Roddy Doyle, Iain Banks, Bill Bryson and Minette Walters are just a few of the bestselling writers whose first novels were plucked from the pile of unsolicited manuscripts sent to publishers or agents, but that doesn't mean you'll be so lucky.
Indeed, if you're an aspirant writer with a manuscript just completed, the chance of this happening is becoming less and less - some of the top London publishers won't even look at your manuscript unless you've got an agent, and the problem is that these days it's just as hard to get a prestigious agent willing to glance at it as it is to find a publisher who'll do likewise.
According to an article in the London Independent this week, more and more London publishers are taking a policy decision not to read unsolicited manuscripts. Nick Sayers of HarperCollins declares: "Everything is returned, and that's 200 or 300 submissions a week to the fiction department alone." Transworld's Patrick Janson-Smith tells a similar story, as does Michael Joseph/Penguin's Tom Weldon, who says that if he and his colleagues went through the fifty manuscripts that arrive each day, they would never get any other work done.
However, at Little, Brown well-presented proposals do get a reading. "We get 3,000 a year," editorial director Alan Sampson says, "and going through them can be a terrible bore. But you have to remember that Iain Banks came from the slush pile with The Wasp Factory, and he's now one of our star authors. However, out of that 3,000, we probably take on one."
Both Hutchinson and Macmillan employ a reader who regularly comes in and looks through the pile of unsolicited manuscripts, while Headline positively welcomes unasked-for submissions. "You just never know," Headline's Jane Morpeth says. "You have to remember that everyone, at some stage, was an unsolicited author. We all want to discover that jewel. And I think it's as difficult to get an agent as it is to get an author."
Actually, says Carole Blake of the Blake-Friedmann agency, it's more difficult, and she adds that if she were an aspirant author with no contacts in the publishing world, she would probably despair. Still, she sifts through her own slush pile on a daily basis in the hope of finding something really special. "You can tell very quickly," she says.
Who knows, maybe your just-completed book fits into that category.
In his book The Western Canon, the American critic Harold Bloom has this to say: "Reading the very best writers - let us say Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Tolstoy - is not going to make us better citizens. Art is perfectly useless, according to the sublime Oscar Wilde, who was right about everything. He also told us that all bad poetry is sincere. Had I the power to do so, I would command that these words be engraved above every gate at every university, so that each student might ponder the splendour of the insight."
Professor Bloom's aesthetic response to literature ("to read in the service of any ideology is not, in my judgment, to read at all") would obviously cut no mustard with the people behind the eighteenth annual conference of the National Association of Poetry Therapy, which takes place at the end of April in (where else?) San Jose, California.
At this conference, according to chairperson Angela Yokota, Americans "will be exposed to" not just "the beauty, wisdom and wonders of poetry" but also its "therapeutic benefits and practical applications". These applications are the raison d'etre of the National Association of Poetry Therapy, "which confers credentials on certified and registered poetry therapists and which promotes the use of the language arts in healing, growth and dealing with life-affecting issues".
I feel better already, and if I made it to San Jose I'd undoubtedly feel further uplifted by workshops on "learning to live with contradictions" and "creative chronicles for healing life's barnacles". Way to go, Angela.
Meanwhile, The Western Canon is now available in a splendid American hardback edition at £5.99 from Hodges Figgis. If you haven't read it, now's the time.
Bernard MacLaverty's Grace Notes, Timothy O'Grady's I Could Read the Sky and John Banville's The Untouchable are among the thirty-six fiction and non-fiction books being considered for the 1998 W.H. Smith £10,000 Literary Award.
The judging panel comprises John Carey, Ruth Rendell, Lucy Hughes Hallett and Hilary Mantel, the six-book shortlist will be released next month and the overall winner will be announced on March 4th.
The Daily Telegraph has begun a new Saturday series called Book of the Century, and Salman Rushdie inaugurated it with his choice of Joyce's Ulysses. "One must recover from Ulysses in order to find one's own voice as a writer," he declares, "but James Joyce is the Picasso of literature; there is no way of writing after him without being affected by him."
Remarking that "Joyce took the ownership of the English language away from the English for ever", and advising readers to "ignore all who complain of the novel's difficulty but fail to mention its comedy, its humanity and its sheer joy", he goes on to take a swipe at those who dare to tamper with the master: "Deride those recent sons of Bowdler who have set out to improve on Joyce by changing his punctuation and correcting what they take to be his mistakes in the name of `accessibility'."
The James Joyce Estate, if not Danis Rose, would agree. The rest of us can't bring ourselves to worry all that much.