiences in her post next Sunday.

And mid-week, on July 13^th, we’re going to have a Very Special Return Engagement by bestselling thriller writer Jeff Carlson  Jeff is going to talk about Amazon reviews. Especially the snarky ones. You know—those people who look at the world through “demon-colored glasses.” It’s a must-read. So do stop by on Wednesday.

Also: tomorrow, Monday the 11th, I'll be guest blogging for Fois in the City on her blog Ramblings from the Left. I'll be talking about how blogging improved my life.