A publisher's reader or first reader is a person paid by a publisher or book sales club to read manuscripts from the slush pile, and to advise their employers as to quality and marketability of the work. In the US, most publishers use a full-time employee for this, if they do it at all. That employee is called an editorial assistant.
Most publishers in the US prefer to receive some type of shorter query, decide if the subject and author fit their current plans, and then request a copy of the manuscript. When a writer ignores this request or guideline, and sends a full manuscript, many publishers return them unopened. These publishers, then, wouldn't have anyone "reading slush."
The first person to read the submissions can exercise considerable influence over the offerings of the publishers for whom they work, and many unknown writers owed their first sale to a sympathetic publishers' reader or editorial assistant. A film reader performs a similar task by reading screenplays and advising producers and directors of their viability as a potential critical and commercial success.
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Baen Books is an American publishing house for science fiction and fantasy. In science fiction, it emphasizes space opera, hard science fiction, and military science fiction. The company was established in 1983 by science fiction publisher and editor Jim Baen. After his death in 2006, he was succeeded as publisher by long-time executive editor Toni Weisskopf.
Publishing is the activity of making information, literature, music, software and other content available to the public for sale or for free. Traditionally, the term refers to the distribution of printed works, such as books, newspapers, and magazines. With the advent of digital information systems, the scope has expanded to include electronic publishing such as ebooks, academic journals, micropublishing, websites, blogs, video game publishing, and the like.
Textual criticism is a branch of textual scholarship, philology, and of literary criticism that is concerned with the identification of textual variants, or different versions, of either manuscripts or of printed books. Such texts may range in dates from the earliest writing in cuneiform, impressed on clay, for example, to multiple unpublished versions of a 21st-century author's work. Historically, scribes who were paid to copy documents may have been literate, but many were simply copyists, mimicking the shapes of letters without necessarily understanding what they meant. This means that unintentional alterations were common when copying manuscripts by hand. Intentional alterations may have been made as well, for example the censoring of printed work for political, religious or cultural reasons.
News style, journalistic style, or news-writing style is the prose style used for news reporting in media such as newspapers, radio and television.
Editing is the process of selecting and preparing writing, photography, visual, audible, and film media used to convey information. The editing process can involve correction, condensation, organization, and many other modifications performed with an intention of producing a correct, consistent, accurate and complete work.
Proofreading is the reading of a galley proof or an electronic copy of a publication to find and correct production errors of text or art. Proofreading is the final step in the editorial cycle before publication.
A romance novel or romantic novel is a type of novel and genre fiction which places its primary focus on the relationship and romantic love between two people, and usually has an "emotionally satisfying and optimistic ending."
Copy editing is the process of revising written material to improve readability and fitness for its purpose, as well as ensuring that text is free of grammatical and factual errors. In the context of publication in print, copy editing is done before typesetting and again before proofreading, the final step in the editorial cycle.
In publishing, a slush pile is a set of unsolicited query letters or manuscripts that have either been directly sent to a publisher by an author, or which have been delivered via a literary agent representing the author who may or may not be familiar to the publisher. The responsibility of sifting through slush piles is usually reserved either to editor assistants or to outside contractors called publisher's readers or "first readers". If the reader finds something of interest and can convince a senior editor to accept it, they may earn credit.
Allen Stuart Drury was an American novelist. In World War II, he was a reporter in the Senate, closely observing Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman, among others. He would convert these experiences into his first novel Advise and Consent, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1960. Long afterwards, it was still being praised as ‘the definitive Washington tale’. His diaries from this period were published as A Senate Journal 1943-45.
Fantastic was an American digest-size fantasy and science fiction magazine, published from 1952 to 1980. It was founded by the publishing company Ziff Davis as a fantasy companion to Amazing Stories. Early sales were good, and the company quickly decided to switch Amazing from pulp format to digest, and to cease publication of their other science fiction pulp, Fantastic Adventures. Within a few years sales fell, and Howard Browne, the editor, was forced to switch the focus to science fiction rather than fantasy. Browne lost interest in the magazine as a result and the magazine generally ran poor-quality fiction in the mid-1950s, under Browne and his successor, Paul W. Fairman.
Robert Adams Gottlieb is an American writer and editor. He has been editor-in-chief of Simon & Schuster, Alfred A. Knopf, and The New Yorker.
Harlequin Enterprises Limited is a Toronto-based company that publishes series of romance and women's fiction. Harlequin was owned by the Torstar Corporation, the largest newspaper publisher in Canada, from 1981 to 2014. It was then purchased by News Corp and is now a division of HarperCollins.
Imagination was an American fantasy and science fiction magazine first published in October 1950 by Raymond Palmer's Clark Publishing Company. The magazine was sold almost immediately to Greenleaf Publishing Company, owned by William Hamling, who published and edited it from the third issue, February 1951, for the rest of the magazine's life. Hamling launched a sister magazine, Imaginative Tales, in 1954; both ceased publication at the end of 1958 in the aftermath of major changes in US magazine distribution due to the liquidation of American News Company.
The Great Controversy is a book by Ellen G. White, one of the founders of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, and held in esteem as a prophetess or messenger of God among Seventh-day Adventist members. In it, White describes the "Great Controversy theme" between Jesus Christ and Satan, as played out over the millennia from its start in heaven, to its final end when the remnant who are faithful to God will be taken to heaven at the Second Advent of Christ, and the world is destroyed and recreated. Regarding the reason for writing the book, the author reported, "In this vision at Lovett's Grove, most of the matter of the Great Controversy which I had seen ten years before, was repeated, and I was shown that I must write it out."
Plot It Yourself is a Nero Wolfe detective novel by Rex Stout, published by the Viking Press in 1959, and also collected in the omnibus volume Kings Full of Aces.
The Waste Land is a poem by T. S. Eliot, widely regarded as one of the most important poems of the 20th century and a central work of modernist poetry. Published in 1922, the 434-line poem first appeared in the United Kingdom in the October issue of Eliot's The Criterion and in the United States in the November issue of The Dial. It was published in book form in December 1922. Among its famous phrases are "April is the cruellest month", "I will show you fear in a handful of dust", and the mantra in the Sanskrit language "Shantih shantih shantih".
Self-publishing is the publication of media by its author without the involvement of an established publisher. The term usually refers to written media, such as books and magazines, either as an ebook or as a physical copy using POD technology. It may also apply to albums, pamphlets, brochures, video content, and zines.
The Literary Consultancy (TLC) is a UK-based editorial consultancy service that was founded in 1996, becoming the first service of its kind to offer "professional, in-depth editorial advice and assessment to anyone writing in the English language, anywhere in the world". Operating under the strapline "Literary Values in a Digital Age", TLC is based at the Free Word Centre in Farringdon Road, central London. Its founding Director was Rebecca Swift, who set up the organisation with Hannah Griffiths after they worked together at Virago Press.
Josette Frank was an American children's literature expert and educational consultant. Frank spent most of her adult life working for the Child Study Association of America (CSAA), a leading authority on child development from the 1920s to the 1960s. Frank was engaged as the CSAA's child reading expert and published a parental literary guide titled What Books For Children? in 1937 with a new edition in 1941. Due to her progressive views about parental supervision of children's reading, Frank became one of the significant pro-comics voices during the American anti-comics movement of the 1950s, for which she received praise and criticism.