Are Literary Agents the Problem?

I Think So…

Photo by chloe s. on Unsplash

Liza Libes Sam Kahn Jacob Savage Megha Lillywhite Abigail Austin Fair For All James Beaman Beatdom Radically Pragmatic The Literarian Gazette Ben Appel Claudia Befu Beyond the Bookshelf

***Nota bene:

Some might roll their eyes at this essay and just think, Another white guy with sour grapes cause he wasn’t talented enough. Maybe. As I say at the start there is probably some truth to this. But that isn’t a real response to the problem. You still have to contend with the argument. And things aren’t that binary: Either it is it or it isn’t; either I am or I am not; either they are or they are not; etc. There’s meaningful complexity here. Also, I’m not saying all agents are bad or ideologically captured or that all publishers are anti-male or anti-white, etc. I am simply exploring a problem I have encountered for many years now.

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If you’ve followed me at all over the past 3.5 years on Substack, you know there are two major ideas I consistently rail against when it comes to writing: The MFA (which I think generally harms both writers and writing) and literary agents (gatekeepers extraordinaire).

I believe in being up front and transparent with one’s biases, so I’ll start by saying this: Without question I have resentment towards agents. I am jealous, even now, of writers who have an agent even if, more so than not, I no longer really, truly want an agent nor do I want to go through the traditional publishing process. Yet I do, of course, want to be traditionally published. Does that make sense? I don’t want to deal with agents and major publishing…but I want my professionally published book on the shelf at every bookstore across America.

The resentment reaches back to 2011, really, when, newly sober and living again in North Oakland in the San Francisco Bay Area I started (foolishly, with retrospect, because it wasn’t anything near ready) submitting my inchoate auto-fiction novel, then called The Cannonball Complex and eventually self-published in January of 2024 as The Crew.

A more accurate appraisal is that, over the course of about a decade or so, from roughly 2011 to 2021, I submitted various drafts and versions of this novel to, my God, maybe as many as 500 agents. Something absurd like that. In 2016 I began actually, at last, after working with a former Random House freelance editor, getting requests for the whole manuscript from agents. One agent read the novel three times and sent me glowing emails only to disappear; that one had ideological connotations in terms of the rejection; read that essay HERE.

Anyway, the point is, none of my books—and I have written at this point I think 16 or 17 books, five of which are self-published, and half a dozen of which I submitted to agents over that decade or so—were accepted by agents. I even interned for an agent in 2013 for nine months. Actually, side note: Here’s where my resentment towards myself comes in. This agent read my work and offered me representation: Stupidly, ignorantly, I rejected her offer at the time in favor of finding “a big agent in New York.” (She was in the Bay Area.) So I screwed myself on my one chance.

Still.

I’ve gone over many times now the argument about whether agents—who are primarily young white progressive feminist women, most of whom have trust-funds because you can’t afford to live in NYC on a new agent’s fees, which are a pittance—are purely ideological or not. Meaning: Whether most agents most of the time prefer debut novels by and for women, by and for progressive readers, by and for the “right” people, the “literary citizens,” people who have the right views about the right things in the right way. I think there is a strong argument against agents in this regard: Read my essay on that HERE, first published in The Republic of Letters.

But there’s a deeper question underpinning the ideological one: Do agents actually care about literature?

I ask the question because many debut novels today seem to be more or less one of three main flavors: Novels by women about women; novels with a political or identity politics message from the progressive point of view; novels by men or women (ideally non-white if male) which read as exactly the standard style guide for The New Yorker.

Now, look. I understand how the industry works…or how it’s supposed to work. Agents, many in the biz say, are trying to walk this fine line between art and commerce. Right? But the data doesn’t support that. As I said: Almost NO agent, especially new ones, can survive in NYC (which is where the lion’s share of agents live and work) by the small 10-15% fees they make from clients’ royalties and book sales. The reason for that is obvious: Fewer people every year are reading books; most debut novels fail both commercially and financially; nowadays it’s pretty common for debut authors to get very small or even no advance at all…which means the agent doesn’t even get paid. Most debut novels today sell fewer than 5,000 copies, and most much fewer.

So, if the financial component, for novels—and here I need to drill down again and say what I mean is “literary” novels, aka literature, versus say romance, romantasy, YA, etc—is actually not a real issue, what agents are actually doing is more or less simply culling through thousands of books each year and trying to find the gems which the small and shrinking pool of dedicated readers (also mostly women) will want to read.

If this is the case: Why not try choosing very different kinds of books?

Why not? As we have established, there is virtually no financial risk here, because these books aren’t making any money anyway. An agent could still represent romance, romantasy, YA and other more trendy books…but they could also play around and be more risky with their literary debuts.

What I’m getting to here is: Since it’s no longer the 1970s, and novels are no longer selling the way they once did decades ago when most people still read books and big advances were common and agents actually made money: Why not more or less, at least with lit novels, ignore the commerce part and focus almost exclusively on the ART part?

There’s been much debate, starting with Jacob Savage’s powerful piece, THE LOST GENERATION, about men and whether they read and whether they just don’t care about literature anymore and are too bored/distracted to care, or whether they simply aren’t getting the chance to read “authentic” male stories because those stories aren’t getting through the agent Slush Piles either for ideological reasons and/or because these novels don’t “sell” or whether it’s because there’s simply no audience or appetite for these novels, etc.

Truthfully, I think the answer is complicated; I think it’s a bit of a mix of all the above.

Fewer men are reading today. Fewer people are reading today. The lion’s share of the remaining readers are, yes, women. (Hence why romance and “romantasy” sell like hotcakes.) Agents are almost exclusively white young progressive women. Look at the hot authors now. Sally Rooney. (Read review of Intermezzo here.) Miranda July. (Read review of All Fours here.) Hernan Diaz. (Read review of Trust here.) Brandon Taylor. (Read review of The Late Americans here.)

I have read all these books. Rooney is an angry Irish Marxist who boycotts Jews and writes like she masturbates to TikTok. July is very talented as a stylist but writes about gender, lesbianism, patriarchy, etc. Diaz is a non-white Argentinian-American author who’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning 2022 novel, Trust, reads like it was ripped directly from The New Yorker style sheet. Taylor is a gay Black author who’s prose is so stilted by his MFA that it reads like a drunk undergraduate with global ambitions somehow found a way to impersonate an author and get published.

My point is: Where is the serious literature?

By that I do NOT mean solely WSM (White Straight Males). It doesn’t really matter what race, but where are the genuine, authentic male American stories? The closest we get of recent times is Andrew Borgya’s Victim, which, admittedly, is a very good book. But it’s also a rarity.

One of the things which bothers me about agents—and in the past, alongside interning for an agent I also attended endless writers’ conferences with agent-panels in SF, NYC, Portland, Canada, etc—is that they often say one thing but do the opposite. They come up with all these “rules” about how a good novel should start, how it should hook the reader in on the first letter (joke, sort of), how the query letter should be structured, etc. But then when you read a published debut it does everything opposite.

Prime example, Hernan Diaz’s 2022 novel Trust, mentioned earlier. Agents always say: Start a novel with action, with scenes, with something happening. Hook us in from the first sentence and don’t let go. Authors, they say, are competing with the attention economy; the distractions of iPhones, social media, streaming, etc. It’s got to therefore be a very strong, action-packed opener.

How does Trust begin? With back-story. With summary. With explanation. With history. With the dreaded “telling” instead of “showing.” In fact, all of chapter one is one giant “info-dump” of back story, summary, explanation and “telling” the reader about the protagonist. And this is a new novel that won the Pulitzer. Don’t get me wrong: Diaz is talented. But that’s not the point. Why do agents say A but then publish Z?

Add to this the fact that, as I mentioned and as the data clearly show, most debut lit novels fail, and you have to admit the obvious: Most agents most of the time have no idea what they’re doing. They don’t actually know what “sells” because almost nothing sells. They don’t know if their might be an untapped mine of readers out there because they don’t take risks.

They don’t know what’s quality or “good” because they often spend six months prior to publication of some new debut (Emma Cline in 2016, say) only to find out that readers fucking hated it. I don’t think agents are doing their jobs for readers, though. I think they’re doing it for themselves, their own little social lit cliques in Manhattan and Brooklyn, rich white kids who are playing at being adults and gatekeepers who keep actual ART at arm’s length. I think, more than anything, it’s all about social status, prestige, control, and narrative.

I’ve had my suspicions about agents for a long time. I never did fully feel comfortable with the idea that some 25, 30-year-old feminist white woman was going to “see” my vision, understand what I was doing, care about my work. My writing, like so many others both male and female, white, Black and other, isn’t for and about women; it doesn’t read like The New Yorker; it isn’t progressive and leftist or enmeshed in identity politics.

I’m not guessing when I say I feel “oppressed” by these agents. They are very vocal in public about either boycotting Jewish products and books alongside Sally Rooney, or else calling Gaza a “genocide” or else looking for books “especially by LGBTQIABXYZ authors,” etc. They’re very open about it. Recently Penguin-Random House Canada opened, for the first time, submissions from writers without agents, unheard of in the modern era…but only for “underrepresented” voices.

***(Doing research for this essay I discovered that, surely after having received criticism, or possibly reprimands from lawyers, PRH “updated” their language. See the first one and the new one. Very sneaky:

Original:

“Random House Canada is excited to open its submission policy exclusively to LGBTQIA2S+ and BIPOC writers, as well as those from other traditionally underrepresented communities. Effective immediately, unsolicited and unagented work can be sent directly to their editors within the RHC division at randomhousecanadasubmissions@penguinrandomhouse.com.”

New:

“We are inviting submissions from all writers, including those sharing underrepresented stories in regard to race, national origin, religion, age, color, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, and disability. We hope to discover new talent and introduce their fiction to readers everywhere.”

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Take a gander at agents’ websites. They say right up front that they want almost anything and everything except books by men for men and about men and especially the worst of the grotesque worst: White Straight Men (ew). They want women. They want “underrepresented voices.” They want Black trans writers. They want writers who seek to “decolonize” their prose. They want writers who are politically “aware” and “conscious” (read: progressive).

Look. I’m not suggesting EYE myself am The Great American Novelist Who is Being Banned from Big Publishing Because I am a WSM, etc. Despite all the writers and even famous authors who over the decades have praised my writing; despite all the authors who have connected me with their agents (only to reject me); despite having a few dozen published stories in small lit mags in the past; despite all of this, maybe I’m just not a good enough writer. (Then again, reading some newer novels I can’t help think, Really?)

Fine. Even if that were the case: There has got to be a male writer out there somewhere, in America, land of the free and home of the brave, who is writing some meaningful literary fiction with some real fucking meat on the goddamn bone. A novel without progressive politics or maybe without politics altogether. (The Left thinks this is impossible because they once read that Orwell said “everything is political,” typically misunderstanding Orwell, who they almost certainly haven’t actually read.) A novel for men and about real, actual men. This author could be white, but he could also be Black, Hispanic, Asian, whatever. Doesn’t matter. Fiction that is ballsy, gutsy, apolitical or even center-right or Conservative, with prose that is impolite, honest, even shocking, that shows what it’s actually like to be a man in America in our time now.

I think we deserve it. I think literature deserves it. We’re starving here, people. There’s no good excuse to not take risks. I think Substack, with it’s 3 million writers and 35 million readers, puts the lie to the notion that men simply don’t read or they’re just not interested. Men are reading and they are interested. We’re waiting for you to publish some of our stories.

Do it, and you may be surprised. The thing may actually sell. You may see a movement develop. But if it doesn’t sell. If it fails, then you’re right back where you were before already. Nothing has changed. Because novels are already not selling.

Why not take the risk?

Ball’s in your court, agents and publishing.