In this, I just don’t; maybe I’ve missed something.I don’t want to be rude about it: it’s shot well enough, and the acting is OK. But if you don’t know what you want to say about your product, then you shouldn’t advertise. I think they’d have been better off letting the salesgirl in the supermarket do her pitch and just filming that, because at least she had something to say about the product (“Fantastic whites, with natural lemon”) before the plug was pulled on her.. Most publishers will tell you the same story: only one in a thousand unsolicited manuscripts shows promise. So why do they keep reading? Because the rare winner can be worth millions. Liz Thomson assesses the task of the as-yet-unpublished writer. Michael Ridpath, Bill Bryson, Carol O’Connell, Minette Walters, Roddy Doyle, Iain Banks.

Six names that should put hope into the heart of every unpublished writer. Each of them was plucked from an agent’s or publisher’s unsolicited pile and is now very successful indeed Millionaires all; posterity assured It does happen It could be you.
Chances are, though, it won’t be. There are only so many hot-shot undiscovered writers out there and, as in everything else, there are laws of supply and demand. The vast majority of manuscripts and synopses that land on the desks of harassed publishing folk simply don’t cut the mustard.”It is a little like looking for a needle in a haystack,” says Sue Freestone, Hutchinson’s publishing director. “We have someone come in to go through the slush pile, which averages 15 or 20 submissions a week It’s not cost- effective – but you have to do it.

That’s how Paul Sidey found Carol O’Connell, and we made her a dollar millionaire overnight.” O’Connell, a New Yorker, had sent her work to Hutchinson simply because they published Ruth Rendell, a writer she revered above all others. Rendell, too, was plucked from the slush pile, though 30 years ago publishing was less harried and more “gentlemanly”, and fewer people felt compelled to dispatch their literary efforts to white-stuccoed offices in Bedford Square. Now there’s a perception that “anyone can write a novel” – a perception fostered, it must be said, by some of the rubbish that does make it into print.The rewards for uncovering a gem can be considerable, which is why small publishers tend to take the search more seriously. Carol O’Brien, editorial director of Constable, says, “I rarely go in for big auctions, so I have to be more creative and inventive. Our reader passes five or six typescripts a week to me and perhaps one a year results in a book contract – a recent example is The North of England Ghost Trail.

Authors can and do write in with good ideas, but working with an author from scratch is always more time-consuming than working with an agent – and then, perhaps, it doesn’t go to contract.”Not all publishers believe the slush pile is worth the trouble. Transworld, for example, have taken the decision not to read unsolicited manuscripts unless they are addressed to a specific editor. “It was taking up such a huge amount of time and energy,” reports the managing director, Patrick Janson-Smith, “and I personally can’t recall ever having taken something on.”HarperCollins likewise. “We had a policy change last year,” confirms Nick Sayers, the publisher.