Slush pile

Hello, this is Elizabeth Ortel, and for the next hour, I'll be reading... from the October 2026 issue of the Wall Street Journal Magazine and the Niagara Frontier Radio Reading Service.

The first article that I'm going to share with you How Cormac McCarthy Got Plucked from the Slush Pile, in an excerpt from his new biography of the author Tracy Doherty, explains how McCarthy's first manuscript won over editors as his personal life was unraveling.

In May 1962, Cormac McCarthy addressed a letter to the fiction editor of Random House, the only publisher he'd heard of, and sent it along with a manuscript he had not proofread.

Before he died in 2023, McCarthy was widely considered the greatest living novelist.

What makes me happy would all fit into one slim volume, she said years later.

Yet that slim volume stayed out of reach.

McCarthy's novel wound up in the slush pile at Random House, alongside thousands of other unsolicited typescripts.

They arrived by the cartloads, like Larry Bensky, one of the editors.

In the following weeks, everybody and their dog was trying to write a Monsters in the Deep Sea story and sending it off to Analog.

And I guess what might have happened is that Reader of the Slush Pile looked at the first two sentences... of the story and thought, fuck, not another one, and just tossed it.

That's just my ego-preserving fantasy.

But, I mean, to answer your question, yes, I was writing continually, but I wasn't getting anything published.

They look at your submission and they may be asked to see the rest of the manuscript.

So what you're paying, you're paying to jump the queue in terms of getting ahead of the slush pile.

You're not paying for anything beyond that.

And I think it's pretty well recognised that there's no guarantee.

Once you jump the queue, you jump the slush pile, you have just as much chance as anyone else does of getting picked up your work by itself.

I suppose even then there is a slight paying to get ahead aspect of things.

But this does seem to be kind of next level in terms of the cost of a manuscript, you know, because they're not cheap.

As you say Nadine, the whole ethos of the industry for generations has been money flows one way towards the author, the author should not be paying for a vanity press or paying for an agent or anything to get the book out there.

and i think we are but we are starting to see that change aren't we like we are starting to see you know ways that people can pay money to jump the queue and and at the very very kind of gentle end of the scale i suppose are things like you know paying 50 80 quid for our agent one-to-one where you they read your book and and and that is a very i don't really i don't have any issue with that because i think you're not you know you're you're paying for them to to have a chat to them with it they look at your submission and they may be asked to see the rest of the manuscript so what you're paying you're paying to jump the queue in terms of getting ahead of the slush pile you're not paying for anything beyond that and and and there's i think it's pretty well recognized that there's no guarantee once once you jump the queue you jump the slush pile you have just as much chance as anyone else does yeah again picked up your work so i stand by it by itself but I suppose even then there is a slight paying to get ahead aspect of things.

But this does seem to be kind of next level in terms of the cost of a manuscript, you know, because they're not cheap.

As I say, we've all used them before.