Some Rough Slush Statistics...

So for fun today (I have a weird idea of fun), I decided to go through the last 250 pieces in my slush pile from March/April.

Different publishers get different stuff in slush, so I'm not saying this is going to be the same results across the board...BUT it should give you a good sense of what I end up seeing.

What I was looking at, specifically, is how many submissions followed our basic guidelines. We aren't, really, all that strict. Email cover letter with your contact info, book titles/genre/word count, book blurb/jacket copy, and synopsis in the body of the email. Complete novel attached in RTF (no other attachments). For formatting: use a common font (like Times New Roman), italics rather than underlines for italicized text, *** for scene breaks...now, the current guidelines ask for single spaced, but I hate reading things that way, so it'll be changed to 1.5 for the next round. No bold. We take sci-fi, fantasy, horror, paranormal, and mysteries. All this is clearly laid out.

For the purposes of this sampling, I didn't bother worrying about whether any text was bold, or little things like that--just basic, simple guidelines. Did you include the info we need in your cover letter? Did you attach in the right format?

I broke down the stats a little from there into other details. So...here you go!

131 followed the basic guidelines.

119 didn't (so they got at least one major thing wrong).

***

Of that 131, only 40 had an actual cover letter.

Now, basically, I don't particularly care if you write a cover letter or not--I've contracted really good books that only sent me the basic information I required. But I just thought it was worth mentioning. For 91 of them, there were no previous publishing credits listed, no real salutation. In some ways, this is a good thing--a lot of writers say really stupid things in their cover letters. Usually they talk about how their mom loved the book and they were published by Poetry.com and how they have several sequels in the works. None of those things makes me want to read any further, so sometimes it's best to say nothing, LOL. But a brief, well written cover letter goes a long way towards putting me in a good mood.

***

Of the 119 that didn't follow the guidelines...I stupidly didn't think to count how many didn't have a synopsis, but I'd say at least half. That's the biggest thing people don't do. Either that, or they send it as an attachment

6 didn't include a full manuscript--instead, they sent three chapters or a couple of short stories from their long anthology.

33 attached the wrong format. We ask for RTF. It's not hard to do an RTF. Some did doc, others docx, a few were PDF, one was zip, and still another was an "unknown" file type that had no extension, although the author typed "RTF" at the end of the file name.

4 had the manuscript in the body of the email.

8 had no manuscript included at all.

23 were genres we don't accept.

***

Now, a couple of other stats that don't really fit into either category, but are interesting to note.

16 had no title or author on the first page (or header) of their file. Though this isn't in our guidelines, it's kinda common sense. Why wouldn't you put your book title there?

3 had weird file titles. One was Mundania.rft, and two others were manuscript.rtf. Uh...hey, kids, stuff can get lost. Pick a normal file name. Many others were the initials of the titles, which can be confusing but not as bad as those three.

26 addressed their cover letters to me. This isn't a huge deal--I haven't been here that long, so I don't care if they're not personalized. What's also interesting is that around half of that 26 were ones that didn't follow the other guidelines. So...they looked me up, but not the submissions page?

Another 2 were addressed to people who don't work at the company, and haven't for several years (if they ever did).

3 others were addressed to completely different publishers. Someone clearly had a standard cover letter, and didn't bother fixing it.

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Other highlights (I'm paraphrasing lines here):

"I hope the novel isn't too poorly written."

"Dear Mundania Press: I would like to submit my book __Title__ to __Publisher that's not MP__"

"Please send me a critique when you're done reading."

"Here's my life history of sexual abuse..."

"Thank you for telling me I didn't follow the guidelines. Here is my manuscript again." (Hasn't followed guidelines.)