Slushpile Hell Blog Letters

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette. One of our occasional guilty pleasures here at A Way with Words is the website called Slushpile Hell.

Oh, yes.

This is where a grumpy literary agent lets off steam about the bad manuscripts and the awful query letters that he receives each week.

And Grant, you know what a slushpile is.

Yeah, a slushpile is when you work in book publishing, you get a lot of unsolicited manuscripts, either if you’re a publisher or a literary agent.

And somebody has to go through them because there might be a genius in there.

There usually isn’t a genius, but there might be.

So you have to give everything a try.

Right.

And slush pile hell is this weird mixture of sort of schadenfreude and eye-rolling and snark.

And it’s also evidence that an amazing number of people have what you might call a wildly overinflated view of their writing ability.

Let me give you just one example.

Here’s a letter that came to this agent.

Have you ever wished that you had represented the author of the Holy Bible and placed it with a publisher?

No.

With the Bible being the best-selling book ever written over the last 2,000 years, the revenue it would have generated for your agency and employees would have allowed your agency to exist for generations.

While I don’t have a religious manuscript, I do have one I believe is as important as the Bible, which has the sales potential of the Bible.

Oh, no.

Yes, exactly. Oh, no.

Well, so the whole premise there on this website is that a lot of these people think that if they’re really positive about their book and they really state their case with a lot of adverbs, they’re going to convince this agent.

They’re just going to be overwhelmed by all the L-Y endings or something, right?

I truly believe this is the best book ever.

And my advice is that it doesn’t work that way, at least in my experience.

It’s different for other people and it’s different in other industries.

Just be plain spoken.

My name is X.

My topic of my book is Y.

It’s this long.

Here’s a sample chapter.

I think it fits into this genre.

Here’s my contact information.

I’m out of here.

And your writing speaks for itself, right?

Yeah, your writing speaks for itself.

Because here’s the thing.

You are encountering a busy person who’s got maybe two minutes.

They’re going to read three or four pages.

And if you don’t win them over in the three or four pages of the manuscript, not the cover letter, not the query letter, then you’re not going to do the job.

Yep.

So stay away from the hyperbole.

For sure, right?

Congratulations on your manuscript.

Please don’t send it to me.

I’ll share a few more examples of these later in the show.

And in the meantime, we’d love to hear your questions, comments about language.

The number to call is 877-929-9673.

Or you can send your comments about language and writing to words@waywordradio.org.