Quote:
Originally Posted by kcmay
The number of publishable manuscripts is greater than the number actually published. I would guess that agented manuscripts have a higher percentage of publishable vs. non, but if you're talking about the slush pile, I've heard from two editors at a Big Name publishing house that around 10% of those are of publishable quality.
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As someone who has done slush reading and script reading, I can say that the 10 percent is what I found. But most of that 10 percent suffered from mediocrity - very often not being daring enough. (EDIT: and I should say often very SERIOUS problems with mediocrity.) As if the author spend so much time adhering to the rules and making it to "publishable" that they never injected any actual life into the story. (Or crushed it out for fear it broke a rule, which really good writing almost always does.)
However, I've also been a writing teacher, and I read the stuff that never even made it to the slush pile. Most of the really bad literature in the world is never completed. I don't know that any of my students ever actually made it to the submission stage, but I think the biggest block was fear of rejection. It's possible some of those would self-publish because there is no overt rejection.
I don't know if what we see at Smashwords and on Kindle yet represent the slush pile. I think there are groups who are jumping ahead of the rest. Midlist writers with a backlist. Writers who have been in the "almost" pile for a little too long and realize that they just aren't marketable to a big publisher. The people who hate rejection and maybe never submitted. And the fringe who never thought of doing anything else.
So what we've got is a disproportionate number of the worst and the good but not commercial. And non-commercial works will likely be loved by a niche audience, and not by the rest of us. You're not going to see best seller types in the indie ranks yet. And you may never see it, because they sell at Walmart, and Walmart doesn't buy indies.
So yes, I think most of us will find two percent or less of books that meet our standards, but I don't think that fully reflects the quality out there now.
And yes, I think we'll see more junk, AND more good stuff coming this way. It doesn't matter what the proportion is, though, because I think we have the tools to sort through it. We've done it with the web for years. And Amazon's tools have been well honed to help us find what we want out of the hundreds of thousands of things we don't.
Camille