Hello, Go Away
My literary agency, a one-man shop, is currently open to submissions, meaning anyone can send me their work. And about 400 people do so every month. That’s neither bragging nor complaining. I have no idea how that lines up with other agents, it’s just part of my job. I’ve found wonderful clients this way, once quaintly called “over the transom,” which literally means someone tossed a manuscript through one of those little old-fashioned windows above a door. Apparently that window is where art and commerce meet.
When I entered the industry a century ago as an editorial assistant, there was a physical thing known as the “slush pile” or simply “slush,” which was all the unagented, unsolicited manuscripts that writers sent directly to the publisher. The assistants would get together for a Slush Lunch to go through each piece (over slush pizza and slush soda), and almost 100% of the time, return a form rejection letter in a writer’s enclosed SASE (another historical term). Legendarily, Judith Guest’s Ordinary People was discovered in slush but I most memorably had a guy who wrote dozens of times and none of us could figure out what his book actually was — including him, because one letter stated, “I will not accept a contract for a manuscript I have not read!” (He was still sending missives after I was promoted and had my own assistant, who wrote a song about him. Different story.)
