Vanity, Vanity. By now everybody knows there are too many books published each year in these United States. Picture this: in 1940, the first year the book-biz bible, Literary Market Place, was published, there were fewer than one hundred publishers listed. The Fiftieth Anniversary Edition contains exactly 2,578. The thirty thousand or so trade books each year (the ones published by the major houses and sold through the “trade,” i.e., through retail bookshops) are only the visible part of a literary iceberg of extraordinary depth: I once read the estimate that three hundred thousand book-length manuscripts are written each year by aspiring American authors. That’s a lot beneath the surface, and I can tell you that most of what’s under water deserves to drown.
Once upon a time, young editorial assistants would go wading in the “slush pile,” that abysmal jetsam that washes ashore at every publisher, and which no publisher these days even bothers to unwrap, let alone read. These are the unsolicited manuscripts that come in over the transom. Why aren’t they read? Because it is not cost-effective to do so; in ten years you’d spend maybe $50,000 mining in this sea to come up with, maybe, one book that might pan out at $5,000. The stuff’s that bad.
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