Friday, July 20, 2012

The Slush Pile

So while I'm not desperate to get published (yet), I *do* have a manuscript in the slush pile at a major publishing house.  But I've been doing a lot of web surfing, reading about response times from publishers, about who gets rejected (and why), and so forth.  You may have noticed a focus in this blog lately on such topics, as I repost what I've found on the web.  At any rate, I had to share this:

SlushPile Hell

It's a tumblr from a literary agent, where he posts portions of query letters he's received.  I am freaking amazed that people actually send this sort of thing to an agent.  But if this is the kind of stuff he has to sort through, well, it's probably what a lot of other publishers and agents get, and maybe I actually have a shot of getting published.  While I realize it's difficult to be objective about one's own work, I did not say things in my query letter like "fiction novel" or "I've sent this to 50 other agents" or "God told me to write this."  I did not have any spelling or grammatical errors.

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