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Originally Posted by Fat Abe
Teresa (unknown last name) posted an essay entitled, Slushkiller
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Unknown last name? The URL of the site wasn't a clue? The author of the famous and infamous Slushkiller essay is Teresa Nielsen Hayden, who at the time she wrote it was an editor at Tor, one of the few remaining publishers who accepted (and I believe still does) unagented work. Her husband, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, is a senior editor at Tor. Trust, Teresa knows of which she speaks.
That being said, I'm glad
Slushkiller was linked, as I had planned to do so.
Part of the problem with the OP is that it seems to assume that the majority of slush is publishable or close to it. Note that in Slushkiller the percentage assigned to such books (which are categories 11-14)
are 1-4% of the submissions.
Firstly, one suspects that publishers would prefer to concentrate their energies on books that they think will sell. Publishers provide a great deal more than simple editing and print production. They also provide marketing, meaning they promote the book to bookstores and other retail outlets, which will in turn feature the books and try harder to sell them. In some cases this involves paying "co-op" fees, for instance, for placement on an endcap or in a special display, like the display of the latest books that greets you as you walk into Barnes & Noble. Those books don't get there accidentally: the publisher paid for it. A publisher is not going to waste increasingly scarce marketing resources on books they don't think they can get in bookstores. Therefore, the author has wasted his or her money on these "editing" services.
Quote:
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Originally Posted by Scott Nicholson
Actually, Harlequin is already doing this, a semi-subsidized arm that caused an uproar in the major professional writing organizations, who took Harlequin off their approved list of "pro publishers." I don't know all the details, but essentially you pay to have your book go through their process and bear the logo. If I remember right, it ain't cheap.
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Harlequin (and Thomas Nelson as well) are monetizing their slushpile by using a rebranded service provided by AuthorHouse. They steer the "not good enough" books (including categories 1-13 on Slushkiller--meaning the 95 percent that is unreadable or shouldn't be published by anyone, as well as the almost-good-enough stuff) to the rebranded service for vanity publication. The author can purchase editing and marketing services from them, or not; the cost can be prohibitive, and if a book is truly slushy, won't help it a bit. The outcry came because Harlequin has also suggested that they might pick up books from this program that sell well for commercial publication. Many authors have pointed out that, especially in the romance writing community, there are plenty of free resources that authors can use to help them bring their work up to publishable quality, and that it is a conflict of interest to create unreasonable hope of commercial publication in authors who just don't have the talent and ask them to spend a lot of money for something that won't ever happen, and also that the service is extremely overpriced. Also, note that the editing and marketing services are provided by AuthorHouse--not Harlequin.
I think the OP had something different from this in mind--more of an earnest attempt by the publisher to create a publishable book that will be edited and marketed like all the other books they publish. I don't see that happening. If it was something they think would make them some money, the publisher would just buy the book in the first place. Having two different workflows would complicate bookkeeping enormously, I would think.
All that being said, there is a high probability that some of the current methods used by commercial publishers will change. It will not happen quickly, however, and I'm not sure that it will be quite in the method described in the OP. I suspect we will see agents taking over more of the functions currently performed by publishers. They already are doing it to an extent. Some agents will guide a promising author through some rewriting before submitting a book to editors.