This issue reminds me of a famous JM Keynes metaphor for stock market trading. He used a newspaper beauty contest where the idea is not to pick the most beautiful woman but to pick the woman who the most people thought was beautiful.
In a way that's what gatekeepers seem to be doing. Not picking the best written book but the book they think most people will want to read.
Great essay. Wouldn't argue with a word. But would add that more writers may want to rethink the persistent stigmatization of any publishing approach that isn't with one of the Big Five. Every other creative endeavor -- music, art, cooking -- relies largely on bootstrapping and micro-marketing. Busking. Food cart. Art fairs. Self-funded, self-stocked, self-staffed direct-to-customer marketing efforts. Merit generates buzz. Buzz finds ears of the profiteers. People who want something of quality -- proven at small scale -- they can "acquire" and promote and scrape value from for themselves. That's why the big five are so impenetrable. They want a sure deal for their dollars. For writers, pushing past the stigma of self-publishing or hybrid publishing or e-pub or KDP or what have you is the key to fashioning yourself as a producer and a merchant of your work. To hell with the gate-keepers. Let the market (I.e. readers) decide.
Re: stigmatization of what's outside the Big Five -- there's a good piece at Persuasion about this, https://www.persuasion.community/p/the-big-five-publishers-have-killed. But there's no sure deal for the dollars in literary fiction, especially with the trend toward huge advances for unproven debuts. Smaller advances for more writers, with a willingness to slowly grow and nurture a writer over the course of their career, would really be a much surer deal; it's strange to me that they don't do this, preferring the splashy advance.
“No one is bound inevitably to have a book in the world. When it comes to publishing, no one will inevitably deserve a book contract, no matter how deserving the work becomes.” This is the most important thing that needs to be said whenever the topic of who gets published and who does not comes up, and it is so often overlooked. This is what it means to be an adult in the world, to realize that in all likelihood, your specialness will really be noticed and matter to only to a few people, and to keep doing worthy and dignified things anyway. And as far as the “where are the male novelists?” question goes in particular, I tend to think that many of the men who stay stuck in those first two tiers of your life’s cycle of an author are spending a lot of time doing things with a more guaranteed reward, in the form of money, or some little power gained over others in a workplace, or getting gains in the gym, winning the video game, whatever… nothing wrong with that, but first acknowledging and accepting the facts you lay out here would make these arguments about how women are only writing sociology or whatever (along with some actual analysis of their writing to demonstrate what the critic sees in it, but that’s another piece all together) much more interesting.
“This is what it means to be an adult in the world, to realize that in all likelihood, your specialness will really be noticed and matter to only to a few people, and to keep doing worthy and dignified things anyway.”
Great, mature take here. For the most part, comparison is the thief of joy. I’ve had to come to peace with not comparing, which has often meant heading to the used bookstore and Little Free Library rather than the new releases, in order to maintain the equanimity from which I can keep making worthy and dignified work. Good to notice where unfairness exists, and occasionally speak (or rail!) against it, but mostly center on the self as a writer. That’s what I’ve come to, anyway!
This is very much me telling on myself! I love getting a paycheck and am very stuck between tier one and two of your schema. I can see how it would be harder to enjoy new books if I had actually produced the one of my dreams and got stuck at a different level. Plus, there are so many good books by 💀 people; no need to put yourself through that. I loved your take here and look forward to seeing more!
Yes, much harder to enjoy anything when the success of others feels personal. When there's direct comparison. This is why I so enjoy the art forms where I'm not a practitioner--like TV and visual arts--and can consume any of it widely. And why I'm very careful about the contemporary books I read. (Which feels fine to me, since there's so much incredible older stuff I haven't read. And I do read selective contemporary stuff when convinced.)
My point was, if I said only male writers do that, it would be sexist. But it’s fine— you can judge me. And I will judge these guys who don’t bother to demonstrate their claims to authority. I will continue to be skeptical of those gaps in their arguments, which are often sexist, and fill in the obvious blanks they’ve left, evaluating them from my own experience.
I didn’t say women writers who are not published yet don’t give in to the desire for recognition in other realms of life. But it’s mostly men who are writing these think pieces, without showing us their work or their receipts for their claims.
You’re on to something for sure. But it’s a story that goes back a way. Give Ecclesiastes a look. “The race isn’t always to the swift” and all that. Not being a smart ass. It just seems that the problem is perennial.
I agree that the problem is perennial. Good stuff is always bound to be overlooked, and less-good stuff elevated, in every era. I also think there are periods of more and less risk-taking, and trends in certain eras that tend to elevate the less-good more than others.
It is discouraging. The relatively recent Century 21 trend to exhort young people to ‘pursue their dreams’ looms ironic over the actual sphinctering-down of opportunities at the hands of gatekeeperism, particularly when the old media models are contracting. Obviously outlets like Substack mitigate that but cultural cachet ain’t what it used to be. Ecclesiastes does point toward a fatalistic outlook. But another way of looking at it is more about zen. There’s also the exquisite pig Latin admonition: nae illegitimi carborundum - don’t let the bastards get you down. Keep that one handy!
When people tell you to pursue you dreams or that you can do anything that you want to if you set your mind to it, what must you conclude if you fail? I guess the problem was always with me: my heart wasn't in it, then.
I think the original advice is good as a starting point. It’s better as a motivator than encouraging fear, trepidation, indecision. Of course no one adds the caveat about adapting along the way, which emerges on its own clearly enough. At some point you come face to face with the inevitable obstacles and have to size them up. At that point you may need to remind yourself that there’s a potentially hazardous, burdensome load of egoism buried in ‘follow your dreams’. Clinging to that goal, chosen when you weren’t as well informed, can leave you concussed from beating your head against a wall. Meanwhile, if you’re open to it, your dreams and goals might change for the better.
I agree completely with the idea of adapting and shifting. To some extent I think that is age-old wisdom: be the bough that bends and doesn't break. Yet I have seen, in places like the self-help hit 'Tiny Experiments', an emerging ethos of constant iteration, experimentation, micro-corrections. This is indeed the language ChatGPT just fed me moments ago when I landed on that therapist's couch.
This all strikes me as the new regulation that a digital capitalist subject must adapt to. I'm nostalgic for the era when the company would pay a woman to fire dry peas at the windows of sleeping workers as an alarm clock. Transpose me to that era and watch me get stellar performance reviews for reading the hands of the clock.
Thanks for that funny and memorable ‘pea shooter’ image! Not sure what to add but am old enough to have gotten a taste of the common advice of a different time. The majority of adults in my young boomer days had lived through the Depression and were anxious about excessive idealism and potential deficits of pragmatism in the young. The economic prospects of adopting conventional wisdom as one’s guiding light seemed solid, so pointing kids in that direction was the default, with some cush corporate job the ultimate goal for many. I got a bit of a pass on that and liked to draw so ended up an art major. When my utter lack of social capital and savvy, along with a bit of sloth and resistance to sycophancy, indicated looming frustration, I opted to become a teacher. It was a good decision in my case. (Getting married and needing some of the positive perks - benefits & job security in particular- played a big role too!) There are (or were, before AI) more opportunities now but also more competition. So maybe I’d end up in the same kind of spot today. If so I’d be fine with it. Good luck to you wherever you point yourself. Reading and thinking are a big plus.
"You should keep writing anyway...Writing has inherent value and dignity, if it’s something the author is writing with maximal complexity and honesty."
"The idea that the gatekeepers pass on good work that would have an audience, and that they are often wrong in their decisions to reject, is one of the hardest to make people believe." Yes! It took me a very long time to accept this, and I keep wishfully forgetting it. My favorite poet, a guy named Lewis Dimmick, has never gotten a word of that poetry ublished, and has been writing great stuff for 30 years. It's so demoralizing to believe that he's the rule, not the exception.
Your comment about this being demoralizing got me thinking. It’s definitely demoralizing in a big way, but I think there are also ways to keep going by viewing it as a freedom to follow your own attention. (More thoughts in the Note below.)
Does your friend share his work anywhere on his own?
No, he doesn't share his work any longer, and I get on him about that. He gave up, seeing the panorama... He did get a wonderful book of prose vignettes published called THIS IS MUSIC, got it published by a record label! ...As far as your note, no, the demoralizing aspect doesn't always have to be so. Hitting that wall, or rather querying or submitting into that void, ends up, as you say, thickening the skin of those with a true vocation, and the rest end up doing other things. Personally, I'm grateful for all the early rejection. I don't think my stuff was rejected because it was mediocre (although it was mediocre), I think it was rejected because it wasn't considered marketable. But the rejection served to give me time to sharpen it. I think tons of stories and novels get published before they're done, because they do "capture the zeitgeist." That's yet another disservice done by the gatekeepers to writers. They don't save writers from embarrassing themselves. They don't force them to do their best work, if it fits what the market wants.
As education has limited the exposure and teaching of challenging and complex works with inconvenient social attitudes to today’s enlightened perspectives, and replaced it with ideological polemics and diatribes disguised as novels, those children grew up and went into the media and publishing fields, bringing condescending and elitist attitudes with them to their work. They don’t leave personal belief behind at the door and filter everything they experience about what makes art good or bad, through that filter.
Everyone thinks the same things, reads the same books, sees the same types
of movies, along with being motived by profit and value for profit/ideological sake, that allowing anything outside their norm would violate their own beliefs of what is morally acceptable, good, and true.
I apologize for to plugging my own, but I wrote a piece on the market impact on books with social media as a societal disruptor that may clarify my point:
which accumulated 72 rejections. But you know what? It makes me happy that I told this story. It makes me smile to think of the street fight scene and the dogs. It makes me happy I told the story of a retired accountant, who went to New York alone at age 17 to find out what happened to his brother, and put his daughter through MIT. And then makes it in a new career.
So there, little 20-something "agents" who just want stories by women, for women, about "marginalized" people. This is about those people who aren't even on your radar screen.
Great essay. I think aspiring writers should also know how much depends upon the trajectory of their first book and how little control they have over all that
Yes, though it’s also true that you get multiple first books if for example you have a debut short story collection and a debut novel and a debut essay collection, or something. Do you think marketing budgets largely control the trajectory of the first book, or pure luck, or something else?
Both. Marketing budget situates a book more than I ever thought, but at the same time, plenty of publishers lavish money on a book and it still sinks if readers don't bite. This podcast demystified a lot of it for me--it follows two authors at the same publisher who got different deals and what happened for their books: https://publishingrodeo.wordpress.com/ As for gatekeepers, one could argue that we don't really have them, with all the self-publishing options available, and that has not been good for writers or readers as a whole. I would say we need a different kind of gatekeeping that is less risk-averse and more diverse in opinion and taste. I get that it is a business, but I still think it could tap into markets that it often misses.
Thanks for the podast rec! Yes, I think there's a version of gatekeeping that's helpful -- the kind that does the value-add gatekeepers are supposed to do, which is to help filter the mass of writing to find the gems. But I completely agree that a good business does find the markets it's missing, and grows the pie, and that's what hasn't been happening with a kind of sameness or flattening of taste among much of the literary gatekeepers in the past several years at least.
I have always held out hope that if I submit a novel that I think is worth reading to enough different agents or gatekeepers, one will like it. There is sure to be a variety of tastes among the gatekeepers. Do you think there is a groupthink that systematically picks worse books than your classmate's Don Quixotesque manuscript for publication? That would be depressing
Good question. On a logistical level, one thing to note is that at the Big Five, many people need to like your work in order to move it forward. So you'll need buy-in from an agent, and then the editor the agent pitches, and then the acquisitions board that the editor convinces. (If the editor happens to be very high-powered, acquisitions might be more of a formality; if they're not, then books can get stalled there. Mine did!)
At the level of what's getting chosen, I'd say it's more complicated than simple groupthink, though that plays in. But I think that, once you're in this world for a while as an agent or an editor, your own particular tastes tend to bend themselves to the common wisdom around you about what sells and what doesn't. Which is to say, you lose your own taste. I think this is human, happens in many fields, and is hard to resist. I think real artists are those either congenitally predisposed to not-bend, or who insist on not-bending.
A training at my job earlier this year introduced me to the concept of "royal jelly," a secretion which worker bees feed to all the bee larvae for the first three days but afterwards feed exclusively to the chosen queen. This rich diet is what separates the queen from the other bees.
We all, as undergraduates or maybe graduate students in MFA programs, get fed a bit of royal jelly, by established writer-professors whose job involves helping us feel talented and accomplished. But it's whom we meet and who is willing to stick their neck out for us outside the walled garden that really dictates whether or not we'll have the chance to morph into queens / stars.
It is possible that Substack can help spread the wealth around a little bit. Certainly if @CourtneySender wants to serialize her novel on Substack, I would read it!
Thanks for the vote of confidence, Chris! We did get that royal jelly to a degree at Hopkins, but you’re right, it’s what happens outside. One person can change everything in the trajectory of a career.
Extremely tangential, but worth noting that Van Gogh also had his work financed so he could continue to produce without the need for external validation or sales. Just keep working is great but you can't eat unpublished manuscripts (well you can, they're not very tasty).
Van Gogh’s story is so interesting. It was his brother, an art dealer, who financed him, right? But not being successful in his lifetime was a torture. I’d definitely like financing (who wouldn’t?) but it doesn’t take the place of an audience.
And he was friends with Gauguin, who thought he was great, but I think they fell out because Vincent unsurprisingly made a difficult friend. So even that wasn’t enough to help him out commercially as an artist!
People prefer to believe in meritocracies whenever possible. It helps to keep you from boiling over. Elon Musk surely has all that cash from his superior intellect, and other jokes you can tell yourself.
I enjoyed this essay.
This issue reminds me of a famous JM Keynes metaphor for stock market trading. He used a newspaper beauty contest where the idea is not to pick the most beautiful woman but to pick the woman who the most people thought was beautiful.
In a way that's what gatekeepers seem to be doing. Not picking the best written book but the book they think most people will want to read.
Great essay. Wouldn't argue with a word. But would add that more writers may want to rethink the persistent stigmatization of any publishing approach that isn't with one of the Big Five. Every other creative endeavor -- music, art, cooking -- relies largely on bootstrapping and micro-marketing. Busking. Food cart. Art fairs. Self-funded, self-stocked, self-staffed direct-to-customer marketing efforts. Merit generates buzz. Buzz finds ears of the profiteers. People who want something of quality -- proven at small scale -- they can "acquire" and promote and scrape value from for themselves. That's why the big five are so impenetrable. They want a sure deal for their dollars. For writers, pushing past the stigma of self-publishing or hybrid publishing or e-pub or KDP or what have you is the key to fashioning yourself as a producer and a merchant of your work. To hell with the gate-keepers. Let the market (I.e. readers) decide.
Re: stigmatization of what's outside the Big Five -- there's a good piece at Persuasion about this, https://www.persuasion.community/p/the-big-five-publishers-have-killed. But there's no sure deal for the dollars in literary fiction, especially with the trend toward huge advances for unproven debuts. Smaller advances for more writers, with a willingness to slowly grow and nurture a writer over the course of their career, would really be a much surer deal; it's strange to me that they don't do this, preferring the splashy advance.
“No one is bound inevitably to have a book in the world. When it comes to publishing, no one will inevitably deserve a book contract, no matter how deserving the work becomes.” This is the most important thing that needs to be said whenever the topic of who gets published and who does not comes up, and it is so often overlooked. This is what it means to be an adult in the world, to realize that in all likelihood, your specialness will really be noticed and matter to only to a few people, and to keep doing worthy and dignified things anyway. And as far as the “where are the male novelists?” question goes in particular, I tend to think that many of the men who stay stuck in those first two tiers of your life’s cycle of an author are spending a lot of time doing things with a more guaranteed reward, in the form of money, or some little power gained over others in a workplace, or getting gains in the gym, winning the video game, whatever… nothing wrong with that, but first acknowledging and accepting the facts you lay out here would make these arguments about how women are only writing sociology or whatever (along with some actual analysis of their writing to demonstrate what the critic sees in it, but that’s another piece all together) much more interesting.
“This is what it means to be an adult in the world, to realize that in all likelihood, your specialness will really be noticed and matter to only to a few people, and to keep doing worthy and dignified things anyway.”
Great, mature take here. For the most part, comparison is the thief of joy. I’ve had to come to peace with not comparing, which has often meant heading to the used bookstore and Little Free Library rather than the new releases, in order to maintain the equanimity from which I can keep making worthy and dignified work. Good to notice where unfairness exists, and occasionally speak (or rail!) against it, but mostly center on the self as a writer. That’s what I’ve come to, anyway!
This is very much me telling on myself! I love getting a paycheck and am very stuck between tier one and two of your schema. I can see how it would be harder to enjoy new books if I had actually produced the one of my dreams and got stuck at a different level. Plus, there are so many good books by 💀 people; no need to put yourself through that. I loved your take here and look forward to seeing more!
Yes, much harder to enjoy anything when the success of others feels personal. When there's direct comparison. This is why I so enjoy the art forms where I'm not a practitioner--like TV and visual arts--and can consume any of it widely. And why I'm very careful about the contemporary books I read. (Which feels fine to me, since there's so much incredible older stuff I haven't read. And I do read selective contemporary stuff when convinced.)
And your last sentence : you're assuming much more patience on the part of the reader than anyone can reasonably demand.
My point was, if I said only male writers do that, it would be sexist. But it’s fine— you can judge me. And I will judge these guys who don’t bother to demonstrate their claims to authority. I will continue to be skeptical of those gaps in their arguments, which are often sexist, and fill in the obvious blanks they’ve left, evaluating them from my own experience.
I think what you said about would-be male writers focusing on things with "a guaranteed reward" is kind of sexist.
I didn’t say women writers who are not published yet don’t give in to the desire for recognition in other realms of life. But it’s mostly men who are writing these think pieces, without showing us their work or their receipts for their claims.
I didn't say "women writers who are not published yet don't give in to their desire for recognition in other realms of life."
I said it was sexist for you to say male writers do that.
And I don't think men (or women) have to pass a credentials check to state their views.
You’re on to something for sure. But it’s a story that goes back a way. Give Ecclesiastes a look. “The race isn’t always to the swift” and all that. Not being a smart ass. It just seems that the problem is perennial.
I agree that the problem is perennial. Good stuff is always bound to be overlooked, and less-good stuff elevated, in every era. I also think there are periods of more and less risk-taking, and trends in certain eras that tend to elevate the less-good more than others.
It is discouraging. The relatively recent Century 21 trend to exhort young people to ‘pursue their dreams’ looms ironic over the actual sphinctering-down of opportunities at the hands of gatekeeperism, particularly when the old media models are contracting. Obviously outlets like Substack mitigate that but cultural cachet ain’t what it used to be. Ecclesiastes does point toward a fatalistic outlook. But another way of looking at it is more about zen. There’s also the exquisite pig Latin admonition: nae illegitimi carborundum - don’t let the bastards get you down. Keep that one handy!
When people tell you to pursue you dreams or that you can do anything that you want to if you set your mind to it, what must you conclude if you fail? I guess the problem was always with me: my heart wasn't in it, then.
I think the original advice is good as a starting point. It’s better as a motivator than encouraging fear, trepidation, indecision. Of course no one adds the caveat about adapting along the way, which emerges on its own clearly enough. At some point you come face to face with the inevitable obstacles and have to size them up. At that point you may need to remind yourself that there’s a potentially hazardous, burdensome load of egoism buried in ‘follow your dreams’. Clinging to that goal, chosen when you weren’t as well informed, can leave you concussed from beating your head against a wall. Meanwhile, if you’re open to it, your dreams and goals might change for the better.
I agree completely with the idea of adapting and shifting. To some extent I think that is age-old wisdom: be the bough that bends and doesn't break. Yet I have seen, in places like the self-help hit 'Tiny Experiments', an emerging ethos of constant iteration, experimentation, micro-corrections. This is indeed the language ChatGPT just fed me moments ago when I landed on that therapist's couch.
This all strikes me as the new regulation that a digital capitalist subject must adapt to. I'm nostalgic for the era when the company would pay a woman to fire dry peas at the windows of sleeping workers as an alarm clock. Transpose me to that era and watch me get stellar performance reviews for reading the hands of the clock.
Thanks for that funny and memorable ‘pea shooter’ image! Not sure what to add but am old enough to have gotten a taste of the common advice of a different time. The majority of adults in my young boomer days had lived through the Depression and were anxious about excessive idealism and potential deficits of pragmatism in the young. The economic prospects of adopting conventional wisdom as one’s guiding light seemed solid, so pointing kids in that direction was the default, with some cush corporate job the ultimate goal for many. I got a bit of a pass on that and liked to draw so ended up an art major. When my utter lack of social capital and savvy, along with a bit of sloth and resistance to sycophancy, indicated looming frustration, I opted to become a teacher. It was a good decision in my case. (Getting married and needing some of the positive perks - benefits & job security in particular- played a big role too!) There are (or were, before AI) more opportunities now but also more competition. So maybe I’d end up in the same kind of spot today. If so I’d be fine with it. Good luck to you wherever you point yourself. Reading and thinking are a big plus.
"You should keep writing anyway...Writing has inherent value and dignity, if it’s something the author is writing with maximal complexity and honesty."
Amen.
"The idea that the gatekeepers pass on good work that would have an audience, and that they are often wrong in their decisions to reject, is one of the hardest to make people believe." Yes! It took me a very long time to accept this, and I keep wishfully forgetting it. My favorite poet, a guy named Lewis Dimmick, has never gotten a word of that poetry ublished, and has been writing great stuff for 30 years. It's so demoralizing to believe that he's the rule, not the exception.
Your comment about this being demoralizing got me thinking. It’s definitely demoralizing in a big way, but I think there are also ways to keep going by viewing it as a freedom to follow your own attention. (More thoughts in the Note below.)
Does your friend share his work anywhere on his own?
https://substack.com/@courtneysender/note/c-120543597?r=1nyev&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action
No, he doesn't share his work any longer, and I get on him about that. He gave up, seeing the panorama... He did get a wonderful book of prose vignettes published called THIS IS MUSIC, got it published by a record label! ...As far as your note, no, the demoralizing aspect doesn't always have to be so. Hitting that wall, or rather querying or submitting into that void, ends up, as you say, thickening the skin of those with a true vocation, and the rest end up doing other things. Personally, I'm grateful for all the early rejection. I don't think my stuff was rejected because it was mediocre (although it was mediocre), I think it was rejected because it wasn't considered marketable. But the rejection served to give me time to sharpen it. I think tons of stories and novels get published before they're done, because they do "capture the zeitgeist." That's yet another disservice done by the gatekeepers to writers. They don't save writers from embarrassing themselves. They don't force them to do their best work, if it fits what the market wants.
As education has limited the exposure and teaching of challenging and complex works with inconvenient social attitudes to today’s enlightened perspectives, and replaced it with ideological polemics and diatribes disguised as novels, those children grew up and went into the media and publishing fields, bringing condescending and elitist attitudes with them to their work. They don’t leave personal belief behind at the door and filter everything they experience about what makes art good or bad, through that filter.
Everyone thinks the same things, reads the same books, sees the same types
of movies, along with being motived by profit and value for profit/ideological sake, that allowing anything outside their norm would violate their own beliefs of what is morally acceptable, good, and true.
I apologize for to plugging my own, but I wrote a piece on the market impact on books with social media as a societal disruptor that may clarify my point:
https://inkingoutloud.substack.com/p/part-2-information-booktok-and-cultural
Very well said. This being Memorial Day, I reread the 1st chapter of my book:
https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/this-new-internet-thing-0f7
which accumulated 72 rejections. But you know what? It makes me happy that I told this story. It makes me smile to think of the street fight scene and the dogs. It makes me happy I told the story of a retired accountant, who went to New York alone at age 17 to find out what happened to his brother, and put his daughter through MIT. And then makes it in a new career.
So there, little 20-something "agents" who just want stories by women, for women, about "marginalized" people. This is about those people who aren't even on your radar screen.
Great essay. I think aspiring writers should also know how much depends upon the trajectory of their first book and how little control they have over all that
Yes, though it’s also true that you get multiple first books if for example you have a debut short story collection and a debut novel and a debut essay collection, or something. Do you think marketing budgets largely control the trajectory of the first book, or pure luck, or something else?
Both. Marketing budget situates a book more than I ever thought, but at the same time, plenty of publishers lavish money on a book and it still sinks if readers don't bite. This podcast demystified a lot of it for me--it follows two authors at the same publisher who got different deals and what happened for their books: https://publishingrodeo.wordpress.com/ As for gatekeepers, one could argue that we don't really have them, with all the self-publishing options available, and that has not been good for writers or readers as a whole. I would say we need a different kind of gatekeeping that is less risk-averse and more diverse in opinion and taste. I get that it is a business, but I still think it could tap into markets that it often misses.
Thanks for the podast rec! Yes, I think there's a version of gatekeeping that's helpful -- the kind that does the value-add gatekeepers are supposed to do, which is to help filter the mass of writing to find the gems. But I completely agree that a good business does find the markets it's missing, and grows the pie, and that's what hasn't been happening with a kind of sameness or flattening of taste among much of the literary gatekeepers in the past several years at least.
Exactly. Easier to diagnose than to cure, unfortunately.
Great piece. Several of the most interesting artists I know still haven't had their break and may not ever.
I have always held out hope that if I submit a novel that I think is worth reading to enough different agents or gatekeepers, one will like it. There is sure to be a variety of tastes among the gatekeepers. Do you think there is a groupthink that systematically picks worse books than your classmate's Don Quixotesque manuscript for publication? That would be depressing
Good question. On a logistical level, one thing to note is that at the Big Five, many people need to like your work in order to move it forward. So you'll need buy-in from an agent, and then the editor the agent pitches, and then the acquisitions board that the editor convinces. (If the editor happens to be very high-powered, acquisitions might be more of a formality; if they're not, then books can get stalled there. Mine did!)
At the level of what's getting chosen, I'd say it's more complicated than simple groupthink, though that plays in. But I think that, once you're in this world for a while as an agent or an editor, your own particular tastes tend to bend themselves to the common wisdom around you about what sells and what doesn't. Which is to say, you lose your own taste. I think this is human, happens in many fields, and is hard to resist. I think real artists are those either congenitally predisposed to not-bend, or who insist on not-bending.
That said, books do get through!
A training at my job earlier this year introduced me to the concept of "royal jelly," a secretion which worker bees feed to all the bee larvae for the first three days but afterwards feed exclusively to the chosen queen. This rich diet is what separates the queen from the other bees.
We all, as undergraduates or maybe graduate students in MFA programs, get fed a bit of royal jelly, by established writer-professors whose job involves helping us feel talented and accomplished. But it's whom we meet and who is willing to stick their neck out for us outside the walled garden that really dictates whether or not we'll have the chance to morph into queens / stars.
It is possible that Substack can help spread the wealth around a little bit. Certainly if @CourtneySender wants to serialize her novel on Substack, I would read it!
Thanks for the vote of confidence, Chris! We did get that royal jelly to a degree at Hopkins, but you’re right, it’s what happens outside. One person can change everything in the trajectory of a career.
Extremely tangential, but worth noting that Van Gogh also had his work financed so he could continue to produce without the need for external validation or sales. Just keep working is great but you can't eat unpublished manuscripts (well you can, they're not very tasty).
Great essay, Courtney!
Van Gogh’s story is so interesting. It was his brother, an art dealer, who financed him, right? But not being successful in his lifetime was a torture. I’d definitely like financing (who wouldn’t?) but it doesn’t take the place of an audience.
And he was friends with Gauguin, who thought he was great, but I think they fell out because Vincent unsurprisingly made a difficult friend. So even that wasn’t enough to help him out commercially as an artist!
One assumes he made a lousy listener.
😂
People prefer to believe in meritocracies whenever possible. It helps to keep you from boiling over. Elon Musk surely has all that cash from his superior intellect, and other jokes you can tell yourself.
Well said.
Agree 100%.