The Whining of Literary Agents

It has long been routine for the functionaries of Big Publishing to write pieces in which they whine that the hatred that frustrated authors feel for them is unjustified. (One may find examples of this dubious literature in such places as the Guardian and Salon.)

As with almost everything that people in Big Business tell the broad public about their business these pieces, which bespeak the self-pity and callousness of privilege toward the less advantaged--the narcissism that says "Attention must be paid!" to my concerns as they deny that "Attention must be paid!" to anyone else's--they obscure rather than reveal, and it seems there is something to be said about that. Certainly I do not deny that people do pursue careers as authors with unreasonable expectations, and that the enmity many of those who have been through this feel toward literary agents and the like partly reflects those unreasonable expectations. For a start, the aspiring author is encouraged to think that publishing is a career open to talent; that publishers exist to publish books; that the slush pile is a plausible path to publication; that any good book is likely to find a home somewhere. However, every one of those premises is false. Publishing is a very crowded milieu, the actual demand for book writers miniscule next to the supply. Publishers exist not to publish books but to make the maximum short-term profit for their owners, with books a mere means to an end, and while things have always been that way as Balzac demonstrates in Lost Illusions, one should not underestimate how much more intensive and minute the predominance of the profit imperative has become in today's ever-more corporatized and monopolized market, where the biggest publishers are corporate giants in their turn owned by asset managers that practice as well as preach "shareholder value." Indeed, in line with this imperative many have decided to have nothing to do with slush piles, dumping that job on literary agents who are in the business of representing their clients, not seeking out new talent, such that where they do have a slush pile it is apt to be the responsibility of some unpaid intern. And as all the foregoing implies--the crowdedness, the emphasis on profit rather than books, the marginality of the slush pile--it is not to be assumed that a decent book, or even a great one, will make it all the way through the labyrinth. Indeed, what an aspiring author writes is of no consequence whatsoever--what they know of no consequence whatsoever next to who they know, and who knows them, which is to say their having "connections" and/or "platform," nepotism and a claim to fame, working in their favor, such that the industry's Dauriats are happy to make "authors" of illiterate celebrities as they brush off a worthy effort by a newcomer because idiots will buy a book with a celebrity's name on it, and not a nobody's, no matter how brilliant (all while encouraging them to believe the fault lies with their writing "not being good enough").

Of course, that raises a very important question, namely "If aspiring authors have unreasonable ideas about this business, one can only wonder: where did they get them?" The answer is only partly the pop cultural crapola that so profoundly misrepresents what writers do, and how publishing works (all the crappy books and movies of our time about this subject offer less truth than does Balzac's great novel of two centuries ago), but also the hard reality that a great many interests profit by exploiting the hopes of would-be authors. Just think of the vast business of books, magazines, web sites, seminars, workshops which bring in revenue by taking such authors' money. Think of higher education, with its Masters of Fine Arts programs--which are central to the revenue and the hiring of English departments, the persons running which, contrary to stupid clichés about the genteel residents of "ivory towers," are as cynically and ruthlessly entrepreneurial as mobsters where Money is at issue. (As one who has been there, you can take my word for it that the colleges wouldn't be able to get all those composition classes that English teachers view with as much distaste as do the students taught at the rates they do if there weren't adjuncts thinking "I'm just doing this crappy job 'til I make it as an author.") Many joke that the withered remains of the once vital fiction magazine scene endure mainly because of the people buying them and reading those magazines less out of interest in the content than research for the sake of attempting to publish in those magazines themselves, they hope, on the way to bigger and better things. And of course, the authors who have "made it," insistent that they made it on talent and hard work and nothing else in line with the egotistic stupidity standard among the "successful" in America, encourages this view as well.

Moreover, those whining functionaries do nothing to disabuse the aspiring authors of these illusions. Quite the contrary, they reinforce them at every turn. After all, who is it that publishes those "You Can Be a Bestselling Author Too!" books? Publishers, of course. Meanwhile, on the web sites and other places where an aspiring author is likely to encounter these functionaries' presentation of themselves to the world feeds their expectation that, yes, these people are willing to look at material people submit to them through the procedures they prescribe, and taking the trouble to follow the instructions will have its reward, for these people have slush piles for a reason, and if seeing something of quality will show it some respect. They even attempt to affirm this in those rejection letters, the recipient of which is encouraged to think not that this was a hopeless endeavor given what it is that publishing actually does and how they stand in relation to it but that the match between their manuscript and this particular agency wasn't quite right. It is even the case that a literary agent's form rejection letter will have accompanying it an ad for their own "You Can Be a Bestselling Author Too!" book, which they hope the author they have just soul-crushingly rejected will actually buy--the existence of which book, written by people who should know better than anyone else exactly how things stand in this world, testimony to their personal investment in the cruel exploitation of those authors' hopes.

That Big Publishing's functionaries feed these illusions, and exploit these illusions for profit, makes their complaining that people have these illusions and act on them entirely illegitimate--the more in as when they do so Big Publishing's gatekeepers (whine as they do about being called gatekeepers, that is exactly what they are) treat them so high-handedly and insultingly, to such destructive effect. After all, let us not forget just what hopes these people are exploiting because of what the dream of authorship represents to so many, not merely the realization of the whim of "seeing their name in print" but, as Upton Sinclair dared to acknowledge, their one shot at escape from the scarcely bearable life of a nobody, such that the hope of that escape and their glittering vision of the life they will have if they do is the only thing getting them through the do. And let us not forget what I have described means in this context, that pursuing that desperate hope the business instead subjects them to the misery and despair of a Lucien de Rubempre and a Martin Eden (two protagonists, mind you, whose involvement with the vileness of the literary world ultimately saw each of those men die by their own hand). The bitterness and the enmity of the author cannot be properly understood without acknowledging how it comes from that desperate hope, and the way in which they have been deceived by the lies Big Publishing and its cohorts spread, made a mark of its own, and as a result brutalized by the "You Can Be a Bestselling Author Too!" racket. Alas, acknowledging that would mean taking responsibility, whereas in this society the respectable abide by the rule that with all the power comes none of the responsibility, and vice-versa, that those who have none of the power have all of the responsibility, and so deserve all of the scorn the world can fling in their faces. Acknowledging it would also mean acknowledging the Big Lie of the "You can do it too!" aspirationalism pervading the entirety of American culture for two centuries now, and that other Big Lie it sustains that this is a nation of "temporarily embarrassed millionaires." Of course, very, very few have ever had the courage to speak honestly about that.