Broken Pencil: Give a little, get a little?

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Give a little, get a little?

They say that you only get what you put in. You give a little, get a little? You work hard, results abound? Buy a book, sell a book? Perhaps not literally, but at least for Tin House Books, this idiom strikes a particular balance in a publishing industry currently caught up in an uneven proportion of want and production.

Tin House doesn’t accept unsolicited manuscripts for consideration of publication – like many other presses, the steady stream of submissions coupled with a small staff makes for a lengthy read and response process. But right now, if your unpublished manuscript is accompanied by a book receipt, your submission will be read. “In the spirit of discovering new talent,” reads their new policy, “as well as supporting established authors and the bookstores who support them, Tin House Books will accept unsolicited manuscripts dated between August 1 and November 30, 2010, as long as each submission is accompanied by a receipt for a book from a bookstore.” The new policy seems to reach to new creative depths in terms of submitting your work, asking would-be authors to “videotape, film, photograph, animate, twitter, or memorialize in any way the process of stepping into a bookstore and buying a book to send along for our possible amusement and/or use on our Web site.”

While most publishing presses strongly suggest having read at least a few titles from their stock before submitting your work, some literary magazines require a reading fee, or suggest that subscribing to their magazine will put your work at the front end of the slush pile. This isn’t just to deter writers from submitting their work to publications ill-suited to their tastes. It’s also meant to foster and encourage new readers, new subscriptions in order to sustain the publication. Seems obvious. Shouldn’t the equation of a plentiful arena of new and unpublished writers ferociously reading like-minded and competitive publications to keep in the game, plus a variety of literary print and online magazines and presses eager to support those writers and readers, equal the livelihood of those presses and magazines? Shouldn’t the cycle feed itself? Does being an ambitious aspiring writer translate into also having an avid need to read and know who is being published and where?

Being a writer also implies that you are a reader, which is what Tin House is looking for this fall with their trial of a new policy. We’ll see if this is a fitting trend for the publishing industry or a financial deterrent for writers trying to submit their work.