ON THE SURVIVAL OF RATS
IN THE SLUSH PILE
Michael Allen
Published by:
Michael Allen at Smashwords
Copyright 2005 by Michael Allen
This edition 2011
TABLE OF CONTENTS
3. The experiment with rats when applied to publishing
4. Strategies for slush-pile selectors (agents and publishers)
5. Strategies for slush-pile contributors (writers)
INTRODUCTION TO 2011 EBOOK VERSION
This extended essay was originally published online, in PDF format, in 2005. It is now being republished, in 2011, in a format which will make it readable in any of the standard ebook readers.
Six years is a long time in the digital age. However, I have left most of the text untouched, as it remains as valid today as it was when first written. Only in Part 5 have I made any revisions, and these are necessary to point out the huge opportunities for writers which are now available through the Kindle, iPad, and a dozen other forms of ebook reader.
INTRODUCTION TO 2005 EDITION
Aims
This essay has two principal aims: first, to help writers, literary agents, and publishers to understand the full scale of the difficulties that face them; and second, to suggest strategies which will enable such participants in the book trade to survive and perhaps even prosper.
These aims may immediately be thought to be both presumptuous and unnecessary. After all, you are saying to yourself, people who work in publishing are all professionals; they know precisely what they’re doing, and they don’t need any help from smart-arse commentators.
That is true, up to a point. But there is, unfortunately, a considerable body of evidence to show that writers, in particular, have a grossly overoptimistic view of their own chances of achieving success (however defined); and every year brings a fresh crop of stories about publishers who have either paid far too much for a book which turned out to be a dud, or decided against publishing a book which some other firm accepted and then proceeded to turn into a smash hit.
I immodestly suggest, therefore, that all riders on the publishing merry-go-round might do worse than spend a few minutes considering the thoughts which are presented here.
The essay should be particularly useful for writers, because they are the ones most likely to labour fruitlessly for years, motivated only by dreams rather than hard cash; and, when their dreams fail to materialise, they are the ones most likely to suffer psychological and physical damage, as a result of powerful emotions such as anger, bitterness, and frustration. It will do no harm at all for these people to have a clearer idea, at an early stage, of the nature of the problems they face.
By ‘writers’ I mean, for present purposes, novelists. Much of the essay will be written in terms of the problems facing novelists, but almost everything that I have to say will also apply to writers of non-fiction; and much of it will be relevant to playwrights and screenwriters.
The essay is written in the context of book publishing in the UK, but the position is not, I suggest, very different anywhere else in the world.
Publishing from a writer’s perspective
Without writers there are no books. Without books there are no publishing firms, no leisurely lunches on expenses, no specialist book printers and binders, no book-trade van drivers, no librarians – and not even any readers. The whole of the book trade begins, therefore, with writers; with their hopes, fears, ambitions, and funny little ways. For that reason alone we should take a close look at this bizarre species.
Nearly all writers yearn to be published; not only do they want to be published, but they burn to be successful. They want to be rich, famous, and worshipped by the critics; they look forward to an orderly queue of admirers forming outside their bedroom door. Writers recognise, of course, that this happy state of affairs cannot come about overnight; but in the early days, when hope is intense in their bosoms, they can see no reason why it should not be achieved by 4 p.m. next Thursday.
From a statistical point of view alone, such hopes are fundamentally absurd, and the material in this essay will explain in some detail why it is that writers are unlikely to be successful in achieving their ambitions.
The essay is prompted by my dismay, which has intensified over several decades, at seeing so many intelligent, sensitive, and hardworking people waste so much of their time on the largely futile business of trying to write and sell novels. (I have written about a dozen myself, without, so far, igniting any huge fires.) It irks me that human beings are so slow to learn, and, having learnt, are so ineffective at passing on what they have learnt. This essay is therefore my attempt to remedy what I see as certain deficiencies in the educational process, at least as far as fiction is concerned. I shall eschew, as far as possible, offering advice; but the facts, when explained, may suggest to readers that some courses of action are far more sensible than others.
In the course of this exercise, I hope to minimise the frustration and despair, and to maximise the profit and enjoyment, not only of writers but of all those involved in the book trade.
I shall try, as far as possible, not to apportion blame or to make too many criticisms of individuals who are doing their best in difficult circumstances.
Between us, we shall, I hope, develop a sense of proportion, and, above all, a sense of humour; the latter is an essential attribute on the part of those who wish to contemplate the vagaries of the book business while remaining sane.
Some of the facts and ideas which are set out here have already been presented to readers in other media: either in my blog, the Grumpy Old Bookman, or in my book The Truth about Writing. (Note: full details of this and other major publications mentioned in the text can be found in the references section at the end.) There is, however, much new thinking on offer in this essay, and it has largely been inspired and stimulated by the work of Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who is the author of a book called Fooled by Randomness.
Dr Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Taleb is one of those rare creatures, someone who has a successful track record in the business world and yet is comfortable, and respected, in academia.
In the world of high finance, Taleb has held a number of senior posts, including that of managing director and head trader at Union Bank of Switzerland, and worldwide chief derivatives trader at CS-First Boston; he is currently Founder and Chairman of Empirica LLC, a research laboratory and financial products trading house in New York. Taleb’s educational background includes an MBA from Wharton and a PhD from Universite Paris-Dauphine. He is a Fellow in Mathematics and Adjunct Professor at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University, and Visiting Professor of Risk Management at Universite Paris-Dauphine.
Taleb first came to public attention as the author of Fooled by Randomness, the subtitle of which is ‘The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and the Markets’. When first published, this was selected by both Amazon.com and the Financial Times as one of the best business books of the year, and is published in 14 languages. It has, however, a relevance far beyond the world of business.
Taleb’s intellectual interests lie at the intersection of philosophy, mathematics, finance, literature, and cognitive science. He specialises in the risks of unpredicted rare events (‘black swans’), and as an essayist he is principally concerned with the problems of uncertainty and knowledge.
For more information visit Dr Taleb’s web site; the URL is www.fooledbyrandomness.com.
The structure of the essay
Part 1 introduces the reader to the concept of black swans, as defined by Taleb.
Part 2 describes a hypothetical experiment with rats, which Taleb uses as a means of illustrating a number of erroneous ways of thinking and arguing. The chief error is perhaps that of falling prey to survivorship bias, which means that the observer sees only the survivors of any particular course of events, and fails to take adequate note of the characteristics of the many other participants.
In Part 3, we note that Taleb’s experiment with rats is in many ways analogous with the slush-pile procedure, as traditionally carried out in the offices of publishers and literary agents. We then proceed to review Taleb’s various forms of faulty thinking, as they apply in the context of writing and publishing; in particular, we try to learn how to think clearly about publishing issues, a skill which is in notably short supply.
The evidence assembled in Part 3 demonstrates beyond question that randomness plays a major part in publishing; specifically, we learn that, provided a manuscript reaches a certain basic professional standard, it is randomness which thereafter determines the ‘success’ of that book.
The fourth part of the essay is intended to provide practical assistance to those who are involved in looking for suitable books to publish (slush-pile selectors). Starting from the most basic of questions – Is publishing a sensible business for companies or individuals to be involved in? – we move on to consider both reactive and proactive procedures for managing the slush pile.
Part 5 outlines a similarly pragmatic approach that may be applied by those are slush-pile contributors, i.e. writers.
PART 1: THE CONCEPT OF BLACK SWANS
A definition
Before we proceed further, I need to introduce you to the concept of black swans.
In his book Fooled by Randomness, Taleb defined a black swan, in the context of investment management, as an unexpected and catastrophic event which could destroy even a so-called ‘master of the universe’.
Subsequently, Taleb wrote an essay entitled Fooled by Success: the Black Swan and the Arts; and in relation to the arts Taleb defines a black swan as ‘a piece of work that, unexpectedly, captivates interests, spreads like wildfire, and dwarfs other contributions.’ As examples of these massively successful phenomena he quotes the Harry Potter books, Mel Gibson’s movie The Passion of the Christ, and the success of the Beatles. (Taleb, you see, is not an intellectual snob.)
Black swans in the arts are distinguished by the fact that they occur extremely rarely (when compared with the total amount of work which is offered to the public), and yet they have enormous impact. They provide, in short, exactly the kind of success that every writer (or publisher, producer, actor, et cetera) yearns for.
Taleb argues that these black swans are random events. After they occur, many observers claim to be able to see that their success was inevitable, for reasons which they then proceed to define; most of these reasons have to do with the innate qualities of the work in question. But Taleb maintains that these post-event explanations are essentially false and unreliable. They are highly influenced by hindsight bias, which makes use of ‘posterior information’. Observers of black swans tend to overestimate the analysable and underestimate the non-explainable.
Above all, those who claim to understand black swans (but only after they have come into view) are neglecting the ‘silent evidence’. Taleb maintains that if we are to understand the factors behind the huge success of Harry Potter (to mention but one convenient example) we need to do more than recognise the qualities that are present in the Harry books; we also need to consider the qualities which were present in the thousands of manuscripts which were rejected by agents and publishers and which never even made it into print.
Similarly, Taleb suggests, if we were to try to pin down the reasons for the rise to stardom of some young actor, we would need to consider the qualities present in other young actors – those who were not, for some reason, given a part for which 400 men auditioned. We would need to identify what it was that caused the producer to choose our future star for a part in his film rather than one of the 399 other candidates; and we would be likely to find, Taleb avers, that the producer’s choice had nothing to do with ‘talent’, however defined. Or, to put it another way, we would find that many of the rejected applicants had just as much talent as the future star.
An example: Harry Potter
Just in case you don’t know the much-told story, it is worth recording that the first Harry Potter book was rejected by every major publisher in London (some sources say as many as 20); and when it was eventually bought by Bloomsbury, the only publisher who showed the smallest degree of interest, the firm paid but a small sum of money for it (sources say between £2,000 and £3,000).
Clearly, none of the ‘experts’ who read the book in manuscript, and rejected it, had the slightest inkling of the massive money-making machine which they held in their hands.
Implications
The Harry Potter case is an all-too-typical example of the failure to identify a black swan at an early stage. And yet it is highly desirable to identify them, if possible, because of their massive power to generate income and reputation. The black swans dominate their competitors in a way which distorts the rewards available: they are part of, and maybe the cause of, a winner-take-all mechanism.
In the book world, what this means is that bestsellers tend to become massive, while sales of ‘ordinary’ books are minuscule. It is not that bestsellers sell twice as many copies as the average novel: they sell hundreds of times as many.
This circumstance is observable in most of the arts: in other words, you are either overwhelmingly successful, in terms of money, fame, and reputation, or you are nothing.
Interestingly, the same clustering effect can be found in other contexts, outside the arts: similar concentrations can be found in the academic-citation system, and it doesn’t matter whether the academic field is physics or social science.
It is also important to note that the concentration effect becomes more marked, not less, as the size of the pool of works on offer increases. The more product that is available, the more the big hits dominate and stand out.
How black swans come about
The appearance of a black swan is influenced by, among other factors, the ‘tipping-point mechanism’. Contagious diseases spread furiously above a certain minimum level (the tipping point), but die down below that level.
In the arts, the mechanisms of contagion are accelerated by the media, and, of course, by word-of-mouth recommendation. Thomas Gilbert and his colleagues at the University of California have used some statistical methods which are normally applied to phenomena such as the spread of diseases, or earthquake aftershocks, in order to analyse the spread of information about books. They distinguish between exonogous (external) and endogonous (internal) stimuli. Publishers use exonogous methods of generating awareness of a book when they give it a large advertising budget; endogonous shock is what occurs through one person recommending the book to another.
Both exonogous and endogonous stimuli play a part in turning ugly ducklings into black swans. A large advertising budget may generate some initial awareness of the product, but it does not inevitably create a black swan; it may evoke nothing more than yawns. Endogonous effects, by contrast, are absolutely essential to the emergence of a black swan, whether it has a large publicity budget or not, and they cannot always be created, no matter how much money is spent; they either occur spontaneously, or they don’t.
Taleb’s principal conclusion about the black-swan phenomenon in the arts is that the process is ‘far less fair than it seems to participants’. The randomness of the system is greatly underestimated. Furthermore, people involved in the arts tend to suffer from overconfidence, and overestimate the chances of their own success. This, believe me, is particularly dangerous for writers, but it can also be catastrophic for publishers who commit massive resources to books which flop. Example: the Dorling Kindersley collapse which occurred as a result of overprinting Star Wars books.
Two observers reaching the same conclusion
One of the reasons why I find Taleb’s paper on black swans in the arts so intriguing is that it echoes, with added scientific and intellectual underpinning, my own conclusions, reached earlier and independently. My views on the ‘secret of success’ for writers were set out in Chapter 9 of The Truth about Writing, published in 2003: there I argued that success for writers is determined by circumstance.
Circumstance, I said, is a factor which some might call chance, fate, luck, serendipity, or karma. But the true definition of circumstance, for my purposes, is everything that you cannot control, or even influence.
Here is an example of circumstance, drawn from the film industry. In the 1950s, the actor Montgomery Clift turned down the lead parts in four films. He declined (1) the part in Sunset Boulevard which was later played by William Holden; (2) the Marlon Brando part in On the Waterfront; (3) the James Dean part in East of Eden; and (4) the Paul Newman part in Somebody Up There Likes Me. As you will already have noticed, if you know anything about the history of the cinema, each of the actors who picked up a part that had been rejected by Montgomery Clift used that opportunity to establish his own name; and they all became stars as a result. None of which would have happened if Clift had decided to play any of the parts himself.
I even compressed my idea about circumstance into a mathematical formula, or expression (of sorts):
S :: C
This formula holds true, I suggested, where S equals Success (however defined), and C = Circumstance (as defined above). The double colon symbol was introduced by William Oughtred in 1631, and it means ‘varies as to’. S :: C is therefore a compact way of saying that Success varies according to Circumstance.
Both Taleb and I, therefore, approaching matters from wholly different directions, have concluded that success in the arts, and particularly success as experienced by writers, is a random event. It is not determined by hard work, who you know, or talent (not, at any rate, above a certain level).
You, the reader, will probably resist the Taleb/Allen conclusion at this point; but you at least are thoughtful enough to be reading this essay, so please reserve final judgement on the causes of the black-swan phenomenon until you have read the rest of the argument.
Taleb and I are not alone in reaching our conclusion about the effects of randomness aka circumstance.
In his autobiography Nudity in a Public Place, the actor John Nettles quoted a friend of his whom he described as ‘a great literary figure and a major celebrity’. This individual remarked to Nettles: ‘Nothing is more common today than successful men with no talent…. Success and celebrity do not necessarily depend on talent in these dog days and it is a good thing you never ever believe they do, otherwise you might miss out on the joke of the century.’
On a less elevated level than John Nettles’s friend, one of the former Spice girls recently spoke with some awe about the popular-music business. She was amazed, she said, that ‘so many people with so little talent are making so much money.’
The remainder of this essay will enlarge on the idea that huge literary and/or commercial success for writers, who are not already famous names, comes (if it ever does) in the form of a black swan, or a random event. The discussion will then be used as the basis for generating strategies which might be adopted by those who work in the book trade. The strategies will, however, be of particular importance to writers – especially if they wish to avoid lasting psychological, and hence physical, damage; and if they wish to avoid allocating scarce resources (e.g. time and energy) to an almost certainly futile project.
PART 2: THE EXPERIMENT WITH RATS
The experiment described
Taleb is under contract to produce a book on black swans; and, at the time of writing this essay (2005), he has posted a draft chapter from the book on his web site. The present title of the chapter is ‘On the Invisibility of the Drowned Worshippers’, which is a reference to the work of Francis Bacon in the seventeenth century.
Bacon, it seems, was once shown a set of portraits of men who had survived shipwrecks; these portraits had been commissioned by the Church authorities. The subjects of the portraits were all good Christians: before embarking on a voyage they had taken the steps recommended by the Church for those in peril from the sea; these preparations no doubt included going to communion, spending a great deal of time praying, and, I imagine, making a substantial contribution to Church funds.
The result of these Christian preparations was that, when their ship sank, lo and behold, God rewarded them by saving their lives: hence their portraits, which were commissioned by the Church authorities as an example to others.
It was Francis Bacon who asked one of those questions that you’re not supposed to ask. Where, he enquired, were the portraits of those mariners who, before their voyage, had also gone to communion, said their prayers, and made a contribution to Church funds, but had nevertheless drowned? These were the ‘drowned worshippers’ who had become invisible. The Church, through some oversight, had not mentioned them, or commissioned their portraits.
The drowned worshippers constitute a phenomenon which will often be mentioned in this essay: survivorship bias. We human beings are fallible creatures, and we have a habit of seeing only the survivors of a set of experiences. This, Taleb tells us, is an error in thinking which can get us into serious trouble.
In the course of his draft chapter from the book on black swans, Taleb sets out to describe several other kinds of erroneous thinking. In order to illustrate these errors, he asks us to imagine an experiment with rats. (And, since this is a hypothetical experiment, I can give an absolute assurance that no animals were harmed during the writing of this essay.)
Suppose, Taleb says, that we have access to a city full of rats: rats of all kinds, fat, thin, sickly, strong, well proportioned, et cetera. In order to determine which of these rats are the strongest, we select a random sample, one that is truly representative of the rat population as a whole. We then put the sample group into a large vat and subject the rats to increasingly high levels of radiation.
As the levels of radiation increase, many of the rats will die. By the end of the experiment (unless you take it too far and kill them all) we will be left with a small number of survivors.
Taleb uses this hypothetical experiment, and its results, to illustrate a number of errors in thinking.
Flaws in the methodology
First, we need to think about the experimental procedure itself. Alert readers will already have noticed that the methodology of the experiment, as described for the purposes of this essay, is flawed.
The intention is to select the ‘strongest’ rats. But while the experiment will certainly reduce the numbers of rats, there is no guarantee that the survivors will be the strongest.
The surviving rats would only be the ‘strongest’ in the limited sense that they were the ones best able to withstand increasing doses of radiation. They might not be the strongest in terms of ability to survive without water, or ability to climb fences. The ability to withstand radiation might or might not be a useful characteristic in the real world.
Second, at least some of the survivor rats may have survived by pure chance. At the moment when the next blast of radiation was administered, a ‘weak’ rat may have been shielded from radiation by a ‘strong’ rat. Furthermore, there might be some variations in the way in which the radiation was distributed around the vat: in some spots (perhaps towards the rim) the rats might absorb less than in other spots.
In short, the design of the procedure leaves much to be desired; and this, we shall see, is the case with some procedures in publishing.
Survivorship bias
We have already noted the phenomenon which is known in statistics as survivorship bias; and history suggests that it is all too easy to fall prey to this lax way of thinking.
Survivorship bias involves mistaking what you see for what is really there. The tendency is for human beings to see only the survivors of some set of circumstances, and to ignore those who, for one reason or another, disappeared or dropped out as events proceeded. We often find ourselves earnestly discussing the traits in a cohort of survivors when, in truth, those traits are no different from those in a much larger population; if you consider the circumstances carefully it may be apparent that the survivors emerged as a result of sheer randomness, rather than through the possession of some special qualities.
It may be, if clear thinking is applied to any set of events, that those who dropped out, voluntarily, or were eliminated, perhaps as a result of chance, have at least as much to teach us about what is important and relevant as those who survived.
Nietzsche’s error
Nietzsche is responsible for the aphorism ‘What does not kill me makes me stronger.’ If repeated, in a suitably solemn tone of voice, in front of a group of people who are aware that Nietzsche is a Big Name in Philosophy, this dictum may well induce nods of agreement. And you may sometimes hear people say, after a young person has had some kind of setback, ‘Well, he will be all the better for the experience.’ Once in a while it might even be true.
In general, however, Nietzsche’s aphorism is nonsense. On the physical level, a car crash which brings you close to the point of death may leave you paralysed for life. So, although you are not actually dead, you are certainly not stronger than before. And in an emotional context, a bereavement which causes you seriously to contemplate suicide may, even if you do not succumb to the temptation, leave you lonely and depressed.
So it is with our rats. The rats which survived our experiment are by no means necessarily stronger. In reality, there is a good chance that they will be weaker. Radiation is not often good for you.
Taleb quotes a newspaper article about the Russian Mafia, which referred to the new generation of gangsters as being ‘hardened by their Gulag experiences’. But, if any modern gangsters have indeed survived the Gulag, they are hardly likely to have been ‘hardened’; the camps were not famous for providing fitness-training courses.
Despite these readily apparent flaws in Nietzsche’s aphorism, there are circumstances in which people behave as if it were true. We often assume that survivors of some intense selection process are stronger than those who were eliminated. We assume that survivors are necessarily the best of the cohort; whereas in reality the procedure may have been flawed and they may simply have emerged by chance.
The dead rats, you see, are no longer around to steal our cheese, or to give us Weil’s disease. Whatever their strengths or weaknesses, virtues or vices, they are gone, and are mourned by nobody. We forget them. But it is a mistake to overlook them because some of them, at least, might well have had characteristics which would be valuable outside the context of our flawed selection procedures.
Another point to note is that the survivors, the chosen few, will themselves tend to conclude, falsely, that they are necessarily superior to those who died. Usually, the nature of rats being what it is, they will conclude that they are infinitely superior to the dead. Some humans share this characteristic.
The swimmer’s body
Another mistake in thinking is described by Taleb as ‘the swimmer’s body’ error.
It is observable that athletes who participate in different events have differing physiques: rugby forwards are big and beefy; high jumpers are tall and slim; and swimmers often have rather beautifully proportioned bodies with ‘elongated muscles’.
Observers who are fuzzy thinkers sometimes conclude from this that if they want to have a beautifully proportioned body they should take up swimming. But this is what is known, in popular parlance, as getting things arse over tip.
Swimmers do not end up looking beautiful because they took up swimming; they excel at swimming because they have the kind of physique which lends itself to fast progress through water, and which is itself aesthetically pleasing, the more so when developed by exercise.
The swimmer’s body error often involves the false attribution of a particular outcome to a particular set of traits. In the business world, it is not unusual to find books which purport to identify the common characteristics of successful entrepreneurs. The analysis is usually based on the careers and backgrounds of those who have got to the top, and it generally yields a list of such ‘success factors’ as optimism, confidence, and a willingness to take risks. Yet had the researchers interviewed those who failed in business, going bankrupt within two or three years, they would undoubtedly have found the same characteristics present.
By the way, it does not necessarily follow from this (should you be tempted to think it) that the successful entrepreneurs are successful only as a result of chance, or random events; but it is a mistake to attribute their success to qualities which they share with many of those who failed.
Casanova: a case history
Casanova’s famous memoirs tell of a life of continual setbacks and escapes from dangerous situations, followed by periods of prosperity and advancement. His was a roller-coaster ride, and it seems that, when it came to overcoming difficulties, Casanova was an unusually resourceful man.
This impression is false. In the above paragraph, the words ‘it seems’ are the crucial ones. We know about Casanova simply because, through a series of accidents of fate – random events – he happened to survive long enough to write a ten-volume set of memoirs about his escapades. Other adventurers, thousands of them, doubtless got into similar scrapes and difficulties, but they ended their days on a dueller’s sword or died in a debtors’ prison. Casanova was not unusually talented or resourceful: there was nothing to differentiate him from any other self-serving layabout except that Madame Randomness happened to take a shine to him.
Next step
It would be possible to spend some time discussing Taleb’s arguments and examples, which are not without their own weaknesses. That, however, is not the point of this essay. The point here is to learn to think clearly about writing and publishing; and to that end we will now apply some of Taleb’s ideas to the present-day circumstances of writers and publishers, and see what emerges.
PART 3: THE EXPERIMENT WITH RATS WHEN APPLIED TO PUBLISHING
Applicability and relevance
Taleb’s ideas about randomness have proved useful in facilitating clear thinking in a number of fields of activity: for example, Card Player magazine tells us that they are applicable to the game of poker. It will therefore be useful to go through the points made in Parts 1 and 2 and to examine their relevance to the book trade in general and the writer’s position in particular.
The first thought that struck me, on reading Taleb’s draft chapter for his book on black swans, was that the experiment with rats is closely analogous to the process of selecting books from the slush pile. And, just in case there is anyone reading this who doesn’t know what a slush pile is, let me explain.
Defining the slush pile
Unknown and unpublished writers tend to be, as remarked in Part 1, wildly ambitious and eager for fame, money, and literary reputation. To achieve these objectives they have to get published. And to get published through the traditional book-trade channels they have to arrange, as a first step, for their work to be offered to publishers.
In the past, it was common for novelists to submit their completed manuscripts to publishers themselves. Every day the postman would deliver, to every publisher in the land, a pile of ten or twenty manuscripts. These unsolicited submissions are known in the book trade, throughout the English-speaking world, as the slush pile.
The term ‘slush pile’ gives a clear flavour of the contempt in which unsolicited submissions are held. It is widely agreed in publishing circles (on the basis of countless years of experience) that many of these manuscripts will be unreadable, unpublishable junk. But it is also the case (as history demonstrates) that the slush pile will occasionally contain a black swan.
One point to note is that every writer, and every novel, is at some point in someone’s slush pile. With absolutely no exceptions.
At some stage, and possibly at many different stages, decisions have to be made on whether to continue to consider a book for publication, or to send it back to its author with a rejection slip. This iterated process has its parallels with the rats-in-the-vat experiment. The rats which were submitted to radiation included every type of rat: fat, thin, strong, weak, young, old. Similarly the slush pile contains writers and manuscripts covering the whole range of ability and quality, from masterpieces to illiterate rubbish.
The role of literary agents
For over a hundred years there have been individuals within the book trade who undertake to handle the business side of writers’ affairs for them. These literary agents, as they are called, will submit manuscripts to publishers, negotiate a contract, and check royalty statements; they may well give advice on market demands, provide detailed comment on content, undertake editing, and generally act as an intermediary between writer and publisher when things go wrong (as they all too frequently do). In return for these services, an agent will receive an agreed percentage of a writer’s income.
The unknown writer, let us say a single mother living on a council estate in Gateshead, will these days find it impossible to submit a novel to a major publisher; the publisher will simply send it back to her, unread, accompanied by the advice that she should try to find an agent to represent her. So the unknown young woman from Gateshead will end up in an agent’s slush pile rather than a publisher’s.
If, at some point, the writer is accepted as a client by an agent, the agent will then offer the book to a publisher, usually to an editor with whom the agent is on first-name, let’s-do-lunch terms. The book is then part of the editor’s slush pile.
If, in the course of further time, our young lady from Gateshead happens to generate a black swan which amazes the entire universe with its brilliance, she will still find that her next novel will still end up in the editor’s slush pile, in the sense that its publication will have to be subject to a conscious decision. The new book may rise immediately to the top of the editor’s reading pile, and the decision to go ahead with publication of the second novel may be uncontested, but a decision will have to be made, none the less.
And by the way, publication of book number two, or number twenty-two, even to follow a big success, may not be uncontested; it may be a matter of considerable debate. In 1986, after Dean Koontz had published fifty-four novels, he appeared on the US hardcover bestseller list with Strangers. He then wrote Lightning, which involved him in a bitter struggle with his editor, who prophesied the end of his career if it was published. Koontz insisted that publication should proceed, and in due course he was proved right, because Lightning became another hardcover bestseller. The editor concerned was Phyllis Grann, then at Putnam.
What the slush-pile process is designed to do
The purpose of the experiment with rats was to find the ‘strongest’ rats – strength being regarded, by the designers of the experiment, as the most desirable of all possible characteristics. To this end, increasingly high doses of radiation were administered until eventually there were only a few rats left.
But what is the slush-pile process – whether undertaken by agents or publishers – designed to do?
Everyone in the book trade is anxious to find the ‘best’ books. Different participants in the trade will have differing definitions of ‘best’. For some it will mean the books which generate the most income. For others it will mean the books which get the most favourable reviews from the highbrow critics. But if the submission and selection process has any purpose at all it is to select the ‘best’ books from the point of view of the organisation conducting that process. In particular, it is surely the hope of most parties that the process of selecting books from the slush pile will throw up an occasional black swan.
How the slush pile is dealt with
If, every day, the postman brings even as few as ten manuscripts into an agent’s office, the agent must assume (if she is willing to consider them at all) that among these unsolicited and unpromising submissions there may perhaps be the twenty-first-century equivalent of Sherlock Holmes, James Bond, or Harry Potter; or perhaps a Booker Prize winner. She therefore has to give at least some serious consideration to these manuscripts.
Perhaps our agent is super-conscientious, a mistress of the management of time, and can manage without sleep. In those circumstances she may even do the initial trawl through the manuscripts herself. But that is unlikely to happen. It is more than probable that the busy agent will employ a reader to do the job for her. The reader will discard the manuscripts which are judged to be hopeless and leave a relatively manageable number for a final decision by the boss.
Over the past fifty years or so much has been written about the role of the slush-pile reader; the experiences described are mainly those of individuals who worked in publishers’ offices in the days when big-time publishers were still willing to consider submissions from the public; but we shall be safe, I think, in assuming that the process is much the same wherever it occurs.
Since the job of sorting through the slush pile is generally reckoned to be soul-destroying, it is almost invariably given to the newest and most junior member of staff: the one who is in no position to refuse. Such people are seldom given any training. (Until recently no one got any training in publishing anyway, unless it was in the form of ‘Sit by Nelly and watch what she does.’)
The volume of work is such that the reader cannot possibly give more than a few minutes to any one manuscript, unless it proves to be unusually promising. Often, those who have done the job claim that to read one paragraph is sufficient to enable a rejection decision to be made.
Here is what one publishing professional, Andrew Taylor, had to say about the task, writing in The Bookseller in 1996: ‘In an average day’s work at a publisher’s office, I aim to assess 7 to 10 submissions and write reports on each of them which vary in length from 2 to 500 words.’
Mr Taylor is more generous with his time than some publishers’ readers. Giles Gordon once stated that, when he was the slush-pile reader at Gollancz, he learnt how to tell whether a manuscript was any good within 15 seconds. ‘It’s just a matter of practice,’ he said airily.
Literary agent Pat Kavanagh takes much the same view. ‘Two pages will tell you if a book from the slush pile is worth pursuing.’
The results of the search through the slush pile
It is generally reckoned that, however carefully or otherwise the slush pile is read, it is rare to find anything in it which is worth even the most cursory consideration as a candidate for publication.
The agent Pat Kavanagh, mentioned above, was asked how often she had found a book in the slush pile that was worth pursuing. ‘Never,’ she said. ‘I don’t believe it has ever happened to me.’
Barry Turner, in The Writer’s Handbook, once mentioned an agent who fared a little better than that, but not much. In 14 years of reading 25-30 manuscripts a month, the agent found 5 good ones. Another agent, at Curtis Brown, personally received 1,200 manuscripts in one year, and took on 2 of the authors as clients. One agent at perhaps the largest UK agency remarked recently that she was having to read 3,000 manuscripts in order to find 1 client.
In 1989, The Times reported that the well-known British imprint Hutchinson was receiving about 1,000 manuscripts a year. One of these unsolicited manuscripts might be published every couple of years or so. Maybe.
At Chatto and Windus the Times reporter was told that about 10 manuscripts arrived every day. Were they all read? Long pause. ‘Yes.’ Were any ever taken on? Long pause. ‘No.’
The largest publisher of romantic novels in the UK is Mills &Boon, or Harlequin Mills & Boon, to give the firm its full name. The Mills & Boon editorial director has stated that the firm receives 6,000 manuscripts a year from hopeful and so-far-unpublished writers. Out of these submissions, the company takes on, in a good year, about 10 new writers.
In 1995, the owner of two small publishing firms in the USA reported in Publishers Weekly that he had received nearly 7,000 offers of books in the previous twelve months, and had decided to accept 12 of these submissions.
A much larger and more prestigious American firm, Viking, agreed to publish only one unsolicited manuscript in 26 years. That was Ordinary People, by Judith Guest; the book went on to become a bestseller as well as the basis for a successful film.
Finally, the English publisher Anthony Blond, writing in The Spectator, maintained that the acceptance rate of unsolicited manuscripts was 1 in 2,000, in both London and New York.
And so on. Taleb rightly advises us against drawing general conclusions from insufficient data (the Baconian flaw), but it would be wearisome, and it is surely unnecessary, to go further.
We can safely conclude, I suggest, that very few manuscripts are picked out of the slush pile – anyone’s slush pile, whether agent or publisher – with a view to being taken further.
It follows therefore, as dogs follow a bitch in season, that a writer’s chances of achieving any kind of success are extraordinarily small. There is only the slimmest chance that a new and as yet unpublished writer will be taken on to an agent’s list of clients; even if taken on as a client, there is no guarantee of publication; and even if the writer is published, the chances of achieving any kind of critical or commercial success are also small.
Famous rejections
Few manuscripts are selected from the slush pile; but we know for certain that some of those which are rejected are in fact worthy of publication – worthy by any standards, whether literary or commercial.
We have already had one example of a black swan which was unrecognised by everyone when it was still in manuscript: Harry Potter. The sole editor in London publishing who was interested in the first Harry Potter book, by a completely unknown author, was Barry Cunningham of Bloomsbury. ‘If it hadn’t been for Barry,’ said J.K. Rowling in 2000, ‘Harry Potter might still be languishing in his cupboard under the stairs.’ A long succession of editors had previously described the book as ‘too long’, ‘too complex’, and ‘too old-fashioned’.
This instance is almost enough, on its own, to prove that slush-pile readers’ judgements are fallible. However, we don’t need to limit ourselves to one example.
Here are some others. MASH, which became one of the most famous series in the history of television, was originally a novel. It was rejected by 21 publishers over a period of seven years before eventually finding a home. After publication, it was adapted as a successful cinema film before being developed for television.
In a more literary vein, the most famous case is that of the American novelist, John Kennedy Toole. In the early 1960s Toole was made emotionally unstable by the frequent rejection of his book A Confederacy of Dunces, and in 1969 he committed suicide.
Toole’s mother then took on the task of trying to find a publisher for the book on which her son had laboured so hard. She finally managed it, and in 1981 the novel was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. A Confederacy of Dunces was hailed by the New York Times as a ‘masterwork of comedy’ (though I’m afraid I never got so much as a smile out of it myself).
There are many other cases in publishing history of books becoming famous and successful only after a long struggle to achieve publication. James Joyce’s Dubliners was rejected by 22 publishers; and Baroness Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel by 12. There are so many such ill-advised rejections, in fact, that a whole book has been written about them: André Bernard’s Rotten Rejections. This book includes, among other things, a letter from a publisher in reference to an agent’s submission of an early John Le Carre novel. ‘You’re welcome to Le Carre,’ said the publisher. ‘He hasn’t got any future.’
George Greenfield, an agent, told a story about Enid Blyton, who was published by Macmillan, and whose innumerable books for children sold so many copies that they paid the salaries of most of the staff. On one occasion Enid had heard that her usual editor had left the firm, but no one had told her the name of her new editor. So, when she had completed her next book, she simply addressed it to ‘Macmillan & Co’. The manuscript went into the slush pile, and in due course was rejected.
A similar instance of the rejection of a work by a famous author occurred early in the career of Giles Gordon.
Giles was then working for Hutchinson, which was run by Robert Lusty. At the time, Hutchinson’s most profitable author was Dennis Wheatley, who is now largely forgotten but was then a sort of English Stephen King. At his death, Wheatley had 50 books in print, and total sales were 41 million copies. As with Enid Blyton, the income from his novels was making a massive contribution to his publisher’s profits.
Giles Gordon was a young man with fastidious tastes, and by his own admission he felt nothing but contempt for Wheatley; and so, when Wheatley’s new novel arrived, Giles had it sent out for a slush-pile report as if it was from an unknown.
The report which came back was not favourable. ‘The book is terribly hackneyed,’ declared the reader. ‘Decline.’ Giles showed this report to his boss, Robert Lusty, who was not amused. Giles was told to publish the book in short order.
‘In spite of my best efforts,’ said Giles, ‘Dennis Wheatley’s career continued to prosper.’
This story demonstrates a number of points. One, that young men are often arrogant, ignorant and stupid; two, that mature publishers usually develop a degree of common sense; and three, that slush-pile readers… Well, what can one say about the Hutchinson reader in this case? He or she failed to recognise a new book by the firm’s principal asset. Does this generate any confidence in that reader in particular, or the slush-pile process in general?
Writers hit back
Every so often, repeated rejection of what the author believes is a good book leads to an attack of blind rage, out of which comes a determination to prove that publishers are complete fools. Sadly, this is not too difficult to achieve, at least in particular instances.
The usual procedure to obtain revenge is to type out a chapter or two of a current bestseller, give it a new title, and submit it to publishers as your own work. I know of at least three occasions when this experiment has been carried out, with results which will not, I think, surprise you. I will quote only one example here.
In the summer of 2000, the French publisher Plon issued a novel which had been written by a famous television presenter; the book was a great ‘success’, in that the author was interviewed widely, made many personal appearances, and the public was persuaded to buy a large number of copies.
The magazine Voici decided, however, that this novel was less than interesting, and that it would never have been published at all had it come from an unknown author. Voici typed out the first chapter of the book and offered it, under a pseudonym, to every leading publisher in France. None of them wanted to read the full manuscript, and none even recognised it as the season’s hit – including Plon, which had published the book in the first place.
We have surely assembled enough evidence about the slush pile. We now need to consider some of Taleb’s types of erroneous thinking, apply these to the world of publishing, and see what can be learnt that might be of value.
Flaws in the slush-pile methodology
We noted above that the experiment with rats was designed to identify the ‘strongest’ rats, and that it failed to do so because of flaws in the methodology.
There is sufficient evidence provided above (and elsewhere) to convince the author of this essay, if no one else, that the slush-pile procedure is also flawed. It is intended to identify the ‘strongest’ or the ‘best’ books (however defined), and it demonstrably fails to do so.
Taleb tells us that, in any experiment or procedure, there will be a difference between the desired outcome (in this case identification of the best books) and the actual outcome if there is either variance in the base cohort, or randomness in treatment.
In the slush-pile procedure both of these factors are present.
The base cohort contains a wide range of variance. The books submitted will range from the sub-literate to the masterly. Some writers can spell and punctuate; some can’t. Some writers will reveal a lifetime of experience; some will display a youthful naivety.
Secondly, there is massive randomness in the treatment of the books submitted. A variety of readers are likely to be employed; they have their own preferences, their own likes and dislikes, and these will differ one from another. The source of a submission (author, unknown agent, high-powered agent) will itself colour the willingness of the reader to ‘give the book a chance.’
The slush-pile procedure, we will allow, does bring about the publication of books which reach a basic, but fairly modest, professional standard. But no more. It does not facilitate, much less guarantee, the identification of black swans. The procedure, as normally operated, is deeply unsatisfactory.
Survivorship bias
Indulgence in the faulty thinking known as survivorship bias is universal throughout publishing.
Slush-pile readers, editors, publishers in general, agents, critics, media commentators, readers, and (published) writers – all have a marked tendency to assume that the slush-pile procedure actually works, and that the survivors are indeed the best.
If pushed up against a wall, with a loaded gun inserted into a nostril, most publishing professionals will admit that the selection of the ‘best’ books is subject to occasional errors. (We have encountered plenty already.) But the next day, the same person will fall back into the old (and incorrect) mode of thinking, and the slush-pile procedure will continue to operate, unchanged.
This is probably the place to point out that the most dramatic illustration of survivorship bias in the book world occurs following the award of a prize. Let us consider, for instance, the Booker Prize(properly the Man Booker Prize), which is currently the most prestigious literary award in the UK.
If you and I are presented with a piece of string, and are asked to guess its length, you may say that it is 15 inches long, and I may say that it’s 18 inches. In order to resolve our disagreement, we can measure its length against a ruler and come to a conclusion which all sane parties will accept as correct.
But when you and I are faced with a novel, and asked to say whether it is a masterpiece or an overblown piece of self-indulgent nonsense, there is no universally recognised scale against which we can measure the book and come to a clear conclusion. Judging a novel is a matter of taste and sensibility, and you are likely to maintain that your taste and sensibility are superior to mine.
As far as the Booker Prize is concerned, it is safe to say that the choice of the ‘best’ book of the year is inevitably a matter of opinion rather than fact. And not even unanimous opinion. In almost every year there are press reports of disagreements among the judges, and in some years we hear of ‘compromise choices’ or the chairman’s casting vote. We also know that, in one particular case, the eventual winner was unusually fortunate.
In 2002 the winner of the Booker Prize was Life of Pi by Yann Martel. Many newspaper reports at the time told us that this book had been rejected by Faber, the firm which had published Martel’s earlier work; the book had also been turned down by at least five other major publishers. So if the eventual publisher, Canongate, had not taken the book, it is likely that the manuscript would have remained in the author’s filing cabinet. Furthermore, if the book had been accepted by one of the bigger firms, it would not even have been entered for the Booker Prize in the first place, because the big firms are only allowed two nominations and have to enter their most famous authors; if they don’t, the famous authors are likely to go elsewhere.
The Life of Pi saga provides a beautifully clear demonstration of the random nature of decision-making in publishing. Here we have a book which was turned down for publication by numerous ‘good judges’. It was entered for the Booker Prize by a small firm which had no stronger candidates. And it so happened that the particular set of judges who were reading in 2002 happened to like it best. Or a majority of them did.
All rational observers will agree that the Life of Pi, or any other Booker winner, cannot sensibly be described as the best book of the year in any absolute sense. The Life of Pi episode shows us, undeniably, that there might have been other books that year which could, quite possibly, have found favour with the judges if they had been submitted. The most that can be said of the book which wins the Booker Prize is that it is the one which (of those presented for their judgement) the judges liked the best.
But observe, please, what happens when the winner of the Booker Prize is announced (in any year). What happens is that the media, the critics, and the public, all behave as if there is some absolute sense in which the winner is the best book of the year. They act as if the book has been held up against a ruler, a universally agreed scale, and has been found, indisputably and scientifically, to be ‘better’ than any other.
This very week, for instance, I was given a copy of the New York Review of Books, in which there is a lengthy review of the most recent Booker winner; the article runs to 108 column inches. Similar articles are no doubt published every year. And this ‘superstar treatment’ will be repeated in newspapers and magazines throughout the English-speaking world.
It is the winning novel, please note, which is treated in this way– not the runners-up; and certainly not the good books which were not submitted by their publishers; and definitely not the books which didn’t even make it into print. It is the winning author who will be interviewed on television, invited to writers’ conferences, and made the subject, in due course, of earnest PhD theses by bespectacled young people who can think of nothing better to do with their time than waste it by deconstructing a novelist’s prose. This is the winner-take-all mechanism in its most unforgiving form.
The runners-up, the non-shortlisted books, and the unpublished books, all those are the drowned worshippers and dead rats of the fiction world; they are losers who disappear from our sight, never to be heard of again. And yet we know, beyond doubt, that but for the workings of randomness, which favoured the winner and disfavoured the drowned worshippers, there might be one, ten, or a hundred other books which could, in different circumstances, have proved to be more enticing to the judges than the eventual winner.
Survivorship bias in the book world is therefore brutal, vicious, and deadly. There is no point in complaining about it: it is just the way things happen. The world in general, and the book trade in particular, is unfair, unjust, and patently absurd in its workings. But all those who work in the book trade, in particular those who write and sell novels, need to be aware of this situation. And they need to ask themselves whether a business in which randomness is so powerful a factor in the distribution of rewards is a business which sensible people should allow themselves to be involved in.
Nietzsche’s error
Nietzsche, you will recall, told us that ‘What does not kill me makes me stronger.’
What, if anything, can we make of Nietzsche’s alleged words of wisdom in relation to publishing; in particular, in relation to the slush pile?