I put out a Tweet yesterday after a comment from a submission I’d received explaining that if I didn’t give the time to the first half of the book, then I really wasn’t giving the author their due. It’s a common argument and I get it, I really do. So I wanted to expand a little about why agents only read the first three chapters of a book at submission stage, because we do know how frustrating it is for authors who have put their heart and soul into a script to have it judged, perhaps unfairly, on maybe the first 10,000 words of a much larger book.
Firstly, it’s about time. You may well have seen a week or so ago - that several great editors left the industry due to publishing burnout. I won’t go into all the details - just Google ‘Publishing Burnout’ and you’ll get some fantastic articles on what it is and who it affects.
We know that writers don’t have the luxury of writing all day - every author I work with writes in their ‘spare’ time. And when I mean spare, I mean those moments squeezed out of the day between family, work and life. It’s not much and it’s incredibly difficult to commit to.
Editors and agents have exactly the same dilemma. Anyone who’s had any first-hand experience of publishing knows that the submission pile is something to be curated in your ‘spare time’. Your actual job is made up of a million other aspects to do with the day-to-day tasks involved in getting a book or client from script to shelf. So taking into account most publishing folk work well past the clocking off time in the office anyway - and then have to eat, spend time with the family, try to relax - and then hit the submissions’ pile which we read without any wage attached to it, because it’s outside of working hours. You can see where time becomes an issue.
Secondly, it’s true that there’s a gratification element to reading. You read, because you want to be entertained. If a book hasn’t hooked you with the opening chapters - would you, as a reader - be honest - continue reading it for your pleasure? We have to take that into consideration when reading submissions. If I’m not hooked by then - why would anyone else be? Yes, reading is subjective. So I could risk missing out on something extraordinary that, say for argument’s sake, occurs in the fourth chapter and blows the whole book into a completely gripping read. That’s a risk I have to take because of the sheer amount of submissions I receive.
To give you some context. I opened up my submissions list for four months, I received over 600 submissions during that time period. I’m still working through the last 219 of them now. It takes approx ten minutes to read a submission. That’s 100 hours of reading. Say I do two hours of reading every evening, that’s still going to take me fifty evenings of reading before I clear my submissions. If I were to read half a script of everyone’s submission, based on approximately two hours of solid reading time to get through it - then it’d take more like 600 evenings of reading. It’s not feasible to spend over a year and a half reading 600 submissions and, I’m pretty sure, authors wouldn’t want to wait that long to hear back as to whether they’d been successful either. I tend to focus on SFF, so 90% of those submissions are purely in that area - agents who look at a much wider genre base, will get even more.
Then we get to the really depressing figures. Of those 600 submissions - I’ll maybe take one client, two at the most. Agents tend to keep their lists tight to ensure they give each client their personal attention. And we, like editors, only take on books that we’re really passionate about - that make our hearts sing. The same goes for publishing. Of all the submissions I used to get as a commissioning editor, I’d take on maybe one or two new authors a year. That’s partly to ensure the list size doesn’t become so unmanageable that your own authors are competing against one another for shelf space. And partly because you need to invest a lot of time and energy in each book. So yes, for anyone who didn’t realise it - and I’m pretty sure most everyone does - publishing is brutal. Absolutely brutal and heartbreaking and, at times, totally soul destroying.
So why do we do it? Love and hope. Yep - massive cliches, I know. But every single one of us got into this industry because we love books. We love reading. We love exploring new worlds that are opened up to us through the pages of a book. No one goes into publishing thinking they’re going to make their fortune. And, I would suspect the same is true for most authors as well. The hope is that we find those writers that we love to read - that we unearth that special gem in the submissions process that makes our hearts race a little bit faster, that we, yes, we fall in love with. And that we can then share that author with a wider readership. Obviously love and hope doesn’t put food on the table or money in anyone’s pocket though. And publishing is a business. So that’s where difficult decisions have to be made.
We know that authors pour their heart and souls into books. Make no mistake, when an agent or editor takes on an author - they invest themselves just as heavily into that book. It’s not just business, it’s personal. So we do understand how much time and energy and sacrifice has gone into each and every submission we read. But everyone deserves a chance to be considered, and there has to be a process that’s fair to every person who submits a book. Until someone invents a time turner or is able to clone us, I’ll continue reading the first three chapters of each submission, wholly respecting that on the other end is a real person with hopes and dreams of their own for this book baby, and I’ll keep looking out for those authors that are a perfect match for me personally.
