A lot of people submit books to publishers. A lot of people (albeit, I suspect, a smaller number) submit books to agents. There are a lot of us monkeys in the world, and a surprising number have typewriters. Many of the manuscripts that arrive, still sticky with the residue of bananas, are, in various definitions of the word, unprintable (1). Let’s discount them, assume they are filleted from the incoming post by some manner of publisher’s angel. What is left? A few glowing magic beans of books, ready to sprout? No, only a small proportion of the infinite number of monkeys can write a decent line, but the mathematics speaks for itself. And if it’s the publisher’s angel’s day off, well…

 

There are such things as slush piles. They are where unborn books go to die.

 

It is not always so, of course. Some writers loose a single arrow into the unknown and it strikes its mark, to stand quivering in the bull. To extend the space-probe simile from last time, if everyone in the latter half of the century with ambition to be published had instead fired off a Voyager-style probe into the ether then we would surely have by now been contacted by some manner of alien, probably bringing a personal injury claim. You’ll know if you are one of these lucky authors when the golden ticket drops out of the envelope. Being, as it is, more difficult to prove a negative, you can only guess that you are not as each returned manuscript trails in like the dog you tried to abandon, tracking ink over the carpet.

 

But you keep submitting, because if you don’t, you’re like the man in the joke who prays to God to win the lottery, until eventually God says, “Well you could at least buy a ticket.”

 

So you buy your ticket. Instead of forking over a quid and having the tiresome chore of checking the numbers on the net, or the more tiresome chore of watching the sad little circus of the TV draw, you write your book, and you send it off.

 

Send what off, and to whom? Many people reading this (assuming that the number of people reading this ever approaches ‘many’) will have already negotiated this rapid, but for those that have not, who are sitting, perhaps, with a pristine manuscript and an envelope and a stamp and a pen, and a question mark…

 

Next: what not to send, and who not to send it to.(3)

(1): How very arrogant of me. To balance it, my early work most certainly falls (2) into this category.
(2): Or was it pushed?
(3): Or some other pointless digression. Hey, it's a blog.