"Then again, reading some newer novels I can’t help think, Really?"
Ooo sassy and spicy Michael.
But I wholeheartedly agree. Have never tried to be professionally published, but I'll pick up a book in the store, flip to a random page, and read a few paragraphs, and i consistently think, "how did this get published?" So much of the fiction, bother for general consumption and of literary quality, is just...awful. Something something something about perverse incentives in the marketplace has now lead us where we are.
Sigh. At least we tiny authors have a sense of humor and know how to entertain ourselves.
Well said! Haha. Yeah, there's a lot of bad stuff out there today. But I guess it's sort of part of a bigger, broader problem. Look at movies today, for example. Occasionally some good ones make it through. The indies have some good ones. (Nomadland, for example, I liked.) But I'd argue that 95-98% of mainstream movies being put out today are pretty terrible. I think with identity obsession, AI and the current polarized culture this is just the way it is now. Which brings us back to Substack. DIY, baby!!
I'm a white, heterosexual, conservative, Christian man writing literary fiction and poetry, so I think I have you beat regarding strikes against me. Still I persist, because I am a writer. It's what I do. Four books on Amazon, all self-published. Many short works published in literary magazines. Two unpublished novels sitting in the drawer waiting for the lucky agent to request them (hundreds of rejections already received). My current project is a collection of linked stories. I'm not chasing the idol of recognition. Gave up on that a while ago. I love writing. I love the process of writing. I love the craft of writing. Read about me in my series of essays about why I write...
I'm with you, man. I do it because I love it, too, otherwise why do it? And yes: White straight, Christian AND Conservative? In today's world? Fogetabout it :) Thanks for commenting and reading. Appreciate it. You are not alone.
I sold out to reality in my publishing, book writing life. The industry is controlled by women. Of that there is NO doubt. So....all, or most, of my characters in my stories are women. And ALL of these women have no anxiety and are positive, intelligent people. Sorry guys, have to go with the women. Macho is out unless it is female.
In 1998 I tried to get a novel agented. I’d say at least fifty percent of the agents I queried were men, most middle aged by my guess. In 2024 I tried to get a novel agented. I’d say only five percent were men, few above the age of thirty-five. The rest were younger women who were all wish-listing BIPOC and LGBTQIA2S+ “voices.” Often coded as “alternative voices.” Most lived in Brooklyn and had very special lifestyles that included cozying up with a dog or cat, a chai and a page-turner. The stuff they had sold was total pap and almost entirely authored by women. It is comical how hopeless the traditional publishing scene is now, sour grapes as it may sound. The gateway is absurdly narrow. I am positive that the future of literature will be DIY, small press and independent channels. Literature will bifurcate into the identity pap that pays off student debts and an NY lifestyle and the original voices of the underground. The latter will be influential but not widely read, just as the most influential music is never played on the radio.
Music to my ears. I agree completely. And so true! I call it The Identity Novel. We on Substack and other platforms (some as yet uncreated) will do the DIY road and eventually we'll be like The Original Punks circa 1976. We fight the good and holy fight.
I'm currently preparing to query my finished first novel to agents and have absolutely zero expectations, but weirdly, this piece didn't make me depressed, it got me motivated. Sure, I'm a 20-something white Jewish male (the horror!!!!), but I've written a book that I'm incredibly proud of and think that anyone, male or female, could enjoy! I've also found a way to incorporate some trendy buzzwords into the query letter (mental health, loneliness, tech addiction, etc) to frame it in a way that will appeal to the most common demographics of agents.
Who knows, I'll probably change my tune once I've gotten a couple dozen rejections, but for now, thanks for writing this piece and lighting a fire under my ass to get serious about putting it out there.
Awesome, Zeke! I love it. Glad to have helped. Who knows: Maybe you'll be one of those outliers who gets an agent first try! You never know. And yes: Male Jew? 20s? "The horror; the horror"; lol. Thanks for reading and commenting, I appreciate it :)
There's one more component that has contributed to a narrow view of literature. These young agents grew up in a failing educational system, one that abandoned phonics, lowered thresholds of passing grades, closed libraries, and surrendered critical thinking to ChatGTP. No doubt the agents were among the handful of students who actually enjoyed reading, maybe became English lit majors, but they were doomed from the start. If we want to elevate the culture in terms of producing great lit and more of it, we are going to have to return to the "blackboard" and teach kids to understand, seek, and produce good writing.
You won't get any arguments from me on that! Agree totally. I'm hoping (probably unrealistically) there might be a trend away from AI on some minority but large-enough scale at some point which will somehow bring us back to The Basics. Simplicity, depth, raw truth, emotion, big ideas, etc. But yes: Your point is well taken that The Culture as a whole has been corrupted and it started, probably, in the 1960s and then got a huge leap with my gen, Millennials. Younger Millennials (I was born in 1982 and am 43, one of the "Elder Millennials") and Gen Z, as you said, didn't have a chance.
I agree with pretty much everything here. Where I differ a bit is that I think the industry is looking for people sympathetic to its social agenda, and this tends to be mostly women; I don't believe the industry is particularly welcoming to women either. That’s a stereotype often thrown around as if women were some monolith and all think, act, and write the same way. As if we all read the same shit. I definitely don't, and my book didn't win friends or influence anyone in the industry. Why? I was told my female lead didn't pass the Bechdel test. Who gives a shit about Bechdel or her inane test? Agents do, that's who. They also said my MC is a misogynist because she's critical of other women; I guess that's a crime? She respects men—also a crime. Actually, she directly engages in the “patriarchy” to her advantage. Can't have that. So, this is a sampling of what you’re up against if you’re not a team player. Yes, even if you’re a woman. Maybe especially because women are automatically assumed to be part of the clique until we prove otherwise—then the knives come out.
Why authors would be encouraged to write for an ever-narrower audience is beyond me. I've never tried to write for either sex or any particular demographic. Joseph Conrad is one of my favorite authors, and while his stories are largely about men, I've never felt that they're FOR men or exclude me in any way; they're universally human stories. For me, that's what makes great literature. So much of what's written today is deliberately exclusive.
Agents are a big part of the problem, and I don't see that changing any time soon. But they’re also just giving the industry what it wants. Ultimately, they don’t take on books they don't WANT TO sell, and it’s the publishers who decide what to invest in. Publishers are pushing this agenda just as hard as anyone. They’ve decided it’s their moral right to remake the culture in their righteous image, from the top down (they see themselves at the top, of course). But that’s not how culture works. It’s organic, and it evolves from all directions. That a bunch of elite fucks in bizarro world wants to impose some sociopolitical agenda on the masses via their victimhood fetish literature has become a nonstarter among the masses, who have collectively decided to just literally not buy it. Maybe that was the plan all along: to make literature the exclusive domain of the elites, like priests speaking Latin to the lowly peasants. But it’s a cultural and artistic dead end. The real culture continues and evolves without them.
Yeah. You're not alone. They forget that literature reflects reality on some crucial level and reality is often unkind, gritty, unfair and even brutal, not to mention hopelessly complex. Liza Libes wrote a similar thing about submitting her novel; one agent criticized her male characters as being "too moral," that kind of thing. Like all men are supposed to be portrayed as shitty and terrible. I agree with you re women, which is why I said it's really everyone who gets rejected, regardless race/gender etc...if they have the "wrong" political views/agenda. Thanks for the read and comment. Appreciate :)
Well, being a Hispanic male, my incel-inspired novel gets rejected flat out. So, as an "underrepresented" writer, I must also write along what's ideologically-aligned in the publishing industry.
Yeah it’s bad now but IMO this will play itself out.
I recently randomly picked up the short story collection Magical Thinking by Augusten Burroughs (2004). What a joy! So poignant and funny, so non-political. And not so long ago this had mass appeal. When I searched around for his early reviews, they were truly amazing. One blurb said that due to his chaotic childhood, being gay was “the least of his problems.” Another points to his fans in the recovery community. Another even mentions “American entitlement,” (a positive thing?) as an equalizing force in his work, saying, “Augusten makes everybody – gay, straight, bi, transgendered, or somewhere in-between – feel better about themselves and the country they live in.”
Old reviews, but I find this encouraging. A beloved author with a great sense of style, who’s not in a niche, who proves the axiom-- the cream always rises to the top. I may be naïve, but this still seems true. Maybe staying light on our feet until then, resisting bitterness, is what’s needed most.
My first effort, 1988, was too long and slice-of-life for an unpublished author.
Write short stories; get known. I wrote about 20. No one cared. I parked the bus focused on creating a paying business. Took time off in the early 90s and lived in the woods and wrote a novel. Never tried to publish it. Went back to work in a city.
2005 I moved back to the woods. Did not write or want to feel the pain of rejection. Five years later I could not stop myself. I've written three novels, several novellas. Nothing took off on Amazon. Went wide. Even less. Now, rebranding and leaning on Amazon with a more focused marketing effort. I'm still a slice-of-life writer.
Realizing much of my fiction fits more in the noir, darker side, that's my move.
Absolutely, the only male person I know who still reads is one of my sons. All his friends listen to audiobooks. While I am putting my ebooks up and I am doing audiobooks also.
To end this diatribe. Think about audiobooks as a way to connect to the males out there.
I love audiobooks actually. All of my novels are on Audible as well as paperback. I also read and love physical books. I relate to your journey in many ways.
Women RULE the literary/book world. Period. You are right. And they don't care about any old white guy. This is about retribution and we see what is going on here. What needs to happen---tough love--- the book business needs to implode.
My wife, who reads 10 times more than I do, has not purchased a book in years. I honestly don't not know how the book business survives. It must be that the business survives with one big sellers carrying the rest of the other books that don't make money. Keep up the good fight, brother.
There have been many off the cuff, on mic, comments to that effect. Many of the ladies now in positions of authority view it as payback time. They have been taught since college men oppressed them, despite all evidence to the contrary. Suppressing those oppressive voices is doing the world a favour. Not publishing you is a much needed rebalancing because we held back all those talented women from expressing their genuis.
I do wonder how much of the decline in reading is just this quota-driven variant on DEI where quality inevitably dips thanks to their obsessions about race and gender.
A recent psychological study once again reinforced the ancient observation that females are uninterested in universal justice or genuine equality, they are simply too easily distracted by the need to be perceived as decent or compassionate. Modern publishing seems to suffer from this too. They'll overlook tomorrow's Orwell for a disabled black lesbian and all that ensues.
Haha: Exactly. Yeah, it's a chicken vs egg thing: Did men just generally stop reading and that's why the identity novel rules the roost? Or did some men start reading less and the rest were pushed off reading by the New Idenity Novel? Or both? In other words: Was it organic or was it a concerted DEI push? Probably both.
What I have done to put the fear of GOD in any organizations that champions DEI, the ones that receive any money from the US government, is threaten them with turning them into the big bad conservative government that is obliterating any DEI.
As a white man writing a work of fiction about men, and having been rebuked by more than 100 agents already, I do understand a few of your points. I am writing what I hope is serious literature, and while it does contain politics, it serves a purpose. A few thoughts:
1.) Agents are profoundly slammed. I heard recently from an agent that they receive 300-600+ queries per week. Per week! They usually have two interns skimming through the slush pile and reject 99% of them. They don't make it past the first paragraph anymore.
2.) Sadly, men statistically aren't reading anymore. I know you mentioned this. However, this isn't agents' faults. It doesn't help that they're primarily pushing works by certain groups, but the male readership regression did start happening before this current creative market. It's reactive. They want money fast. Hell, men aren't even reading Hemingway or McCarthy anymore. One thing we can do is start encouraging men to fuckin read more!
3.) We live in one of the curls of the epoch. Agents and publishers don't actually care about representation (I'm sure some do but many don't) and Black and LGBTQIA+ sells. I believe John Oliver made a joke about how "if Apple knew they could sell more phones under fascism, they would be for it 100%" and it's true of all things!
Anyways, good stuff and I think you're asking the right kind of questions.
Thanks for reading and commenting. Definitely true about agents being slammed. I interned for an agent for nine months years ago and saw it from the inside. Very busy. I think you're right that they judge based off openings. But I think it's also because of this that they may cut corners by using identity markers versus strong writing sometimes. There's just so much competition. It's true that fewer people are reading in general, and especially men. And yeah: That trend started before this past decade of identity obsession. But: I still think if more quality lit novels by men about men without the progressive identity stuff were published...we might get more men reading. As far as contemporary fiction: What's the draw for the average man right now? Our stories aren't being told. My point in the essay about money is this: The vast majority of lit novels today make very little to no money. Most debut novelists make little or even no advance today. Agents aren't in the industry to make money. There's very little money in publishing especially for new agents. The big money-makers are maybe 1-2% of the market. Ergo: There's no real risk in trying new kinds of books...except prestige/reuptational risk. That's what a few brave agents need to break through, I think.
I think we're both totally on the same page overall. There's a huuuuge reason why, if I self-publish, my marketing strategy is "this is a book for men AND women, which is about men—and how yes, we can be evil, but also very good." We'll see!
Don't hate me too much, Mike, but I submitted my novel to Random House under the alphabet soup umbrella. But I'm not a gay writer-I'm a writer who happens to be a gay, and a real masculine white guy, to boot. Anyway I probably don't have a prayer in hell, since this is how my query reads:
To the editors:
I am a sixty year old gay man, and I have written a novel. Please consider it for publication. I thinks it's a very topical book for the times we are currently living through- it's about the white working class in America, the half of the country that voted for Trump. But not the dysfunctional white working class from Hillbilly Elegy. Let's call it the functional white working class, the kind that pay the mortgage, stay married, have kids, go to soccer games. The ones who don't have careers, but jobs.
Writing it, I drew on my own considerable life experience: I have worked as a UPS driver, cable vision lineman, supermarket stock boy, deli clerk, waiter at the busiest restaurant in the world at the time, Tavern on the Green, NYPD cop, and for the last twenty years, as a psychiatric RN in a very busy Emergency Room. Suffice to say, I have a lot of stories to tell.
The book is about a married Italian American couple who are narrating the story of their life together over fifty-odd years: from falling in love as teenagers, getting married, having kids, working. The wife is an RN and the husband is a cop, and their voices alternate in telling the story. And this began as sort of a literary device, something that would allow me to unlock so many of the unforgettable experiences I have had in my working like, such as being on the scene of an active police shooting, or saving the life of a psychotic eighteen year old girl with ECT. A device, that is, until my two characters, as I wrote the book over twelve years, began to breathe life and walk around the room. But I guess that kinda happens, huh? (and in case you are wondering where the whole LGBTQ theme comes in, the third major character, the husbands patrol partner, is based on myself, and drawn pretty much from life-a closeted gay alcoholic cop who is gradually losing his mind-I got better, though).
Trigger warning one: there is a lot of racist language in this book. It's no secret many cops are racist-I depicted this accurately, based on my experiences.
Trigger warning two: there is also a lot of Catholicism in the book. I even ask some of those old Russian-novel questions nobody ever asks anymore in a work of 'serious' fiction: Does God exist? Does evil exist? Why is there suffering in the world? And I didn't plan this, I didn't sit down to write a novel with religious and existential themes. But it's there, just the same. Pitch it as: The Sopranos meet Dostoevsky!
Then I give my workin titles and current title and my contact info, plus three excerpts: a radio call where the husband and the gay partner find a girl stabbed to death by her own father, then the wife's experience as an RN on a challenging MICA unit (mentally-ill-chemically-addicted), then a short section of the husbands initiation by the patrol cops in the brutal Bedford Stuyvesant precinct as a rookie back in the early eighties.
Too bad they'll never know they have a smoking-hot property on their hands. Ah well, I already know a hundred years after my death, my book will be taught in universities. Too bad publishers don't know.
Hey: If you got it, use it!! Haha. I love that Catholicism is given a trigger warning. Sounds like an intriguing read. Have you seen the film American Fiction?
Nah I just watch old movies, book lectures, and Judge Judy, but I will check out American Fiction on your say so, thanks. And I did get an automatic reply from Random House that they received my email, but that unless they were considering it, I wouldn't hear anything else, so we shall see.
https://brutusmac.substack.com/p/female-dominant?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=post%20viewer
"Then again, reading some newer novels I can’t help think, Really?"
Ooo sassy and spicy Michael.
But I wholeheartedly agree. Have never tried to be professionally published, but I'll pick up a book in the store, flip to a random page, and read a few paragraphs, and i consistently think, "how did this get published?" So much of the fiction, bother for general consumption and of literary quality, is just...awful. Something something something about perverse incentives in the marketplace has now lead us where we are.
Sigh. At least we tiny authors have a sense of humor and know how to entertain ourselves.
Well said! Haha. Yeah, there's a lot of bad stuff out there today. But I guess it's sort of part of a bigger, broader problem. Look at movies today, for example. Occasionally some good ones make it through. The indies have some good ones. (Nomadland, for example, I liked.) But I'd argue that 95-98% of mainstream movies being put out today are pretty terrible. I think with identity obsession, AI and the current polarized culture this is just the way it is now. Which brings us back to Substack. DIY, baby!!
I'm a white, heterosexual, conservative, Christian man writing literary fiction and poetry, so I think I have you beat regarding strikes against me. Still I persist, because I am a writer. It's what I do. Four books on Amazon, all self-published. Many short works published in literary magazines. Two unpublished novels sitting in the drawer waiting for the lucky agent to request them (hundreds of rejections already received). My current project is a collection of linked stories. I'm not chasing the idol of recognition. Gave up on that a while ago. I love writing. I love the process of writing. I love the craft of writing. Read about me in my series of essays about why I write...
https://rajacoby.substack.com/p/why-i-write?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=l8m9d
I'm with you, man. I do it because I love it, too, otherwise why do it? And yes: White straight, Christian AND Conservative? In today's world? Fogetabout it :) Thanks for commenting and reading. Appreciate it. You are not alone.
The new band of brothers.
Yes.
I sold out to reality in my publishing, book writing life. The industry is controlled by women. Of that there is NO doubt. So....all, or most, of my characters in my stories are women. And ALL of these women have no anxiety and are positive, intelligent people. Sorry guys, have to go with the women. Macho is out unless it is female.
In 1998 I tried to get a novel agented. I’d say at least fifty percent of the agents I queried were men, most middle aged by my guess. In 2024 I tried to get a novel agented. I’d say only five percent were men, few above the age of thirty-five. The rest were younger women who were all wish-listing BIPOC and LGBTQIA2S+ “voices.” Often coded as “alternative voices.” Most lived in Brooklyn and had very special lifestyles that included cozying up with a dog or cat, a chai and a page-turner. The stuff they had sold was total pap and almost entirely authored by women. It is comical how hopeless the traditional publishing scene is now, sour grapes as it may sound. The gateway is absurdly narrow. I am positive that the future of literature will be DIY, small press and independent channels. Literature will bifurcate into the identity pap that pays off student debts and an NY lifestyle and the original voices of the underground. The latter will be influential but not widely read, just as the most influential music is never played on the radio.
Music to my ears. I agree completely. And so true! I call it The Identity Novel. We on Substack and other platforms (some as yet uncreated) will do the DIY road and eventually we'll be like The Original Punks circa 1976. We fight the good and holy fight.
one piece of punctuation you used a lot in this piece: a colon
Underrated comment of the year thus far.
I'm currently preparing to query my finished first novel to agents and have absolutely zero expectations, but weirdly, this piece didn't make me depressed, it got me motivated. Sure, I'm a 20-something white Jewish male (the horror!!!!), but I've written a book that I'm incredibly proud of and think that anyone, male or female, could enjoy! I've also found a way to incorporate some trendy buzzwords into the query letter (mental health, loneliness, tech addiction, etc) to frame it in a way that will appeal to the most common demographics of agents.
Who knows, I'll probably change my tune once I've gotten a couple dozen rejections, but for now, thanks for writing this piece and lighting a fire under my ass to get serious about putting it out there.
Awesome, Zeke! I love it. Glad to have helped. Who knows: Maybe you'll be one of those outliers who gets an agent first try! You never know. And yes: Male Jew? 20s? "The horror; the horror"; lol. Thanks for reading and commenting, I appreciate it :)
There's one more component that has contributed to a narrow view of literature. These young agents grew up in a failing educational system, one that abandoned phonics, lowered thresholds of passing grades, closed libraries, and surrendered critical thinking to ChatGTP. No doubt the agents were among the handful of students who actually enjoyed reading, maybe became English lit majors, but they were doomed from the start. If we want to elevate the culture in terms of producing great lit and more of it, we are going to have to return to the "blackboard" and teach kids to understand, seek, and produce good writing.
You won't get any arguments from me on that! Agree totally. I'm hoping (probably unrealistically) there might be a trend away from AI on some minority but large-enough scale at some point which will somehow bring us back to The Basics. Simplicity, depth, raw truth, emotion, big ideas, etc. But yes: Your point is well taken that The Culture as a whole has been corrupted and it started, probably, in the 1960s and then got a huge leap with my gen, Millennials. Younger Millennials (I was born in 1982 and am 43, one of the "Elder Millennials") and Gen Z, as you said, didn't have a chance.
I agree with pretty much everything here. Where I differ a bit is that I think the industry is looking for people sympathetic to its social agenda, and this tends to be mostly women; I don't believe the industry is particularly welcoming to women either. That’s a stereotype often thrown around as if women were some monolith and all think, act, and write the same way. As if we all read the same shit. I definitely don't, and my book didn't win friends or influence anyone in the industry. Why? I was told my female lead didn't pass the Bechdel test. Who gives a shit about Bechdel or her inane test? Agents do, that's who. They also said my MC is a misogynist because she's critical of other women; I guess that's a crime? She respects men—also a crime. Actually, she directly engages in the “patriarchy” to her advantage. Can't have that. So, this is a sampling of what you’re up against if you’re not a team player. Yes, even if you’re a woman. Maybe especially because women are automatically assumed to be part of the clique until we prove otherwise—then the knives come out.
Why authors would be encouraged to write for an ever-narrower audience is beyond me. I've never tried to write for either sex or any particular demographic. Joseph Conrad is one of my favorite authors, and while his stories are largely about men, I've never felt that they're FOR men or exclude me in any way; they're universally human stories. For me, that's what makes great literature. So much of what's written today is deliberately exclusive.
Agents are a big part of the problem, and I don't see that changing any time soon. But they’re also just giving the industry what it wants. Ultimately, they don’t take on books they don't WANT TO sell, and it’s the publishers who decide what to invest in. Publishers are pushing this agenda just as hard as anyone. They’ve decided it’s their moral right to remake the culture in their righteous image, from the top down (they see themselves at the top, of course). But that’s not how culture works. It’s organic, and it evolves from all directions. That a bunch of elite fucks in bizarro world wants to impose some sociopolitical agenda on the masses via their victimhood fetish literature has become a nonstarter among the masses, who have collectively decided to just literally not buy it. Maybe that was the plan all along: to make literature the exclusive domain of the elites, like priests speaking Latin to the lowly peasants. But it’s a cultural and artistic dead end. The real culture continues and evolves without them.
Yeah. You're not alone. They forget that literature reflects reality on some crucial level and reality is often unkind, gritty, unfair and even brutal, not to mention hopelessly complex. Liza Libes wrote a similar thing about submitting her novel; one agent criticized her male characters as being "too moral," that kind of thing. Like all men are supposed to be portrayed as shitty and terrible. I agree with you re women, which is why I said it's really everyone who gets rejected, regardless race/gender etc...if they have the "wrong" political views/agenda. Thanks for the read and comment. Appreciate :)
Well, being a Hispanic male, my incel-inspired novel gets rejected flat out. So, as an "underrepresented" writer, I must also write along what's ideologically-aligned in the publishing industry.
I believe it! For sure.
Yeah it’s bad now but IMO this will play itself out.
I recently randomly picked up the short story collection Magical Thinking by Augusten Burroughs (2004). What a joy! So poignant and funny, so non-political. And not so long ago this had mass appeal. When I searched around for his early reviews, they were truly amazing. One blurb said that due to his chaotic childhood, being gay was “the least of his problems.” Another points to his fans in the recovery community. Another even mentions “American entitlement,” (a positive thing?) as an equalizing force in his work, saying, “Augusten makes everybody – gay, straight, bi, transgendered, or somewhere in-between – feel better about themselves and the country they live in.”
Old reviews, but I find this encouraging. A beloved author with a great sense of style, who’s not in a niche, who proves the axiom-- the cream always rises to the top. I may be naïve, but this still seems true. Maybe staying light on our feet until then, resisting bitterness, is what’s needed most.
Let's hope you're right!! Pendulum swings. I do see that slowly happening. Substack is a symptom of that.
My first effort, 1988, was too long and slice-of-life for an unpublished author.
Write short stories; get known. I wrote about 20. No one cared. I parked the bus focused on creating a paying business. Took time off in the early 90s and lived in the woods and wrote a novel. Never tried to publish it. Went back to work in a city.
2005 I moved back to the woods. Did not write or want to feel the pain of rejection. Five years later I could not stop myself. I've written three novels, several novellas. Nothing took off on Amazon. Went wide. Even less. Now, rebranding and leaning on Amazon with a more focused marketing effort. I'm still a slice-of-life writer.
Realizing much of my fiction fits more in the noir, darker side, that's my move.
Absolutely, the only male person I know who still reads is one of my sons. All his friends listen to audiobooks. While I am putting my ebooks up and I am doing audiobooks also.
To end this diatribe. Think about audiobooks as a way to connect to the males out there.
I love audiobooks actually. All of my novels are on Audible as well as paperback. I also read and love physical books. I relate to your journey in many ways.
Women RULE the literary/book world. Period. You are right. And they don't care about any old white guy. This is about retribution and we see what is going on here. What needs to happen---tough love--- the book business needs to implode.
My wife, who reads 10 times more than I do, has not purchased a book in years. I honestly don't not know how the book business survives. It must be that the business survives with one big sellers carrying the rest of the other books that don't make money. Keep up the good fight, brother.
That's exactly right: It's the top 1-2% of blockbuster hits that float the rest which mostly fail and sell little.
There have been many off the cuff, on mic, comments to that effect. Many of the ladies now in positions of authority view it as payback time. They have been taught since college men oppressed them, despite all evidence to the contrary. Suppressing those oppressive voices is doing the world a favour. Not publishing you is a much needed rebalancing because we held back all those talented women from expressing their genuis.
I do wonder how much of the decline in reading is just this quota-driven variant on DEI where quality inevitably dips thanks to their obsessions about race and gender.
A recent psychological study once again reinforced the ancient observation that females are uninterested in universal justice or genuine equality, they are simply too easily distracted by the need to be perceived as decent or compassionate. Modern publishing seems to suffer from this too. They'll overlook tomorrow's Orwell for a disabled black lesbian and all that ensues.
Haha: Exactly. Yeah, it's a chicken vs egg thing: Did men just generally stop reading and that's why the identity novel rules the roost? Or did some men start reading less and the rest were pushed off reading by the New Idenity Novel? Or both? In other words: Was it organic or was it a concerted DEI push? Probably both.
What I have done to put the fear of GOD in any organizations that champions DEI, the ones that receive any money from the US government, is threaten them with turning them into the big bad conservative government that is obliterating any DEI.
As a white man writing a work of fiction about men, and having been rebuked by more than 100 agents already, I do understand a few of your points. I am writing what I hope is serious literature, and while it does contain politics, it serves a purpose. A few thoughts:
1.) Agents are profoundly slammed. I heard recently from an agent that they receive 300-600+ queries per week. Per week! They usually have two interns skimming through the slush pile and reject 99% of them. They don't make it past the first paragraph anymore.
2.) Sadly, men statistically aren't reading anymore. I know you mentioned this. However, this isn't agents' faults. It doesn't help that they're primarily pushing works by certain groups, but the male readership regression did start happening before this current creative market. It's reactive. They want money fast. Hell, men aren't even reading Hemingway or McCarthy anymore. One thing we can do is start encouraging men to fuckin read more!
3.) We live in one of the curls of the epoch. Agents and publishers don't actually care about representation (I'm sure some do but many don't) and Black and LGBTQIA+ sells. I believe John Oliver made a joke about how "if Apple knew they could sell more phones under fascism, they would be for it 100%" and it's true of all things!
Anyways, good stuff and I think you're asking the right kind of questions.
Thanks for reading and commenting. Definitely true about agents being slammed. I interned for an agent for nine months years ago and saw it from the inside. Very busy. I think you're right that they judge based off openings. But I think it's also because of this that they may cut corners by using identity markers versus strong writing sometimes. There's just so much competition. It's true that fewer people are reading in general, and especially men. And yeah: That trend started before this past decade of identity obsession. But: I still think if more quality lit novels by men about men without the progressive identity stuff were published...we might get more men reading. As far as contemporary fiction: What's the draw for the average man right now? Our stories aren't being told. My point in the essay about money is this: The vast majority of lit novels today make very little to no money. Most debut novelists make little or even no advance today. Agents aren't in the industry to make money. There's very little money in publishing especially for new agents. The big money-makers are maybe 1-2% of the market. Ergo: There's no real risk in trying new kinds of books...except prestige/reuptational risk. That's what a few brave agents need to break through, I think.
I think we're both totally on the same page overall. There's a huuuuge reason why, if I self-publish, my marketing strategy is "this is a book for men AND women, which is about men—and how yes, we can be evil, but also very good." We'll see!
Write ho!!
Don't hate me too much, Mike, but I submitted my novel to Random House under the alphabet soup umbrella. But I'm not a gay writer-I'm a writer who happens to be a gay, and a real masculine white guy, to boot. Anyway I probably don't have a prayer in hell, since this is how my query reads:
To the editors:
I am a sixty year old gay man, and I have written a novel. Please consider it for publication. I thinks it's a very topical book for the times we are currently living through- it's about the white working class in America, the half of the country that voted for Trump. But not the dysfunctional white working class from Hillbilly Elegy. Let's call it the functional white working class, the kind that pay the mortgage, stay married, have kids, go to soccer games. The ones who don't have careers, but jobs.
Writing it, I drew on my own considerable life experience: I have worked as a UPS driver, cable vision lineman, supermarket stock boy, deli clerk, waiter at the busiest restaurant in the world at the time, Tavern on the Green, NYPD cop, and for the last twenty years, as a psychiatric RN in a very busy Emergency Room. Suffice to say, I have a lot of stories to tell.
The book is about a married Italian American couple who are narrating the story of their life together over fifty-odd years: from falling in love as teenagers, getting married, having kids, working. The wife is an RN and the husband is a cop, and their voices alternate in telling the story. And this began as sort of a literary device, something that would allow me to unlock so many of the unforgettable experiences I have had in my working like, such as being on the scene of an active police shooting, or saving the life of a psychotic eighteen year old girl with ECT. A device, that is, until my two characters, as I wrote the book over twelve years, began to breathe life and walk around the room. But I guess that kinda happens, huh? (and in case you are wondering where the whole LGBTQ theme comes in, the third major character, the husbands patrol partner, is based on myself, and drawn pretty much from life-a closeted gay alcoholic cop who is gradually losing his mind-I got better, though).
Trigger warning one: there is a lot of racist language in this book. It's no secret many cops are racist-I depicted this accurately, based on my experiences.
Trigger warning two: there is also a lot of Catholicism in the book. I even ask some of those old Russian-novel questions nobody ever asks anymore in a work of 'serious' fiction: Does God exist? Does evil exist? Why is there suffering in the world? And I didn't plan this, I didn't sit down to write a novel with religious and existential themes. But it's there, just the same. Pitch it as: The Sopranos meet Dostoevsky!
Then I give my workin titles and current title and my contact info, plus three excerpts: a radio call where the husband and the gay partner find a girl stabbed to death by her own father, then the wife's experience as an RN on a challenging MICA unit (mentally-ill-chemically-addicted), then a short section of the husbands initiation by the patrol cops in the brutal Bedford Stuyvesant precinct as a rookie back in the early eighties.
Too bad they'll never know they have a smoking-hot property on their hands. Ah well, I already know a hundred years after my death, my book will be taught in universities. Too bad publishers don't know.
Hey: If you got it, use it!! Haha. I love that Catholicism is given a trigger warning. Sounds like an intriguing read. Have you seen the film American Fiction?
Nah I just watch old movies, book lectures, and Judge Judy, but I will check out American Fiction on your say so, thanks. And I did get an automatic reply from Random House that they received my email, but that unless they were considering it, I wouldn't hear anything else, so we shall see.