Journalist Katherine Rosman has an interesting article up on The Wall Street Journal's Web site today, titled "The Death of the Slush Pile."The piece is a nice wake-up call for fledgling writers with unrealistic expectations. Included among the quotes:
David Granger, editor in chief of Esquire, says slush-pile finds are extremely rare: "If we found one writer a year that sent things in randomly, that would be a lot."
The article states that literary mainstay The Paris Review publishes just one piece from the slush pile each year, which after factoring in submission numbers and the vagaries of the submissions process gives unsolicited submissions a .008 percent chance of rising to the top of the pile.
The above illustration, used in the original WSJ post, is by illustrator Lisa Haney.
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