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By Leslie, August 2, 2010 7:38 am

His examples range from curators at the Getty museum who when faced with an expertly executed fake statue failed initially to see it as a fake, to overwrought doctors trying to decide the fate of possible cardiac patients in a inner city hospital in Chicago. He walks us through the dilemma faced by police officers with milliseconds to decide if the dark object in a young man’s hand is a gun or a wallet.

It’s interesting stuff. And the parallels to the current crisis in the publishing industry were obvious.  According to Gladwell’s experts, the key factor between making the correct split second decision, the right blink, is the amount of good, no excellent, prior information and research you have internalized or a willingness to follow a set of triage instructions and not waver in the face of conflicting information. The cardiac physicians who used the apparently simple triage rules, ignoring the rest of the symptoms, had patients with better results. The art experts with years of experience trusted their first glances of the statue and identified the fake, but only because they backed it with deep knowledge.

Gladwell found when inexperienced people trusted their initial judgments, or blinks, preconceived results based on bias ruled. Decisions often went awry.

The publishing industry is in crisis and not just from the threat of ebook readers. Personal computers, the internet and easy access to just about anyone makes it seem like anyone can write and publish a book. Just do google search! Slush readers who twenty years ago would get a handful of manuscripts  a week to slog through for an editor or agent are receiving, in some cases, hundreds each day. Agent backlogs are months long.

How are these querys and first pages getting read? I bet they’re getting blinked. And in most cases the slush readers are likely experts and know what they are looking for. But some are getting blinked in an unknowable, inexpert way, as well. That’s just human nature and the internet firehose.

Since I am getting ready to query my first novel, this means that anything I can do to elevate myself above the slush pile is crtitical. You can work to gain access through contests and, pitch sessions at sites like SavvyAuthors or other writing sites. Producing squeaky clean pages and a tight query seems like a good starting point. Making sure my unique voice shines in my first pages, and the rest of my novel is one of my priorities, and improving my basic grammar and self-editing skills. I figure in a Blink world it’s all about not squandering any opportunity that drifts my way.