On a typically messy February morning in Canada, avoiding slush is clearly on my mind. As a writer, this should also be on yours, though the slush you are looking to avoid isn’t the slop at the end of your driveway, but the slush pile your submission is likely to land in when you first share your work with an agent or editor.
I spent nine years working for a Canadian literary agency, and for the first few I was in charge of reviewing the agency slush pile. For those of you who haven’t heard this term before, the slush pile is the stack of unsolicited manuscripts and proposals that agencies and publishers add to every day. The pile is made up of work addressed to the agency, or to the acquisitions team, or to whom it may concern, and is rarely a top priority for anybody to read.
During my time shovelling the slush, two or three out of the thousand submissions I read ever reached the desk of an agent. The material was usually unpolished, poorly directed, and nowhere near ready to be considered by an elite agent. Because of the volume of these types of submissions, rarely could we respond with the type of constructive feedback that would really benefit their authors. This wasn’t the case with more advanced submissions, the ones that were well conceived, carefully edited, and directed at a particular agent whose career track clearly matched the work that was being submitted. While those submissions weren’t always successful, the attention and consideration they received were always more significant. Because they deserved to be; because a real effort had been made.
The biggest mistake authors made during my time at the slush pile was that they felt sending their work off to publishers and agents was the first step they should take, but the truth is, it’s closer to the last, and by the time most of them realized that, it was too late to start over. It had been seen, rejected, and unlikely to ever be read by those they sent it to again.
For many years I felt that authors really needed a guide to help them through the submission process, to take their project from good to irresistible, making sure that the first thing an agent or editor saw with their name on it was professional, well presented, and immediately appealing. That what they needed most was someone to pull back the curtain on this very nuanced business of writing, someone who had been there, successfully, at the highest level.
And then I realized that guide should be me. So while watching the freezing rain fall on this February morning, I want to remind authors that avoiding the slush is incredibly important, and that I have a good shovel if they need it.