Tin House Books Accepting Unsolicited Manuscripts, with a Catch

Good news all you writers out there with finished manuscripts and no one willing to look at them: Tin House Books will be accepting unsolicited manuscripts for its fall reading period! Now is your chance to send in your masterpiece to a really awesome press and not have to worry about being rejected because you don't have an agent!

But there's a catch: they will only be accepting manuscripts that are "accompanied by a receipt for a hardcover or paperback from a real-life bookstore." The idea has stirred up quite a bit of controversy (check out the comments thread over on GalleyCat - people can be pretty harsh), but I for one think it's a pretty brilliant idea. With the future of print publishing currently in limbo, what better way to stimulate the literary economy than by reminding all of us that actually reading is a pretty huge part of being a writer? And that doesn't mean sitting in Barnes & Noble for three hours, sifting through lit journals and then walking out empty-handed; it's all about not biting the hand that feeds you. It's about being on the receiving end of good writing just as much as you are trying to contribute to it.

You can get all the details on submitting your work over at Tin House's website. And be sure to check out Tin House's quarterly review as well, which we mentioned last week on the blog.