Most publishers no longer read unsolicited manuscripts - but that doesn't stop writers sending them in. Aida Edemariam, who has rejected more submissions than she cares to remember, investigates
from The Guardian:
It is a dispiriting business. Like everyone who has ever done this, we began in great hope. We would discover the next Tom Wolfe, the next John Cheever ... but reality quickly set in. The vast majority of it is just bad. You start doubting your own judgment (particularly when the stuff that you do pass on to senior editors gets ignored, or immediately rejected), get distracted by prisoners who think it a good idea to include a picture of themselves with a gun pointed at the viewer (true story), and quite quickly find yourself reading the first two paragraphs, putting a pencil mark or something on page six (so the outraged author doesn't post it back with a note pointing out that they can tell you haven't read it), and slipping it into an SAE. Not without a mounting sense of guilt.
The internet, of course, means that more and more people publish straight on to the web, either as is, or to get peers to comment on it. Ten years ago Hamish Hamilton was getting 20 manuscripts a week rather than four, and Prosser puts this decrease down not just to active discouragement, but also the ways in which writers are learning to circumvent the traditional machine. "I do think there's been an opening up," says Swift. "A lot of writers are taking things into their own hands and publishing online.
I think sending things in blind now is about the most stupid thing you can do."
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