As part of our preparation for accepting novel-length fiction, we spent over a year in conversation with professionals and leaders across the publishing industry.

We landed on a 90-100 page excerpt for two main reasons.

First, publishing professionals typically request the first 20 pages of a manuscript as part of the querying process. In the event an agent is interested and wants to read more, they will ask for additional pages, typically 50. If a writer is fortunate enough to have the interest of an agent past 50 pages, they will ask for the remainder of the manuscript. This process indicates that decisions are made about manuscripts based on a very small percentage of the full project regularly and we trust that requesting a manuscript excerpt from writers is well within the bounds of standard industry practice. That said, because we are committed to paying readers a fair fee for their labor and expertise, and because our site utilizes a searchable database that benefits from robust project information to deliver highly granular search results–we knew we’d want to request a larger sample than 20 pages.

Second, a 90-100 page excerpt is well above industry standard and gives our readers the opportunity to explore a manuscript beyond initial impressions of prose and its basic narrative setup. We’re able to get a clearer picture of how a writer might handle character development, story structure and world texture, as well as elements like the thematic content at play in the material.

Of course, evaluating any piece of art is an inherently subjective process–and our evaluation services are no exception. But by combining written feedback and numerical scores geared toward identifying how a project might be received within the industry with a searchable database that indexes nuanced information about that project, the Black List provides an avenue for writers to make their work available to a wide swath of individually-vetted industry members looking for new material.

Evaluations