Publishing people get asked this all the time. It’s a toughie: your acquaintance might have written a masterpiece but the odds are the manuscript is not that good, or at least unsuited for any publisher you know. But without looking at it how can you know? We’ve all evolved temporizing answers, most of which, like the Penguin Random House example shown below, tend to take cover behind a literary agent. I’ve never come across a piece of paper like this before, but it makes perfect sense that PRH would feel the need for something they can thrust into the hands of anyone who asks them the dreaded question. The document obviously originates in the UK, but PRH had a stack of them at the recent BookExpo America exhibition in the Javits Center.
“Our company policy is to not accept [boldly split infinitive] unsolicited manuscripts or synopses and we cannot enter into correspondence about unpublished work.” A bit harsh? Not really — it costs a lot to deal with such correspondence and a target as big as Penguin Random House must get boatloads of it. More efficient to focus on your regular source of supply, the literary agency world, rather than rush off down dark alleyways. Sure you may miss the odd wonder, but as a percentage play it’s hard to argue against. Of course as a public relations move it might be seen as a bit less successful.
This sort of document is exactly the sort of thing the commentariat loves to latch onto. Didn’t we tell you those fat cats in their New York ivory towers don’t care about innovative new work or the people who produce it? Just see how they treat aspiring authors — and it’s their job to publish books. Amazing!
Stop and think you windbags. If you were to run a publishing company would one of your priorities be to employ a couple of people, skilled people, who had no tasks other than to write letters to hopeful authors who have invested a postage stamp in sending you their latest stories? Well, you might, but if you’d ever worked in any publishing house where despite such disclaimers unsolicited manuscripts do inevitably creep across the transom, you’d know from bitter experience that the likelihood of an unsolicited manuscript actually being publishable are vanishingly small. Sure it happens, but on no cost-benefit analysis is it worthwhile setting up your acquisition department to focus on the slush pile. Everyone in a publishing house is already doing huge amounts of work with the books they’ve actually solicited. It would be idiocy to wander the streets scouring through local trash bins in the hope of finding another brilliant manuscript. Even in our ivory towers the day has only got 24 hours in it. And while we love to publish books, there can never be (pace the commentariat) a duty to publish every book ever written. So, you have to deflect.
Now, if your name is Ian McEwan you know they’d enter into correspondence with you about anything, unpublished or published: but of course the bit of paper isn’t meant for the likes of him — and PRH already employs someone whose job it is to keep after their authors about unpublished work.
Making Book 
I hooked up with my publisher by writing an article published in Baseball Research Journal that caught the eye of an acquisitions editor. She contacted me. I still had to do a proposal, but it cut through the “unsolicited” issue. And of course it wasn’t one of the big five publishers.
The self-publishing crowd is entirely open that they consider the absence of an acquisitions editor to be a big plus. It took me a while to figure out how this worked on the consumption side. Why should I pay to read the slush pile? Mechanisms have been created that partially serve to replicate the role of the acquisitions editor. (Those and the target market has different ideas of what constitute a good book, of course.) There are a lot of hoops to jump through, but it is important to the ethos that there is no individual acting as a “gatekeeper.” Personally, I want my gatekeepers. There are a few midlist authors who also self-publish, and whom I am happy to read. These are pre-gatekeeped, as it were.
FWIW, I (of course) have a second book churning through my mind: why America plays (American) football when the rest of the world (to a first approximation) plays Association football. I am sure I can get this into a midsized house, but I aspire a larger audience, so I am cogitating on the agent route.
I always think American football is the favored game here because it is ideally suited to television: regular breaks in the action on the field so that commercials can be run. But of course the timing (history) doesn’t really work out.
In the early days of US television broadcasting of soccer they would break in periodically to show you a commercial. If anything important (which to US TV excecs meant a goal) they’d show a replay after the commercial. The next step (in one of the world cups I think) was continuously to stream ads across the bottom of the screen. Thank goodness we’ve now come to accept that soccer is a continuous action thing.
Television is certainly key to the NFL’s rise in prominence in the 1950s, but American football was firmly established over soccer long before then. Or, in the British context, football over rugby (not to say that rugby is viewed as rubbish, but it is much smaller than soccer).
I take a historian’s view of the matter. Americans watch and play American football today because we did so yesterday. We did it yesterday because we did it the day before that. And so on. Similarly with soccer in those parts of the world that favor it. But this doesn’t go back to Adam, with Eve fetching the beer. There are key turning points, where football split into soccer and rugby, then American football split off from rugby. The public (British, American, and worldwide), presented with these choices, made their selections. The reasons for this are subject to historical inquiry.