The access audit · Authors
Publishing runs on conferral more openly than almost any other field, and says so: the slush pile and the referral pile are physically different piles, read by different people, in a different order.
Two questions · free · nothing you enter about your routes leaves your browser
Every route that brings attention to your work is one of three things, and two questions asked in order tell you which.
When someone shows up here, had they already chosen you?
If no, stop. The route is contested and question two does not apply. Coordinates you hold for people who never chose you are not a direct route.
Could you reach them again without this intermediary choosing you again?
Yes is direct. No is rented. Ordinary infrastructure you can replace does not count as a landlord.
Sorted by the two questions. Yours will differ — this is the shape of the reasoning, not a verdict on your career.
Unsolicited and unranked. Read by whoever reads the slush, if it is read.
Their standing carried you out of the slush. It is real, and it is theirs.
You were chosen. The route to the publisher runs entirely through the agency.
Those readers trust the imprint. They arrive oriented toward the book, not toward you.
You can reach them, and you would keep them through a change of publisher.
The relationship is with you and survives everything else changing.
The reader was not looking for you, and the recommendation can stop without notice.
Someone with standing pointed at you. You cannot point again on their behalf.
Reporting on querying puts the odds of a cold query producing a manuscript request at a fraction of one percent — QueryTracker data summarised by the author Dan Koboldt gives roughly 0.03%. The number is worth knowing, but the structure is the point: nobody in that pile was chosen before they arrived.
The audit places a route. It does not price one. For anything that came out rented — in this field that is usually your agent and your publisher — the next questions are:
Renting a publisher's editorial, production, distribution and standing is often the correct trade. The book this instrument comes from says so plainly. Price it anyway.
It places your routes. It does not measure your career. It cannot see the quality of your work, your income, your craft, your credits or your reputation — and rented routes build all of those, even when they build no way back to anyone.
The underlying idea — that attention arrives contested, rented or direct — is free to use, adapt and teach. If this is wrong about your situation, that is worth more to me than if it is right: the contact is on the about page.