New York – One of the most onerous tasks in the magazine and book trade is the sifting of the slush pile. Slush piles, the collection of unsolicited and unagented manuscripts sent to publishers by beginning or would-be authors, are sometimes the source of future literary successes, but more often than not are the source of headaches and indigestion. Many editors privately complain and scream about the uselessness of slush piles, but fearing a backlash from beginning writers who already assume conspiracies keep their work from being printed, very few speak out about the quality and quantity of the material received.

With this in mind, the international literary community announced a special amnesty day for those long-suffering editors forced to sift through manuscripts where everything but the name of the author was misspelled on the title page. April 31, 2002 marks International Slushpile Bonfire Day, where editors and publishers are encouraged to collect all of the unreadable or unusable manuscripts that have built up in their offices, in some cases since 1968, and burn them while drinking wine and singing songs. Since one of the worst offenders is the science fiction / fantasy / horror triumvirate, SF, fantasy, and horror editors are allowed to place the first documents and light the pile when complete.

New York editors gather for Slushpile Bonfire Day

"We’re burning everything," said Pablo Redondo, the organizer of the event and the only editor willing to appear on television. "All of the manuscripts with no merit other than the tag ‘Member, SFWA"’ on the cover page. The manuscripts where the author didn’t bother to read the submission guidelines and dumped off the copy to a magazine that doesn’t buy that sort of fiction, or doesn’t buy fiction at all. The manuscripts where the author already registered the story for a copyright ‘to keep editors from stealing their work’. The Wesley / Worf slash fanfiction sent in ‘just in case we had an interest.’ The manuscripts sent in on toilet paper or on Hello Kitty note paper, and the manuscripts sent with death threats against any editor who plans to reject it, and the 3000-page ’sequels’ to popular books written because the author didn’t like how the original ended. We’re making a big pile in the middle of Times Square, and every editor with a slush pile is invited to pitch in. Big magazines, small book lines, Webzines, rantzines, and weekly newspapers: every editor in the world is welcome to start the healing here."

In return, the rest of the publishing community will protect the identity of the participants in the bonfire and blame the disappearance of the manuscripts on the Postal Service. "After all, they were all contaminated with . . . um . . . anthrax!" said Redondo. "That’s right: anthrax and Dutch Elm Blight! Maybe a bit of tobacco mosaic and some cane toad venom, but anthrax was definitely involved somewhere. Of course, considering the number of manuscripts we’ve received with any number of bodily fluids all over the envelope, nobody will be surprised in the slightest."

If this seems a bit extreme, the words of an editor who wished to remain nameless explained the situation. "We’re constantly reading in Locus or Speculations about the bad editors who take more than a week to accept or reject a story or novel, but these people don’t know what it’s like. An intern who takes eight weeks to reject a story is most likely needing that eight weeks to recover from jamming a set of ten Lee Press-on Nails in her eyes. By the time she’s able to see again, that same author may have sent another eight to ten stories to the slush pile, and the cycle begins again. Even at our best, we can only afford to publish three short stories and a novella a month, which means we publish a grand total of 36 short stories a year, and we get eight to ten THOUSAND manuscripts a month. This is the only way we can keep up with the overload without going insane and shooting at school buses once we got off work.

"Let’s put it another way," the editor continued. "I hear from one writer who suggests that because of the delay in response to his submissions, we call out HAZMAT teams to pluck his envelopes out of the incoming mail and decontaminate them before opening them. I can’t bring myself to tell him that we can’t afford a HAZMAT team, and each and every one of his stories makes me scrub my arms with carbolic acid whenever I open it. Each one of his stories literally takes away my will to live, and I shudder every time I see his return address on an envelope. And he’s one of hundreds out there, maybe thousands. I have to buy elbow-length rubber gloves on credit just to keep up."

Electronic manuscripts are no exception. "Since the advent of the Web, we’ve been receiving material from people who apparently learned to type by throwing their cats at the keyboard, and some of it is so horrible that we don’t let it dare escape," said Redondo. "Some of it is so foul that we’ve decided to include hard drives in the bonfire, because any hard drive or mail server that contained that story is obviously too contaminated for future use. The New York Fire Department had problems with this at first due to environmental issues, but when we explained the evil that would be removed from the universe by its extirpation, they understood."

An unsolicited submission is thrown on the fire

Surprisingly, no news of this action appeared in any of the journals dedicated to collecting existing and new writing markets, such as Writer’s Digest, The Writer, The Gila Queen’s Guide To Markets, and the innumerable Web sites cataloguing every market that pays in money, credit, advertising space, or raw meat still on the bone. Redondo said that this was deliberate. "The only publication that contained details was the American Editor’s Association newsletter Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash, and anyone who leaked the details to the general public was to be appointed the person in charge of dealing with the repercussions. I myself am going into hiding in New Zealand after this, and I’m not returning to work until after I’ve had extensive cosmetic surgery."

The response from the beginning writer community was, as expected, swift and terrible. A representative of the Eltingville (New Jersey) Science Fiction Writer’s Circle and Costuming Guild released a statement that read, in part, "We decry any efforts to rid the world of our works, and the ESFWC&CG will start up a GeoCities site to hold all of these orphaned stories until the New York literary establishment comes to its senses and buys them back for their full value." When the representative was contacted and asked whether starting up a magazine or book line might be of more value than lambasting the existing editors, the response was "Of course not. They’re supposed to pay us for our work; we’re not supposed to pay to get it published. It’s not our fault that everyone submits stories but nobody pays to read the stories submitted, and we’ll all go to SFWA to complain if the magazines go under. Now go away: I have a Buffy / Farscape crossover novel that I have to get off to St. Martin’s this evening."

Although the editors and publishers in other countries were sympathetic to the idea, it is currently unknown whether or not they will participate. At least one Australian editor expressed support for the bonfire, saying "Australia has only six million people, and between the four science fiction magazines in the country, we’ve received submissions from at least four million. Either we have a lot of razorback hunters and crocodile skinners with plenty of free time in the evening who will suddenly buy subscriptions so they can see their stories in print, or we’re going to have a bonfire of our own in our future."

– Edgar Harris is the former Sports Editor at “Science Fiction Age”. After this article was first published, Harris retired from most forms of journalism, and now makes his living as a horticulturalist specializing in carnivorous plants. He is attempting to breed a species of Sarracenia that will feed on unsolicited manuscripts, to provide a year-round, ecologically-friendly alternative to the bonfire.

In an industry besieged by variables, there is but one reliable constant in publishing — everyone thinks they know how to make the business better (more profitable, more reliable, more efficient, or "fairer", whatever that means in their perspective), and they are all wrong.

To further understand their wrongness, the set of everyone must be divided into three groups:

• People outside the publishing business, who look at a few public statistics and performance indicators and shake their heads in wonder at how anyone in the industry makes any money at all;
• People with a professional stake in the business, who look at their own performance indicators and wonder if they could be making more money if they had control over the other segments of the industry; and
• Whiners.

It’s this third group that provides the most fun — mostly because they think they’re in the first group.

In my Guardian column, I frequently lampooned the half-baked, self-centred, hopelessly flawed and often counter-productively idiotic theories of journalists, authors and social commentators who pointed their rose-tinted telescopes at a segment of the publishing industry and pronounced it any number of unflattering adjectives — usually without explicitly stating their central complaint, that no-one was buying their book. Begging your indulgence, it’s a tradition I wish to continue.

Sramana Mitra’s column at Forbes.com

In this instalment, we will examine the argument presented by one Sramana Mitra, in a recent column for Forbes.com called "How Amazon Could Change Publishing". Now, I know little about Ms Mitra beyond her biography, which says she’s an entrepreneur and strategy consultant. Please remember this fact.

If you haven’t read the article, fear not: I’m told that you can click on the words in blue in the previous paragraph. However, the thrust of her argument is that Amazon (the web retailer, not the river) could — nay, should — dominate the publishing industry, removing the "middle-man", and the entire concept of publishing as it is known today, by printing and retailing every book directly.

I’m going to leave that elephant in the room for a few minutes, and deconstruct some points in her argument. Mitra states that:

• the publishing industry is "archaic beyond belief" — without providing any archaeological evidence. Yes, books are essentially the same medium of dark ink printed on light paper that they’ve been since Gutenberg, a system almost as archaic as the outmoded practice of growing food in the ground.
• the industry "treats its most important asset–the author–badly" — though the only suggestion of bad treatment is that authors don’t get a big enough piece of the pie.
• Amazon is "the largest bookseller in the world" — which may be true, but it still only accounts for around 15% of the book market.
• Vanity publisher iUniverse’s biggest seller to date is Amy Fisher’s memoir, a "NYT bestseller" that sold 34,000 copies. I’m sure there’s a more interesting story in why that book wasn’t published by a traditional publisher, involving the words "market disinterest" and "shitness", but 34,000 copies of a "celebrity" memoir is pretty unremarkable, and really only serves to demonstrate how ineffective the vanity press approach is.
• "The agent takes 15% to 20%" of the gross proceeds from book sales. This is flat-out wrong, and its inclusion demonstrates a fundamental flaw in Mitra’s limited understanding of how publishing works. Agents take 15% of the author’s contracted payment for a book, not the gross (on a typical 10% royalty-after-advance contract, this amounts to no more than 1.5% of the gross). Even if this ridiculous number was true, the other figures she gives — 50% to retailers, and 20% to publishers — leaves 10-15% completely unaccounted for.
• "On a book that costs $24.95, the author gets at most $1 to $1.50" — or so says the CEO of a print-on-demand publisher, always the first choice for accurate statistics on revenues from traditional book publishing.

This is a blinkered, seriously inaccurate summation of the economics of traditional book publishing. But it’s the necessary foundation for Mitra’s absurd theory:

[Amazon] could directly engage with authors and cut out the middlemen: the agent and the publisher. That would free up 30% to 40% of the pie, which can easily be split between Amazon and the author.

It gets better:

Let’s say, in the new world, Amazon becomes the retailer, marketer, publisher and agent combined and takes 65% of the revenues, offering 35% to the author–we end up with a much better, fairer world.

And the result of this:

Amazon likely will use its power to build direct relationships with authors and gradually phase out publishers and agents. It will first go after the independent print-on-demand self-publishers and get the best authors from that world [like Amy Fisher]. Amazon will then take on the large publishers.

It’s difficult for a man of my years to be sure he grasps all the implications of such outstanding wrongheadedness. But let me try to elaborate how I interpret this:

• Mitra’s main issue with the publishing industry is that it doesn’t pay authors enough.
• The solution to this is to let one company completely dominate the publishing industry, essentially becoming the publishing industry.
• Once Amazon has established its monopoly on the printed word, it will freely decide to give authors more money, and authors will all be delighted.
• Every existing "middle-man" in the industry — agents, publishers, and all other retailers — can just fuck off, and die.

Let me just reiterate that this plan is coming from an entrepreneur and strategy consultant — someone to whom those "middle-men" would usually turn, to consult on a strategy to avoid this exact scenario. Nowhere in the article does Mitra hint at how other companies could combat this, or even survive in such a market. (The article is clearly written for Forbes’ ambitious-but-uninformed-writer demographic.)

There are any number of minor concerns you might have about such a "change" — such as, the death of free speech and independent thought — but my chief concern is the staggering hubris and myopia demonstrated by one of Mitra’s remarks in the commentary after the article:

As for authors choosing to work with Amazon - well, if Amazon can guarantee that using their recommendation / co-branding / merchandising system, they can sell a million copies of my book, why wouldn’t I work with them exclusively? I don’t know about you, but I certainly would.

Not only is this a blunt statement of Mitra’s prejudice — she’s only thinking as a (possible) author, not at all as a rational economist — but it’s also prima facie stupidity. Amazon is not going to guarantee to any author, save maybe Dan Brown, that they’ll sell a million copies. Given their 15% share of the book market, only the uber-bestsellers like James Patterson are even likely to sell over a million copies of a title through Amazon alone (Amy Fisher is certainly out of the race). Based on Mitra’s figures of 35% royalties on a book selling for $24.95, that’s an advance of $8.7 million dollars. (There’s the solution, then. Authors should agree to work with Amazon exclusively if they guarantee payment of $8.7 million dollars per book.)

There are problems in the publishing industry, certainly — but the solution to this, and indeed any economic problem, has never been "Let the big guy own everything". The publishing industry will survive, as long as it continues to refrain from taking advice from unpublished authors.

Sir Thomas Evelyn de Kay’s long-running Guardian column "Balderdash" won an unprecedented five straight Jonathan Swift Awards ("the Swifty") between 1983-88, for Best Use of Metaphor or Allegory In Social or Artistic Criticism.

If you would like to recommend an article about books or publishing for the Balderdash treatment, please send the URL to balderdash@101reasonstostopwriting.com.

It was one year ago, yesterday, that the (still) most famous of literary agent bloggers decided to hang up her stilettos and retire, ending a three-year run of advice, rebuke, clarification and consternation. (Granted, in the first year she only made a couple of posts, but the last two years were much more fruitful.)

At the time, I posted a farewell message, which had the distinction of being one of the last outgoing links on her blog, before the lights went out and the dynamically-generated archives were cached for the last time. The sentiments I expressed are still true.

Patricia Wood’s blog yesterday hosted a virtual get-together of old Snarklings, which was virtually attended by Miss Snark herself, in the comments.

While the “Snarkives” are still of immeasurable value, both to unpublished writers looking to understand the submission process, and to social researchers looking for a corpus of whiny protestations from hapless rubes convinced that the process will magically alter itself to accommodate them, Miss Snark’s voluminous advice can essentially be reduced to two simple principles:

• Follow the damn directions
• Don’t be a nitwit

It was the general inability of the unpublished writers of the world to understand and apply these principles that drove most of the content on Miss Snark’s blog, and ultimately led to its abrupt conclusion.

With the glorious advantage of hindsight, it’s clear that Miss Snark fell victim to what should be known as Blogger’s Ennui — the tipping point where the demands of maintaining a blog outweigh the pleasure of it. In Miss Snark’s case, though, she was essentially a victim of her audience, and the narrowness of her topic. There are only so many issues relating to queries and submissions that can be discussed in general terms, and as her audience grew, so did the number of nitwits (a proportional constant in any population) — who would ask either the same questions again, demonstrating their inability to grasp the simple concept of search, or ask essentially the same questions frustratingly modulated from the original by some absurdly trivial point of contention.

It takes a lot to crush the spirit of someone who purposefully armors themselves with sarcasm, but the hapless rubes managed it. I imagine that by the end, her gmail account must have become a slushpile in itself, yet another accumulation of inane and unremarkable queries to sift through looking for a question worth answering — for no pay, no commission, no hope of reward other than the dwindling, and eventually non-existent fun of it.

It’s fitting (though entirely coincidental) that the anniversary of her blog’s closure falls in International Slushpile Awareness Month. If the divine Miss S had managed to hang on until the comforting catharsis of International Slushpile Bonfire Day (May 31st), she might still be blogging.

International Slushpile Awareness Month is an annual celebration of the unsung heroes of the publishing process: the Slush Readers, those hardy adventurers who pan for gold at the edges of the vast wasteland of sediment at the mouth of the River of Unreadable Shit.

Without them, modern publishing would be entirely (instead of mostly) written-to-formula potboilers from established hacks, cash-ins by Internet celebrities, political gasbag rhetoric assembled by interns, and stream-of-consciousness doorstops where the glue is still warm.

For writers, it’s also a chance to think about the Slushpile, and your place within it. Are you truly expecting that someone will jump at the chance to publish/represent you, or are you just hoping for validation and a free critique? Is your work really that one-in-a-thousand that deserves consideration, or are you merely hoping to skip the next nine-hundred-and-ninety-eight drafts?

For editors, agents and assorted slush readers: we feel your pain.

Previous Coverage

For those of you who missed last year’s event, here’s a roundup:

• International Slushpile Awareness Month: They screen out the unpublishable, the unpalatable, the unreadable short stories and novels, in search of that one manuscript in a thousand that is original, well written, proofread, spellchecked and printed in 12 pt Courier, and which might be good enough for agents and publishers to invest time and money to release to a public who might be willing to pay to read it.
• Top Ten Reasons You’re Stuck in the Slushpile: #10. You addressed your submission to "The Slushpile".
• Calling for a Slushpile Armistice: An end to the partisan bitterness which prevents people on both sides from properly accepting blame for their part in the slow downfall of publishing.
• Reason #14: Youre Speling is Atrowshus: A sizeable proportion of every slushpile is comprised of randomly, punctuate’d, fonetikly riten first drafts so bad, so head-shakingly wrong that they would make proofreaders weep and copyeditors resign, if they didn’t initially make slush readers shudder with fear as they drop the submission into the Burn This pile.

We also ran a couple of polls. You can view the original results, and vote (again):

• Poll: What Do You Think of the Slushpile?
• Poll: What’s the longest you’ve waited for a response to a submission?

Slushpile Demotivators

We’ve published several Slushpile-themed Demotivators here at Reasons Central:

Click on the images to see a larger version, download wallpaper, or add a comment.

International Slushpile Bonfire Day

International Slushpile Awareness Month culminates on May 31 with International Slushpile Bonfire Day, a universally-recognised tradition where agents and publishers take the opportunity to hand over their accumulated backlog of unsolicited submissions to Nature’s own impartial and inexhaustible reader, the naked flame.

ISBD in 2007:

• Announcing International Slushpile Bonfire Day: It’s an opportunity for agents, publishers, their assistants, readers and interns to meet, socialise, vent, and publicly exorcise the curse of their profession, the thing that has made the offices unworkable, their schedules and budgets incalculable and their front doors impassable: the unsolicited manuscript.
• ISBD For Editor, Agents, and Slush Readers: If you’re new to the biz, or your office is too far from the nearest organised bonfire, or you’;re hopelessly agoraphobic, fear not. You can still join the festivities.
• ISBD For Writers: Without a doubt, deep in the shadows of your fragile heart, you know that some of the stuff you’ve written has all the literary merit of initials carved in a tree the day before a forest fire. Why not discover the healing powers of ISBD for yourself, by making your own contribution?
• Breaking News: International Slushpile Bonfire Day a ‘Blazing’ Success: The city’s publishing establishment came together this evening in Times Square to celebrate International Slushpile Bonfire Day, an annual festival to purge the industry’s ever-growing backlog of unpublishable manuscripts. New York’s literary elite mingled with industry professionals to swap stories of the worst of the worst writing to come over the transom, while truckloads of paper holding the creative output of thousands of untalented writers were dumped into a prescribed area and ignited.
• Five Years Later, Did We Learn Anything? Paul Riddell explains the origins of ISBD, for those of you who can stand the metafiction.

Are they trying to augment or overhaul the existing book distribution system? Are they trying to find audiences for the nearly 300,000 books published every year? Are they trying to prepare for the nearly inevitable collapse of Borders Books and Music chain by constructing alternatives to the ever-decreasing number of Frumpy Fiftysomething’s Used Books and Quiet Desperation Emporium franchises? (And has anyone noticed that the same people who bitch up a storm about how terrible it is that the big chain bookstores have driven Frumpy Fiftysomething’s to near-extinction are the same ones who’d set fire to a bus full of paraplegic nuns for the opportunity to have their books carried by those same chain stores?) Could they be focusing how bookselling is a business and not a workfare program for otherwise unemployable English and journalism majors, and that small publishers and bookstores alike might want to stop waiting for angel investors to swoop in and save them from their fiscal and promotional incompetence?

Naah. The real concern is that Amazon.com won’t allow POD publishers print their books through any printer other than Booksurge. And since PublishAmerica and other such vaunted and highly respected publishers of high-quality reading material want to maximize their return by printing the books bought by these writers by the long ton for “promotional purposes,” it’s not in the vanity publishers’ interests to give Amazon their business. Oh, woe, the whole of the publishing world is about to collapse!

To take a quote from one of the champions of the POD industry and put it very slightly out of context, “Authors slap books up on Amazon.com all the time, don’t market them, and sell zero copies.” Yet somehow they look surprised when someone at Amazon decided to take the POD money sink (in server space, in moderation of comment boards, and responding to the paranoiacs who are certain that Amazon is keeping their works of genius from bestseller status) and find the only way to turn it into a source of revenue, however small. A word to the wise: if your book sells so poorly that the lack of a “Buy” button on an Amazon.com page makes that much of an impact upon your sales, you might want to consider your place in the publishing food chain and stop writing.

– Paul Riddell has advocated stopping writing for the last six years, and tries his best to practice what he preaches. This is why his blog is shutting down in June.

click for larger version (widescreen)

Photo by P. Winberg, of MorgueFile.

An artist’s impression of the slushpile at a mid-sized independent publisher, for the months of April to June.

"No more submissions, the slushpile is closed," said Jane Friedman, President and CEO of HarperCollins. "You have no idea how long I’ve waited to say that."

Under the moratorium, editorial departments are given discretion to shred or delete any submissions they receive between the first and last days of May, with exceptions granted for submissions postmarked during April, and staff are encouraged to use the time saved during the month to process any backlog of submissions from previous months. At the end of the month, to mark International Slushpile Bonfire Day, editorial departments are invited to incinerate any remaining backlog at designated bonfire sites in major cities, or to stage bonfires of their own.

"It’s been a long time coming, but we’ve finally got industry-wide agreement on how to deal with one of the most pervasive problems threatening our business," said Friedman. "Everyone who’s ever worked in publishing has dreamed of finding that gem in the slushpile, the next Confederacy of Dunces or Skinny Bitch Diet. But now, with every subliterate numbskull with a blog thinking he can be the next Doris Lessing, the gems are rare and getting rarer. Even the interns give up on the slush after a month or two of opening four-pound packages containing six hundred pages of eighth-grade drivel. Many big firms and imprints stopped accepting unagented submissions years ago, but do you think that stops Joe Writer-Guy in Poughkeepsie from sending out a thousand copies of the same submission to every editor he can find, even if they’re in the same building? We’re already renting containers on the docks to store all the ‘memoirs’ we get, and every once in a while one of those containers accidentally finds itself on a ship bound for a sneaker factory in China, but it just isn’t making a dent. So this May, and every May, we’re not even going to check the post office box, and anything that turns up at the office in a yellow envelope is going straight on the fire."

Patricia Schroeder, CEO of the Association of American Publishers, said most AAP members were honoring the moratorium. "Our members are reporting that they receive as many as 50,000 submissions a year, and that’s just the stuff that arrives through the postal system — it doesn’t include the manuscripts that mysteriously find their way into editors’ handbags, gym lockers and bedrooms. In our last survey, 15% of editors reported receiving submissions that took the term ’slush’ literally. The AAP is very supportive of initiatives that streamline the publishing process, and anything that reduces the burden of having to write the sentence "Not right for us" over and over is going to give editors time to concentrate on more important tasks, like editing the works of established writers. And fact-checking."

Many independent publishers stated they intend to honor the moratorium. "The slushpile is a growing problem for every publisher, big or small, mainstream or niche," said John Stamos, former Full House actor and now acquisitions editor for Jane’s Information Group, publisher of Jane’s Infantry Weapons. "Granted, every publishing company has its own submission guidelines, and they’re not always obvious, but really, why would anyone think that a firm specialising in defence and intelligence reference material is going to want to publish a passionate story of lesbian awakening in the Alaskan wilderness? It’s a full-time job just carting this stuff out to the dumpster. I can’t imagine what it’s like for the suckers at other companies that have to open and read it."

The Association of Unpublished Writers (AUW) was approached for comment, but had not responded by press time.

Sidebar: What Is The ‘Slushpile’?

The ’slushpile’ is industry vernacular for the accumulation of manuscripts and query letters sent unsolicited to the editorial departments of publishing companies by prospective authors. According to industry guidelines, each submission should be evaluated by editorial staff to determine its ‘publishableness’, a report compiled detailing the submission’s ‘bestsellerosity’, and copies of each submission and editorial report delivered to the company CEO and an editorial board consisting of at least four vice-presidents and six career authors, where each submission is read aloud and discussed. Submissions that pass this stage are sent for focus group testing and market analysis prior to making an offer to the submission’s author, while unsuccessful submissions are returned to the author, along with the publishability report and a thorough review by a New York Times staff writer.

In practice, however, standards and processes for dealing with the ’slushpile’ vary, from only opening every fifth submission, to building towers and only evaluating the packages that don’t topple over, to simply writing ‘Addressee Unknown’. Simon & Schuster only recently abandoned the policy of forcing debut authors to evaluate one submission for every dollar of their advance.

– Stephen Jayson Harris reports on the publishing industry for the Association of Unpublished Writers newsletter. From 1995 to 1998 he was the Fiction Editor for The New Republic magazine.

New York — Author Dan Brown and Stephen Rubin, president and publisher of Doubleday, announced today that they would publish a fully revised version of the mega-selling 2003 novel The Da Vinci Code. The new edition, dubbed 1.5, would be "like re-reading the book for the first time," said Brown.

"The Da Vinci Code has been the publishing success story of the decade, second only to, well, you know who," said Rubin. "It’s sold more copies than we thought there were adults who still read books. But there were some minor errors in the original edition, little mistakes that slipped through the rigorous program of fact-checking that Dan did on his own work. So, now that the book’s been out there for five years, and the sales finally seemed to have dropped off, we felt this was the perfect time to bring out a revised edition, with absolutely bullet-proof historical detail. The Da Vinci Code 1.5 provides that and more, with some new characters, more chase sequences, and a completely revised conspiracy."

"It’s true that I let a few little mistakes go in the first edition," said Brown. "Factual errors about Biblical history, early Christianity and Judaism, Catholic theology, Egyptian mythology, Mithraism, the origins and language of the New Testament and Gnostic Gospels, the Nicene Council, Emperor Constantine, the Dead Sea Scrolls and Nag Hammadi texts, the history and modern organizational structure of Opus Dei, the history of the Vatican, interpretations of Leonardo’s Last Supper and Mona Lisa, Leonardo’s sexuality, the history of the Knights Templar, the history and architecture of Rosslyn Chapel and the Church of Saint-Sulpice, the history and geography of Paris, the location of Versailles, the position of Curator of the Louvre, the design of the Louvre Pyramid, the French education system, the French language, Andorra’s rail system and propensity for seismic activity, the geography of London and the procedures of the Metropolitan Police, the astronomical position of Venus, the feasibility of a button-sized GPS tracking device, the number of female victims of the Inquisition, the existence of a professorship of religious symbology at Harvard University, the existence of a scholarly discipline of religious symbology, the origin of the word ‘minstrel’, the ratio of male and female bees in a hive, the secret agenda of Disney films, the number of words in Job 38:11, the existence and supposed history of a Priory of Sion, the physical characteristics of people with albinism, to name a few — and, umm, the divinity of Jesus, and the notion that there is any historical evidence, at all, that Jesus had a sexual relationship with Mary Magdalene.

"These are all minor errors," said Brown, "but a few people have complained about them since the novel was first published. We’ve corrected a few errors over the years in different editions, but Doubleday and I felt it was time we had another bite at the apple, and release a new edition with enough changes that people would want to buy it again."

When asked if the revisions made substantive changes to the plot of the novel, Brown replied, "Oh sure. When you take out all the factual errors, baseless conjecture and flawed reasoning, the whole storyline basically collapses. All you’re left with is a guy who’s good at solving puzzles running around Europe for no reason. I don’t even like Europe. The new version is entirely set in Connecticut, so I could fact-check everything myself without having to drive more than two hours."

Doubleday president Rubin added, "I have personally verified every single fact in this new edition, which doesn’t reference anything that happened before 1985. It took most of a weekend."

"It’s still called The Da Vinci Code, though,"said Brown, "even though the only reference to Leonardo — Vinci is the town he was from, did you know that? I didn’t — is a print of the Mona Lisa in Robert Langdon’s bedroom. I know for a fact that he has a bedroom."

Brown refused to be drawn on the revised conspiracy plot of the new edition, saying only that "It involves aliens. Let’s see the bastards at Wikipedia disprove that."

The Da Vinci Code 1.5 goes on sale on April 31st, according to Brown.

Somewhere in humanity’s distant past, a storyteller was recounting the tale of a skirmish between two warring tribes, embellishing details of a battle he didn’t witness. Elaborating on the strengths and prowess of his tribe, and the weakness and cowardice of their enemies, the storyteller struggled with his limited vocabulary to keep the story going, to turn a simple act of brutality into an epic tale that would be remembered.

In a moment of inspiration, the storyteller compared the leader of the tribe to a bear, large and powerful — and invented the simile. He said their enemies were wolves, vicious and predatory — creating the first metaphor. Cheered by his audience, he described the rest of the story as a battle between bears and wolves — and the allegory was born.

And in so doing, he doomed the future of storytelling to a constant struggle for imagery, a search for similes, metaphors and allegories that would make each story seem greater than those told before — and the simple skill of recounting events as they happened was lost.

It’s Like an Analogy

Similes, metaphors and allegories are the unholy Trinity of bad storytelling, the linguistic embodiment of the over-rated maxim Show, Don’t Tell. Collectively, they are more frequently abused than the exclamation point, the deus ex machina and the phrase "As you know". They can be used to brilliant effect, but more often than not they only exist to demonstrate the author’s inability to tell the story clearly.

Similes, metaphors and allegories are all essentially analogies: they serve to illustrate something unknown by comparing it to something known. But, like writers, they usually don’t work. This simple principle of description-by-comparison has been largely abandoned to a game of linguistic excess, where writers construct ever more outlandish and distracting imagery as if there was a merit badge for it (or, more accurately, to prove their literary cred to the critics in their writing group).

Similies and metaphors have their place, though: in 19^th Century Symbolist poetry. The worst of the trio is the Allegory, which has the power to ruin entire stories.

Allegory is not a Character in a Troma Movie

Allegory is when the entire story becomes a metaphor for something else — whether or not the author intended it as such. You’re probably familiar with the term from its most commonly-used phrase, "But it’s really an allegory for … ", usually followed by an unconvincing "Oh yeah, I knew that."

Allegories are written (or interpreted) because people have a hard time justifying the time it takes to read a book without deducing or ascribing a "deeper meaning". This is especially true of so-called "classic" works, which require more effort to read and thus should yield greater reward than a contemporary work. By the same token, writers create allegorical stories because they don’t want their work to be read and forgotten in an afternoon.

There are two kinds of allegories:

• those that pretentious writers build their stories around, and
• those that critics with nothing else to do insist on interpreting into stories.

There’s little we can do about the second group — there will always be a dialogue about the "deeper meaning", because English professors have to justify their tenure, and lit students their tuition, by endlessly re-analysing stories with newly-invented critical frameworks called Post- something — post-feminist, post-colonial, post-caring. The most an author can do is deny the bogus interpretations, as J.R.R. Tolkein did when people insisted that Lord of the Rings was an allegory of the Second World War, or revel in the infamy of competing interpretations, like Don McLean has since recording "American Pie".

But stories designed to be allegories are the scourge of literature, intent on making it impossible to enjoy a story without having discuss it afterwards to check if your interpretation is "right".

When Allegories Attack

There are really only two circumstances that warrant an allegorical story:

• When the author lives in, and is writing about, a repressive society that punishes direct criticism with censorship, imprisonment or worse; and
• When the author is one failed novel from being dumped by their publisher, and really needs to get shortlisted for a literary award this time.

It’s no wonder that some of the best allegorical stories are written during wartime, or in repressive or archly conservative societies, such as Orwell’s Animal Farm. The allegory is an essential tool in those conditions, both for communicating your meaning covertly to a receptive audience, and for deniability when the powers-that-be wise up and come knocking.

Outside those conditions, it’s a tool of literary pretension, deliberately obfuscating the meaning of a story in order to make your readers feel clever for having decoded it, to court critical and academic discussion, and to apply in advance for Penguin Classics reprint rights. It’s also a convenient way of excusing the fact that the story doesn’t stand up on its own.

But What Does It Mean?

That’s the eternal question. In every allegorical story, there is a conflict between the surface story and the deeper meaning. The best ones are entertaining enough on the surface to be enjoyed even if the reader never perceives the allegory. It’s possible to enjoy Tolstoy’s War and Peace, for example, as an epic tale of a nation in conflict, without understanding that it’s really an allegory for life in high school.

The Holy Grail of allegorical writing is timing the "aha" moment, when the reader discovers the deeper meaning, for as close to the end of the story as possible. For example, the final sequence of Close Encounters of the Third Kind is very powerful when you realise the whole movie, culminating in Richard Dreyfus’ decision to leave with the aliens, is an allegory for the moral dilemma of deadbeat dads.

The problem, though, is that allegories almost never achieve this. Either the allegory is so obscure that you only discover it when the pseudo-intellectual husband of your wife’s friend mocks you at dinner for not having figured it out (after he read it in a review), or the allegory is so blatantly signposted that the surface story reads like its own Cliff Notes.

This is the essential problem with allegories: the surface story is usually dull or even meaningless without understanding the allegory, and once you understand the allegory, it’s boring and predictable.

When Good Allegories Go Bad

All allegories are parables, or satires — but in the information-rich 21^st Century, allegories are preaching, or satirising, to the converted. The "deeper meaning" of your allegory has almost certainly already been discussed ad infinitum on talk shows, blogs and message boards, and if your readers don’t understand the idea already, they won’t get it from your story.

In Western countries at least, there is just no need for allegory anymore — when the moronic antics and draconian douchebaggery of the sitting US President are daily fodder for bloggers, talking-head pundits and comedians alike, what is there that you can’t say, except allegorically?

The only thing worse than a story that relies on allegory is a one with no deeper meaning at all. The allegory then becomes an exploration of why a reader would want to waste their time.

The conference room at the Best Western Apalachin, where the meeting allegedly took place – Photo by Gracey Stinson / Morguefile

Sources for The New Republic, which broke the story in this week’s issue, claim that the meeting was attended by many of America’s most highly-regarded critics and editors, including David Ulin, Editor of the LA Times Book Review, Sam Tanenhaus, Editor of the New York Times Book Review; and heavyweight reviewers and columnists including Michiko Kakutani, Christopher Hitchins, Roger Ebert and Joe Morgenstern. All have denied that any such meeting took place, but NYTBR editor Tanenhaus was quoted as saying, "the critical community in this country needs the authority to do what ever is necessary to prevent the proliferation of these fictions of mass dumbification."

The agenda for the meeting, it is claimed, was to discuss how far a reviewer could go in criticising a novel, film or purportedly-nonfiction work, to set limits on the use of ebullient language, and to devise a strategy for relocating the reviews of marginal or fringe books to so-called ‘black sites’ where they are unlikely to attract attention, such has the Weehawken Gazette and Operational Risk & Compliance Magazine. As a result of the meeting, critics at major newspapers allegedly must write at least seven negative reviews for every positive, with a maximum of three clichéd phrases per review, and no mystery, romance, science fiction, fantasy, horror, or young adult novels may be favorably reviewed unless the author has recently received a literary award previously won by William Faulkner.

"For decades, critics have been negotiating with authors and publishers, irresponsibly using and inventing twenty-point words like ‘corsucating’ and ‘unputdownable’ to describe books that definitely do not coruscate, and are easily put down," said NYT critic Janet Maslin. "The platitudinous hyperbole of our critical verbiage is typically transcended only by the conspicuous mediocrity of the literary subject. This softly-softly approach has reduced the ability of reviews to negatively impact sales, and has only emboldened the authorists. We need to strike preemptively, exposing their plots and taking out their deus ex machinas before they can hit our shelves."

According to the unnamed sources, most of the meeting was devoted to a detailed discussion of harsher criticisms reviewers would be permitted to use. These allegedly included a much broader definition of sarcasm, direct comparisions to the works of James Patterson or Uwe Boll, a new procedure called ‘waterbacking’, and for the first time, the literal use of vitriol.

The most controversial suggestion to emerge from the meeting is a plan for the entire publishing process be overseen by a new government agency, the Publication Safety Administration. Under the plan, every book would be carefully inspected by PSA agents at galley checkpoints, and books that failed to meet undisclosed criteria would be placed on a "no buy" list.

– Stephen Jayson Harris covers the White House on issues of print security and counter-publication for Fox News 2: Liberal Agenda channel. He was nominated for a Pulitzer for his investigation into Vice President Dick Cheney’s high-school poetry.