![]() The approach is so rigorous, she said, because they do not want anything to fall through their fingers. It has to have two people saying 'no' before it's rejected." "All manuscripts are read at least twice. "We all gather on a Friday afternoon in the boardroom with our manuscripts," Ms Gouglouis said. Each week they receive up to 100 submissions. Text is unusual in that it requests hard copies of manuscript rather than digital copies. "But it's much harder for people intimidated by the whole publishing process." How does the process work? "It's very easy for people connected with the publishing world, in the city, going to creative writing courses, to get their work in front of a publisher," she said. Louise Thurtell, who set up Allen and Unwin's unsolicited manuscript program 10 years ago, says it had been a successful way for the publishing house to find new voices, particularly from regional Australia. "It's a revitalising part of the industry because you actually get to have contact with the authors out there," she said. "You never know when you're going to find the next great Australian novel."Īs a writer herself, Scribe's Lesley Halm also said she enjoyed the process and was excited to see people trying.Ĭontrary to popular belief, she said, publishing houses do care about writers who are struggling to be published. "The very first book that Text published came in through the slush pile, which was Melbourne author Shane Maloney's debut," she said. But he said it was central to publishing - you never know when you will find a diamond.Īlaina Gouglouis, an editor at Text Publishing, said Text had found some successes through its slush pile and remains committed to the process. Geordie Williamson, a new publisher at Pan Macmillan imprint Picador, called the slush pile "the unlovely place". ![]() Publishers already have a lot of reading to do, so the slush pile could be considered a burden. Increasingly, it's an avenue for emerging writers who don't yet know how to navigate the publishing industry. The slush pile, however, is not on the way out. In recent years the cobweb-draped tower of manuscripts tottering in the cleaning cupboard of a publishing house has been replaced with an electronic file on somebody's hard drive. Who sends the manuscripts? Do they get read? And how many get published?īefore literary agents became the gatekeepers between writers and publishers in Australia, sending unsolicited manuscripts was the way writers got noticed. But what really happens to the slush pile of unsolicited manuscripts that are sent to publishers by wannabe writers? There's a lot of mystery surrounding the book publishing process.
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