Are there publishers with whom an unknown, unpublished author might have better odds of success? Also, I was wondering if the bigger publishers might reserve x% of their annual endeavor for new authors?
Also, I should ask: Will a publisher bother to read/skim a 500 page manuscript? Or, is it best to submit maybe the first half to leave them in suspense…along with a cover letter (of course) giving the general summary?
Please share your experiences, advice, lessons learned, etc…
Thanks,
Jinx
I’m not published or nearly published…having said that, I’ve been doing a lot of research and a lot of reading on the subject. Here’s what I’ve gleaned…
The numbers I’ve always heard was that 10% of submissions are utter dreck. 80% are not terrible, but not terribly good and aren’t up to the level needed to publish. That’ leaves 10% publishable. The only problem is that they can only publish 2-5% of what they get. Your goal would be to write something good enough to get into that 2%. It’s hard, but it’s not impossible.
There are some publisher who still take entire manuscripts. These are definitely the first you should consider, since they can get an idea of the entire book (and writing a synopsis is a different set of skill from writing a novel). Note that the publisher (like any reader) is never obligated to finish your book. I know of one first reader who said he could tell if a novel was publishable in the first ten pages, and that’s about right. (Unfair? No. It’s your job to make the want to read more than the first ten pages. Unless your book is chosen for a college text, no reader is obligated to finish it, and if the editor doesn’t see a reason to, your readers won’t, either.)
RChuck, I see your point, but ten pages? I have several arguements against this. I realize this saves the publisher time, but heck! What if my first ten pages (or even first three chapters) are awesome…and the rest is downhill? They’d be publishing a bombshell! IMHO, “Airframe” is a good example where the storyline falls apart in the second half as the author (Michael Criton) goes off on a tangent. Since I have worked on forensic investigations of other types of accidents, I found the second-half of this book totally absurd.
OK, ten pages may lure in the reader, but that’s almost as bad as judging a book by its cover. Doesn’t a publisher care about what surprising are awaiting the reader to discover? Any story that a reader feels has revealed the whole plot in just ten pages can’t have much of a plot at all…unless it’s a chidlren’s book!
I know the publishers want “compressed” storyline and “tight” dialog, but ten pages? How did Grapes of Wrath ever make it? I know…today’s so-called best sellers are just products of the “puppymill” - make the plot fit some standard mold and recycle the same idea through the grind over and over and over again. Good literature would never make it in today’s dollar-driven, greedy market. Thank goodness for the “good old days”…as with anything in the arts (architecture, music, etc.) The young’ins of today have little personal knowledge of anything better against which to compare today’s stuff to…
My apologies for editing errors in my post above. An example of rushing…not an example of my writing samples! - Jinx 
OK I publish children’s books, which is obviously a little different, but we do a lot of YA novels, and I would guess the percentage of good writing doesn’t vary all that much from adult to YA writers.
My personal estimate of the quality of unsolicited manuscripts is that 10% of what we get is illiterate, 75% is utter dreck, 10% is adequate enough to look good after all the dreck, and 4.96% percent is publishable if it fits the list or is a kind of book we’re looking for.
From 15 years of keeping track of how many unsolicited manuscripts are actually good enough to get excited about, to think, “oh yes, I love this, we must do it,” I have concluded that the proportion is something like 1 in 3000. That’s .03 percent.
As far as reading only ten pages, frankly it doesn’t usually take that much. Usually one sentence would do it (but we do always read a bit more just in case). The first thing we’re looking for is a voice–can this person write at all? As far as plot goes, yeah, the first ten pages are often way off the mark and don’t end up in the published book. Often an author doesn’t really hit his stride until the second chapter, and the first chapter is just a kind of throat clearing. If there’s any indication at all the the person has potential as a writer we’ll keep reading. Remember, we want to find a good book to publish almost as much as you want to publish a good book.
But think about reading a batch of college essays–or the discussions on most internet message boards for that matter. You can’t tell immediately if you’re dealing with a good writer or not, but you really can tell right off if the person isn’t a writer at all.
Jinx, you have it exactly backward. First readers aren’t reading so much to accept a book as to cull out the ones that are obviously a waste of everybody’s time. And yes, any good reader can tell this in 10 pages - and usually much less. Do you have any experience at all in reading non-professional work? Often it doesn’t take more than a glance at the first paragraph.
Well, that’s why they read the rest of the manuscript.
But they’re not looking at the plot at this point, just whether the writing is of publishable quality.
Good literature makes it all the time. It’s the easiest thing in the world to identify a supremely well-written book in the first few pages.
What makes publishers’ lives difficult are those books with merely adequate prose, but which have a bevy of other qualities - setting, plot, historical verisimilitude, insight into a profession, sweeping ideas, a knockout ending - that might tip a no over into a yes. That’s why I keep hearing that many publishers today - especially genre publishers - are demanding the entire manuscript up front from first-timers, just so they can see whether they are capable of an entire book.
Writing is a business, not a public service of the arts. It’s the job of the publisher to publish books that people want to read. Fortunately, “people” is such a huge and varied group that all sorts of books get published annually. Certainly they vary enormously in quality, but any fair look at the slush pile should convince anyone that the gap between publishable and not-publishable is very wide indeed. A few people right at the border may not be being treated “fairly” but the vast majority are.
And your side of the business of writing is both to write something publishable and to know what publishers are asking for. You don’t decide whether to send in a full manuscript or part of one. You find the publisher’s guidelines and go by them.
You know, finding a local writers group and looking at what other people do - and have them look at your work - might be just the thing you need.
Exapno has made the points I would have made in rebuttal. The purpose of a first reader is to screen out the large percent that is unpublishable and send it along to the editor for a final decision. Any good fiction can pass this test – if the reader gets to the end of the ten pages and is interested in reading more, that’s what publishers are interested in. And that’s because it what reader’s are interested in.
What happens in most cases is that it’s clear that the author can’t put together a readable English sentence, or doesn’t know how to handle Point of view, or is just rewriting Star Wars with all the names changes, or is writing about a potato chip that finds Jesus.
You can develop your plot slowly, as long as there are other things in the first chapter that make the book worth reading.
This isn’t a new development, BTW. I first heard the claim 15 years ago, and I’m sure it goes back much much longer. Any new author you’ve ever read has managed to pass this test.
Thanks for the additional insight. I will keep your words in mind, of course. Still,
playing the devil’s advocate, maybe you can explain why, then, doesn’t Hollywood follow this same philosophy when chosing which movies to make? From where I sit, Hollywood has a lot more mega-$$$ to lose than a publisher! (And, there are fewer movie studios than publishers, too, so they can be pickier, can’t they?)
I was watching a pure piece of trash last night, just out of curiosity. It was Steve Martin’s “The Man With Two Brains”. To me, Steve Martin’s movies were all trash until his humor “matured” bringing us movies with more substance and wit along the lines of “Parenthood” and “Roxanne”. To date, I never bothered with the crap that somehow made him a celebrity like “The Jerk”…and what the other duds?
Now, one one hand, why does Hollywood pump out such pure trash? And yet, OTOH, why aren’t publishers more risk-takers? Looking at economics alone, it just doesn’t add up! Sometimes, I wonder if Hollywood simply doesn’t take a buckshot approach - throwing such a spectrum of drek out there…it’s got to appeal to someone! And yet, look how many millions they throw away on a production they MUST know will bomb out. Heck, any publisher would have rejected “The Man With Two Brains” after ten pages…if the script were submitted as a manuscript!
Just wondering what makes the publishing and movie worlds go round. All are welcome, but I am especially curious to hear RChuck’s and Exapno’s feelings about this parallel. - Jinx
Reposting, edited: Thanks for the additional insight. I will keep your words in mind, of course. Still, playing the devil’s advocate, maybe you can explain why, then, doesn’t Hollywood follow this same philosophy when chosing which movies to make? From where I sit, Hollywood has a lot more mega-$$$ to lose than a publisher! (And, there are fewer movie studios than publishers, too, so they can be pickier, can’t they?)
I was watching a pure piece of trash last night, just out of curiosity. It was Steve Martin’s “The Man With Two Brains”. To me, Steve Martin’s movies were all trash until his humor “matured” bringing us movies with more substance and wit along the lines of “Parenthood” and “Roxanne”. To date, I never bothered with the crap that somehow made him a celebrity like “The Jerk”…and what were the other duds?
Now, on one hand, why does Hollywood pump out such pure trash? And yet, OTOH, why aren’t publishers more risk-takers? Looking at economics alone, it just doesn’t add up! Sometimes, I wonder if Hollywood simply doesn’t take a buckshot approach - throwing such a spectrum of drek out there…it’s got to appeal to someone! And yet, look how many millions they throw away on a production they MUST know will bomb out. Heck, any publisher would have rejected “The Man With Two Brains” after ten pages…if the script were submitted as a manuscript!
Just wondering what makes the publishing and movie worlds go round. All are welcome, but I am especially curious to hear RChuck’s and Exapno’s feelings about this parallel. - Jinx
How many movies do you suppose the average person sees a month? I mean, all the movies. The ones they go to the theater to see, the ones they rent, the ones on cable, and the ones on network tv, plus the ones they buy, and even the ones they DL.
How many books do you suppose the average person reads in a month? Not someone who loves to read, but the average person. How many do think they seek out? How many do think they buy in a month, as opposed to check out from the library or borrow?
Which business do you think has a wider margin for error?
I think you should read Slush Killer. It’s extremely informative, extremely helpful, and should answer all the questions you have.
They don’t. Ever. They thought it would make money.
It probably will make money, in fact. They’ll sell it to pay-per-view. And they’ll sell the premium channel cable rights, and the basic cable rights, and the network cable rights, and get royalties from each showing. And they’ll distribute it in DVD and VCR and sell some and rent some and get money back each and every time. And they’ll put out a director’s cut edition, and a special packaged edition, and a silver anniversary edition. And they’ll sell it in 160 different foreign markets. And every time there’s a new format, they’ll sell it all over again.
William Goldman has this to say about Hollywood: Nobody knows anything. In other words, nobody, no matter how deeply entrenched in the industry, can tell ahead of time which movies will bomb and which will unexpectedly do great. Because of this, Hollywood sets the rules so that a studio has to work very, very hard to lose money in the long run from its slate of pictures.
It’s a totally different world from that of books, and none of the same rules apply.
Someone recently sent me a link to a thread, Learn Writing with Uncle Jim, from a messageboard devoted to writing.
I’m not familiar with the messageboard, but the thread is chock-full of interesting and useful information. Of course, there are also some unedifying grammar hijacks and annoying self-aggrandizing interruptions from random weirdos, but overall, the signal-to-noise ratio is pretty good.
Advance warning: The thread is VERY long, and it will take you even longer to get through it if you go off and read all of the relevant links that people post to the thread, which I would highly recommend doing.
One of those links is even relevant to your question about movies and how it is that crappy ones get made and what this does (or doesn’t) mean about what the original screenplay was like: Crap-plus-One.
Yep, our very own Yog (in-joke for Chuck and me) will undoubtedly provide you with lots of good basic advice.
But always remember, what works for you is what works for you. It doesn’t matter what works for someone else.
Unless it’s not working, in which case it’s time to pay close attention. 
Not just you and Chuck. I was there too. Although I am not a writer.
Exapno, I didn’t intend for my recommendation of that thread to be taken as a blanket endorsement of every piece of advice that “Uncle Jim” gives; in fact, there is discussion in the thread of exactly the point you make about different things working for different writers. I do think that there might be useful things to pick and choose from the advice that Jim and other writers give in that thread.
The particular reason I recommended the thread, more than for the writing advice, was for the information it gives about the way publishing works, which I thought would be especially useful for Jinx. There are both published authors and editors participating in the discussion, and it’s full of links to things like “Slush Killer” (which pepperlandgirl already mentioned) and “Myrtle the Manuscript”.
There’s also extended discussion of why slush readers can tell very quickly when a manuscript should go into the “reject” pile (with specific horrific examples), and of exactly why it really is important that a manuscript grab the reader’s attention quickly.
Once again, Exapno beat me to it about Hollywood films – they do think they’re going to make money when they start out. They can be mistaken (as can book publishers).
Look, I’m not saying bad books aren’t published. But I guarantee that the worst book you can find from a major publisher is light years better than the manuscripts that don’t get past the first reader. People just don’t understand how bad many submissions can be. I guarantee that you’d probably stop reading many of them after ten pages (or less) yourself.
Publishers look for a certain basic level of competence in the writing, and this can be determined very quickly. They use the term “publishable” in a very specific sense: does the writer show the skills needed to write a book that might be interesting enough that readers might want to read it?
That’s the point of the first screening of manuscripts. If the manuscript is unreadable, there’s no point in sending it to someone else. If the manuscript is interesting and stands out from the pack (remember the numbers – no matter how you slice them, most submissions are not all that good), then it goes to another editor, who may be in a position to buy it.
This is actually good news for a beginning writer – if you work on your writing, to the point where it is publishable, you are ahead of 90% of the manuscripts in the slush.
Why should they do this? Their job is to make money selling books. If no good new authors come their way in a particular year, wouldn’t that money be better spent marketing the latest mega-selling author? The only reason they accept new authors is because the market demands fresh blood.
Our job as writers is to convince them that our writing is good enough for them to risk the low profit they’d make from an unknown author, because we’ll eventually make them tons of money. When they publish a new author’s work, it’s not to fulfill the dreams of a hopeful artist; it’s to make the publishing house money.
It’s really not any more complicated than that.
It’s only fair, given how many million times you’ve beaten me to a thread.
I didn’t mean to imply anything else. But I’ve seen too many beginning writers try to contort their own work to someone else’s advice not to put in that word of warning at the start.