Usually, everything starts with the author — or, more accurately, the author’s agent. Sometimes a publishing house contacts an author to write a book, but that’s not the norm; it happens most often with people who have name recognition. The majority of manuscripts come to a publisher unsolicited, and these can be divided into ones that are submitted through a literary agent (which gives them a better chance of being noticed) and ones that come in directly from an author over the transom (which gives them a slim chance of being noticed).
An agent submits a manuscript on behalf of an author to several publishing houses. A good agent plays matchmaker, pitching a manuscript to editors and publishers that he thinks make the best potential mates. If the author has a strong hook — for example, she’s well known and brings a built-in audience with her — the agent may be able to submit only a query letter or book proposal containing a book outline or table of contents; an introduction; and a completed sample chapter, often the opening chapter of the book. And what about those unagented submissions, and even submissions from agents that the editor doesn’t know? If they’re kept at all (and often they aren’t), they go into what’s called a slush pile — a reserve of manuscripts and proposals that sit until an assistant editor gets around to looking through them when it’s a light week for submissions. Published winners do get pulled from the slush pile, but it doesn’t happen very often.
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