Business Finds

Avoiding the Slush Pile

The way many people gain credibility in the self-help field is by getting a book published and seeing it become a bestseller. This strategy fails more often than it succeeds though. It’s nearly impossible to get a book deal with a major publisher as a first-time author. You almost always have to get an agent first, and it’s very hard to get an agent because the good agents are overwhelmed with submissions. So you face this tough chicken-egg problem. How can you get a book deal when you have no credibility? But how can you establish credibility with no book? And even if you manage to secure a book deal, how are you going to make it a bestseller? You either have to be extremely talented or extremely lucky to make this strategy work for you.

I went through this kind of challenge with my computer games business during the 1990s. I worked with an agent who helped me find publishing deals. Submitting game demos to publishers and then waiting to hear back from them was very time-consuming. There was a lot of pressure to make something happen quickly because the product’s technology had a relatively short effective lifespan. To make matters worse, some publishers used dishonorable tactics to string developers along for months, delaying their products from hitting the market because the publisher had a competing product in the works. The publisher would say, “Yes, we definitely want to publish your game.” Then they’d offer one excuse after another for the long delays in sending the deal sheet or the contract. But the truth was that they had no intention of publishing the game. They just wanted to keep it off the market long enough to sabotage it. Even if you follow up with multiple publishers at the same time, you can still waste a lot of time when one of them tries to string you along. I’ve heard that other creative fields have similar integrity problems.

The game developer is the low guy on the totem pole in this frame. As a developer you have virtually no leverage unless your team already has a major hit. You can work very hard under this model and end up with little to show for it, even if you do manage to secure a publishing deal now and then. Participating in this kind of system will drain you fast. I did this for several years and got nowhere with it. Even when I landed a publishing deal, it didn’t help me significantly build my business, and I had to start all over again with the next game. My games business only became profitable when I started selling games direct over the Internet, using licensing deals as a secondary income source.

It’s really hard to get ahead by submitting your work to the big players with no leverage, hoping they single you out from the thousands of other submissions and throw some business your way. If you try to break in to a new field the same way everyone else does, you’ll have to rely on a great deal of luck. You’re just another nobody in the slush pile. Strategically speaking, this is a dumb and ineffective approach. I had to learn this the hard way.

The problem with the slush pile frame is that you adopt a posture of weakness and neediness. Even if you manage to get a deal, your position is so weak that you’re virtually certain to end up with terrible terms. In the end you’ll just end up being owned. You can tell yourself that maybe you’ll be able to leverage this “success” to get better terms for your next project, but quite often it doesn’t work out that way.

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