Monday July 19, 2010

Nobody likes the slush pile. Let’s get rid of it.

Lately the poor slush pile has been getting lots of ink. Laura Miller worries the public can’t handle its horror. The Awl traces its history. Tin House tries to slow its relentless accretion and sparks a backlash in the process. I believe the heat the journal took for requiring submissions to be accompanied by a receipt from an independent bookstore was well-deserved, by the way. The shrill plea came off as tone deaf because it ignored a) that anyone who’s heard of Tin House is, by definition, a book nerd, and b) that Tin House readers and Tin House submitters are likely the same set, so alienating the latter also pisses off the former, which—well—hastens the inevitable demise of Tin House.

But I’m not defending the eternal openness of the slush pile. In fact, I think we should do away with the slush pile entirely. Some of you, particularly those of you who work for literary journals—or habitually submit to them (interesting verb, that)—are probably scrolling down to the comments now to register your complaints. The open slush pile, you might argue, is the foundation of democracy and freedom of speech. If everyone can’t submit to any publication at anytime, what will happen to America and, worse, to Literature? But you could also argue (and I might, although I’m not married to this point) that this cant is but the populist face of journals’—and indeed any curatorial endeavor’s—discernment and, yes, elitism. The slush pile is like the Republican canard that everyone should defend the rights of the ultra-rich, since you might one day become ultra-rich—although really, no, you probably will not.

I don’t think it’s necessary to go this far, however, to justify the end of the slush pile. The fact is, it isn’t working for anyone. Not for publishers, certainly, but not even for writers.

Here’s how it works, from a writer’s perspective. You go to a journal’s website, fill out that robo-form they all use and upload your doc. Then you wait. And wait … and wait. Months pass—during which time you receive at least one e-mail from the journal begging for money—and then you receive, in all likelihood, an automated response. Maybe not. Maybe you get a few lines of feedback. That’s the upside. The situation can be much worse, however, if the journal requires a receipt from a bookstore, a buck (which I can see as a reasonable speed bump a journal might place on submissions), or $20 (an unconscionable practice employed by at least one lit site that miraculously manages to retain a decent reputation).

What’s the best possible outcome? Your story is accepted, and maybe a year later it appears and is distributed to the journal’s meager readership, who probably won’t read it because they only bought the journal in the first place so they could submit their work to it. I’m not saying the journal contributes nothing. It provides a few reputation credits and exposure, perhaps, to editors and/or agents in a position to do something with your work. But it isn’t providing readers, per se, at least not efficiently. In the eighteen months it takes a story to go from submission to publication, most writers could accumulate as many readers as most journals deliver by posting it to their Tumblr. If the story has to be submitted to four of five places before it’s accepted, the value of the journal’s circulation declines accordingly. And, at the moment, these two routes—self-distribution and the submission path—are mutually exclusive. Put it out there and it’s out of the game. More on that in a minute.

How is the slush pile working for publications? Not so well, it seems. The cost of wading through it—even just the social costs of maintaining an army of volunteer readers with vague promises of CV lines—has to be enormous. And it’s wasteful, since—as any honest editor will tell you—most submissions fall into the category of “not even close.” The fact that journals feel honor-bound to keep the slush pile open in deference to some ideal of accessibility, yet know that most things in it will miss the point entirely, is—I would argue—at the root of a love-hate relationship editors have with their would-be contributors. This low-grade contempt then can be seen coming out, all sideways, in passive-aggressive gestures like Tin House’s receipt policy.

So let’s drop the pretense and kill the slush pile. Manuscripts considered by solicitation only. (As most of them are now anyway, let’s be honest.) How will writers and editors find each other then? Simple. Writers will put their work out—on blogs or in writing communities or wherever—and editors will find it. This addresses, I think, two new realities.

The first is that writers don’t really need journals for distribution. Now, instead of tying up work for eighteen months, they can put it out there, and maybe it will find an audience. Maybe it will even gain value by the time a journal decides to sink money into it, which will benefit the journal in the end. The second new reality is that journals no longer need to be sent work to find it. It is everywhere. How will they sort through the work that’s out there and find what’s best for their publication? Well, I think that could be solved in all sorts of novel ways—nominations, tagging schemes, fostering writing communities—all of which would be less ridiculous (and probably less expensive and time-consuming) than the slush pile.

While I think abolishing the slush pile is a good idea—and perhaps an inevitable one as editors realize that their role isn’t to create content, but to shape content that’s already there—there are two tightly-help beliefs that are keeping it from happening. Both, however, are fallacies.

Fallacy 1: If something is available for free, people won’t pay for it.
Long after the disruption of the music industry by Napster, we can put this one to rest. Every song ever recorded is, in principle, free. Yet people buy music from iTunes and listen to it on Pandora. Why? Because convenient access and curation have value. If an established literary brand—or an upstart—decided to put the efforts they now put into the slush pile into discovering and promoting the best fiction already on the web, readers would reward the effort.

Fallacy 2: If something is already online, people have already seen it.
Are you kidding me? I miss half the updates my wife posts on Facebook. The fact is that we’re so inundated with data—and there’s so much of it out there—that being “previously published” on the Internet drains content of very little of its value, and promoting deserving work from smaller circles to larger circles is the proper function of modern curators.

So let’s do it. Let’s kill the slush pile. Or, rather, let’s stop duplicating it by asking writers to e-mail it around the country and the world. Let’s, instead, commit to filtering it where it lives. Death to the slush pile. Long live the slush.