Slush Pile Treatment at TOR

A friend sent me this post Get Rejecting from Romancing the Blog. The writer of this blog post, Anna Genoese, is an editor at TOR/Forge, and she tells about the slim chances of an unagented writer to be selected out of the slush pile. What she has to say is not very encouraging and even somewhat depressing.

... at Tor/Forge, every two weeks, the entire editorial department gets together in a giant room with a big stack of submissions, and we get rejecting.

Nope, I don’t mean reading. I wrote rejecting, and I meant rejecting (grammar aside!).

Tor/Forge, all told, gets somewhere between 25 and 75 unagented, unsolicited submissions every single business day. ... That means we get between about 7,000 and 20,000 submissions every year, not counting stuff from authors we already publish, and agents.

We publish an average of 15 books per month ... That’s about 180 books every year. Subtract from that the number of authors we work with on a regular basis and… well, the odds aren’t good.

How many of those 20,000 submissions actually become real grown up novels?

Not many.

In fact, in the last five years, I can count on one hand the number of books that we pulled out of the slush piles and published. ...

So I ask - is the timing -- a day before my birthday -- intentional?

Categories: writing, publishing