The Black List Expands to Connect Aspiring Authors to Publishers
Welcome to Today in Books, our daily round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more.
Ted Chiang Has Entered the Chat
Leave it to a sci-fi writer to offer the best argument I’ve seen yet for why A.I. isn’t going to create art. The whole piece is well worth your time, but the tl;dr is that art involves making a lot of choices, and when A.I. makes those choices, it tends to default to the lowest common denominator or stylistic mimicry, neither of which is terribly compelling. I won’t rule out the possibility that A.I. technology could someday be good enough to compete with human creative writing, but for now, can we please stop constructing Novelist vs. Computer face-offs?
Not That Kind of Black List
The slush pile is a perpetual problem in publishing, and Franklin Leonard may have a solution. Leonard, who created The Black List in 2005 to curate and publicize the best unproduced screenplays in Hollywood, is expanding the service to include unpublished novel manuscripts in order to “create a new avenue for authors whose work may have gone overlooked because they lack a literary agent or the right industry connections.” The biggest challenge aspiring authors face is getting the attention of agents and editors, and the biggest challenge agents and editors face is finding the needles in the publishing haystack. By offering services to folks on both sides of the equation, Leonard is attempting to facilitate a long overdue streamlining of the publishing pipeline. So, how does it work?
Fiction writers create public profiles on The Black List for free and pay a $30/month fee for the ability to post full-length manuscripts of unpublished or self-published work. A one-time fee of $150 gets you professional feedback on the first 90-100 pages of your novel from one of The Black List’s readers. Publishing professionals who apply and are approved by The Black List then get free access to members’ manuscripts, which are searchable by genre and theme. The service also highlights highly-rated manuscripts on the site, in email blasts, and in curated lists organized by genre. When an agent or editor likes what they see, they can reach out to the writer and take it from there.
What’s the catch? There doesn’t appear to be one. The Black List doesn’t take a cut of book deals born on the site or retain any rights to users’ material. And Leonard’s track record speaks for itself: in the nearly 20 years since The Black List launched, more than 400 of the screenplays it featured have been produced, including hits like Slumdog Millionaire and The King’s Speech. Of course, they won’t all be hits, but that’s the truth no matter where a publisher sources manuscripts.
The Black List probably won’t revolutionize the industry, but it offers compelling value propositions on both sides. Aspiring authors can pay to improve their odds in the great casino that is publishing, and agents and editors can outsource the drudgery of wading through the slush pile. Probably worth a couple hundred bucks a year.
The “It” Books of September
Every month, Jeff O’Neal and I play a knock-out round to identify the “it” book of the month. Ten titles enter, and one leaves victorious. September is stacked with interesting new releases, and we even surprised ourselves trying to pick the winner.
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