As a special feature, from time to time, we’ll be bringing in folks outside our usual cast of characters to talk about literature. As our first guest, Jessica Freeman-Slade, an editoral assistant at Knopf, tackles a tricky issue: Do online submissions hurt underprivileged authors?
The publishing world has never exactly been an equal-opportunity industry–the more years of college you have, the likelier it is you’ll know how to research the submission process, format your manuscript, and write something with “mass market appeal.” However, a few weeks into my job within the mainstream publishing industry, a conversation with an author submitting a hand-written manuscript gave me some pause. Can you survive as an author without access to technology, education, and most importantly, money? Is the chance of being published a class privilege? Eccentricity and outsider status sometimes helps art ??? see the movie Junebug and the recent boom of folk and outsider art appreciation as example ??? but given the hoops and hurdles involved in getting a book published, it’s hard to imagine anyone without class privilege negotiating the process without the help of an agent. Or, if you’re dealing with a venue that only accepts electronically, your hopes for publication are reliant upon the time and money to sit with a computer and send out your stuff. With each of these hurdles, more people are weeded out. Though we end up with many more submissions than we can handle, I fear that our new slush pile is only a fraction of what it could be, a reading experience shaped by the writer’s access and know-how rather than by artistic talent.
During my junior year at Kenyon, the KR submission process suddenly went from paper submissions to electronic. This might have been a blessing in terms of office space, but the kind of submissions we received changed dramatically. Gone were those coveted poems from prisoners and mental patients, which every now and then yielded something terrifically interesting and different. Gone were envelopes slightly greased stained from waitresses writing in their spare time, or wrinkled from being stuffed in a back pocket. Also missing were the beautifully illustrated poems, in pencil and thick smudgable ink, from writer-illustrators ??? photo essays are now rarely transmitted
electronically, as no matter how good the photograph is pixellated, it never quite comes across in jpeg form.
With the advent of technology certainly comes progress ??? more writers than ever before are sending their poems and stories and novels to multiple venues, increasing tenfold the opportunity to be read, let alone published. Magazines without substantial web components fold, yet in their place arise blog-style commentary allowing multiple authors and multi-faceted perspectives updated in nanoseconds rather than weeks. (Slate.com has set the bar for internet magazines, yet few mainstream magazines will take the same risk.) Books and magazines are published faster than ever before, and manuscripts, covers, etc., are seen by entire floors of a house or imprint in a given day. Books themselves are barely out in the marketplace before they are brought in for reprints and refreshed back ads, featuring the latest reviewers to draw in the bookbuyer already jaded by a familiar jacket. Computers, the Internet, the fast back-and-forthing of the written word, has transformed the way we evaluate and process literature, and it can be argued that all of this makes writing???and writers–more accessible.
The ability to see the author behind every piece is meant to enable us to see beyond the O. Henrys, beyond the brief blurbs of previous publication, and to see the text as it’s meant to be read, by the truly appreciative reader. I am incredibly grateful for my three years of watching the discovery ??? the Eureka ??? of publishing take place at The Kenyon Review. And now, in a commercial house, without a single unsolicited manuscript on my plate, I start to wonder, as we advance further and further into the information age, if the progress we’re making is at the expense of the people we’re excluding. To the author with the hand-written manuscript, I can’t say much beyond “see you in the slush” and hope that your talent puts your paper copy in the right hands.