Wellington Leg: One of the major trade publishers made news last week by indicating they would stop reading manuscripts on submission from agents. Although the ban is described as temporary this reporter and others wonder if this plan is the first glimmer of an ingenious recovery effort for a sagging industry. Let’s make the reading ban permanent; choose manuscripts in an entirely new and cost efficient manner: At Random!
The Random Walk Theory: For those of you who think this is a dry cleaning or oil exploration blog, let me explain the basics of modern publishing. Once written, manuscripts are passed along a conveyor to professional readers called agents. Some of the agents wear gloves and hairnets and are bored like Laverne and Shirley while others demand changes before offering representation. After years of reading and re-reading the product is shipped to an editor who may “buy” or “pass” depending on a complex matrix of factors. If acquired, the manuscript is read by many inside the publishing house before it is rendered in book form. I think the inefficiencies here are obvious: at every step someone is reading the manuscript. Why?
The Soviet Model: In a force economy books are banned, but some are published. Thus we have Heroic Book, Romantic Book, Scary Book, Funny Book, Not Funny Book, Kids Book, How To, How Come? How to Make Millions in Real Estate. With workers controlling the means of production all books are equal and are published unread. Then some are banned. People read them under the covers and wonder why the rules of punctuation change so often.
The New Criterion: Instead of reading new submissions publishers will feed the pages into a Marketing Collator. The collator will quickly reassemble the pages into categories sometimes mixing and matching pages from various manuscripts to achieve an industrial level of efficiency, providing numerous opportunities for balancing output with market needs. If a publisher wants a Romantic Book, he or she may have one at the touch of a button. In the time it takes to get coffee from a vending machine, the book is on its way to Cover Art and some lucky author is receiving a small check.
I think the benefits of the Random Walk outweigh the disadvantages. Publishers are fretful that their selected titles perform in wild unpredictable ways making profit projections more art than science. Short of TARP money for the industry, only draconian measures will succeed.
Author Number 144 reporting.