So I was looking for places to submit some of my short stories the other day and ending up going through quite a few magazine submission guidelines. Some of the magazines presented selling points along with their guidelines, reasons why you should submit to their particular magazine. You know, stuff like their pay rate, how long they’ve been around (to show how stable the magazine is and assure you it won’t go defunct before your story is published). Reasonable things to point out if the magazine isn’t known worldwide.
But amongst the selling points for a couple of the magazines, I tripped over statements like: We don’t use slush readers, or Every story will be seen by the editors. And when I say tripped, I mean my mind mentally faceplanted the ground. I had never considered slush readers (also known as “first readers”) to be a bad thing.
This is probably where I should point out that I’m, as of a few months ago, a slush reader for magazine, so I’m more than a little biased. This is going to be subjective. But I also has experience with the slush pile both as a reader and writer, so I like to think my opinion is fairly nuanced. I’ll never be too old to be educated, though, so if I’ve missed some more or less obvious argument, don’t hesitate to write in the comments.
It’s not that I don’t get the idea here. I’m a writer too. I know that receiving an acceptance letter is one of the best thing that can happen. And that’s only going to happen if your stories get in front of the editors, so anything that gets them there will help. And slush readers are people who can make sure the editors never see your story. So they’re a problem, right?
Yeah, well… This is were I’m going to argue you’re wrong (or, technically, that I’m wrong, but let’s not be pedantic).
Firstly, an editor won’t necessarily have the power to buy your story, or at least be the only one to decide if the publisher’s going to buy it. At a magazine there might be several layers of editors with the editor-in-chief being the one who ultimately decide which stories to publish, making the other editors higher ranking slush readers really. At a book publisher, the acquisition editors will probably have to convince the marketing department and the publisher, that this story they love is also sellable.
Secondly, slush readers aren’t picked off the street. If it’s a decent publisher/magazine, there’s an application process. It took me three years and applying at four different magazines before I was good enough to get a position.
A slush reader should be familiar with the magazine/publisher, and ideally their taste in stories match that of the editors at least somewhat. More importantly, though, they should know a good story from a bad one, and be able to explain why a story is either one or the other (or, often, somewhere in between). They should be familiar with what tropes have been overdone in the genre of the magazine/publisher. They should have a solid grasp of grammar.
Yes, slush readers are volunteers (like almost all fiction magazine employees, including most editors), and at book publishers they’re very likely the intern. But they still had to prove their worth to be there in the first place.
Thirdly, no matter how qualified an editor is, they’re still only one person. Not that slush readers have split personalities — at least not all of us — but at least at magazines, a team of slush readers means that you, as a writer, can be relatively sure that more than one person reads your story. An editorial teams of three, two, maybe just one editor usually means that, yeah, only one person will read each story.
So with a bunch of slush readers on board you don’t have to worry if you only got rejected, because the editor never gave your story the attention it needed to be properly understood, trying to get through the slush pile threatening to tip over. It depends on the magazine, but often having slush readers will mean that two, three, sometimes half a dozen people have read your story before it’s either rejected or passed on. So the opinion of that one person who didn’t get any of the subtle references to ’80s comic books in your master piece won’t matter that much because there are three other people who think that was a pretty cool element.
Fourthly, if in doubt, slush readers will pass your story on or at least alert the editor to them not being entirely sure about it. Slush readers aren’t there to find the golden flower that’ll make the magazine shine (much as we want to). That’s the editors job. But that one flower will be far easier to spot if the weeds have been cut, and that‘s the slush readers’s job.
Yes, I realize this might hurt to hear when your latest submission was rejected mere hours after you sent it, and it obviously never reached the editor (actually, this probably means that the editor rejected the story instead of letting the slush readers give their view on it). But most of what publishers and magazines receive are easy rejects. Authors who don’t follow the guidelines; authors who submit 300 page memoirs to a horror, flash-fiction-only magazines; authors who just don’t manage to create stories with an original premise, interesting characters, and a fully developed, well paced plot every time. And slush readers are there to catch especially the latter of those stories, because it’s not always immediately clear that they won’t work for the magazine/publisher.
So in conclusion, slush readers are brilliant and every magazine and publisher should have as many of them as possible. Well… that’s also too onesided. In the end, it comes down to taste.
For the editors, not having slush readers means they have more control themselves, getting to read every story and not just relying on other’s comments. But having slush readers usually means they’ll have a higher turn around and can keep the slush monster at bay.
For writers, a magazine/publisher not having slush readers means your story will definitely be seen by an editor, whereas them having slush readers means you’ll get an answer for your submission sooner.
It’s a matter of taste. But since no story will be published either way unless it’s strong enough to convince the editors, I know which solution I prefer magazines to go with.
Toby Backman 