Really enjoyed this post, Naomi. As always, I appreciate the blend of personal narrative and critical analysis. I agree with a lot of what you say here about the strengths and limitations of recent works on the publishing industry and literary institutions more broadly. I haven't yet read McGrath's book, but I'm looking forward to doing so as soon as it's released.
The one qualification I'd make about your assessment of the sociology of literature is that the works you cite are almost all from academics associated with one scholarly group: Post45. Those authors have a very specific methodology, which tends to prioritize the study of single institutions (publishing, creative writing, etc.) over the complex of "interlocking institutions" that, as you rightly note, combine to produce literature as we know it today. I agree with you that McGurl's The Program Era and Sinykin's Big Fiction are important contemporary works that are well worth reading. But I also worry that focusing on such a small group of recent academic works that share key methodological premises risks giving us a very narrow portrait of what the sociology of literature looks like across the academy. This is as true of the critics (i.e. Lorentzen) as the proponents of the new sociology. In my eyes, it's like taking what one conglomerate publisher like Penguin has done over the past two decades and assuming it's representative of publishing as a whole.
I don't mean this to take away from your really insightful reading of those recent works. But I do see an increasing trend on lit stack of limiting discussions of the sociology of literature to a handful of folks in the Post45 group, and I hope these discussions will eventually broaden to include others working in the field these days. My own canon would include the three major sociologists of the book in the post-Bourdieuian tradition (Gisèle Sapiro, John Thompson, and Pascale Casanova) as well as literary scholars such as Simone Murray, Claire Spires, Lee Konstantinou, Sarah Brouillette, Günter Leypoldt, and my colleague Andrew Goldstone. To my mind, Sapiro, Konstantinou, and Brouillette are particularly good on the issues of prestige you raise in the post.
Finally, fwiw, I respect that you divulged that you and McGrath share an agent. In a relatively small cultural world, these kinds of connections are inevitable, and I think the best approach is to be transparent, as you are.
Are there standout books from the other traditions that I should read? I think the Post45 group makes an effort to write in a way that’s accessible to a general audience, so it’s easier to approach their work. But am definitely interested in a broader picture :)
Yes! John Thompson's Merchants of Culture and Book Wars are both foundational books and relatively accessible. He is a trained sociologist, so these books rely heavily on interviews with industry folks. I'd also recommend Sapiro's The Sociology of Literature, Casanova's The World Republic of Letters, Brouillette's Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace. Bourdieu's The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field is very jargon-heavy, but remains the book that launched a thousand literary sociology theses. I'd also check out Lee Konstaninou's essay on the sociology of lit in The Chronicle from a few years ago (https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-sociology-of-literature-comes-of-age). If I think of others, I'll add them here!
I would enthusiastically also recommend Clayton Childress's Under the Cover. (It influenced my own book on The Last Samurai.) I'm rereading it now for something else I'm writing on Everett's James, and am reminded it's exceptionally well-written and a very good complement to Laura's book.
Definitely second Merchants of Culture, especially because you, Naomi, mentioned your interest in tracking the structural changes in the publishing industry since the mid-20th century.
I'll second everything Jeff's saying here. (Except Evan Brier's excellent Novel Competition is not a Post45 book, it was published with Iowa, and as far as I know he's never been closely linked with Post45 except belatedly publishing in the journal.) Simone Murray, who Jeff mentions, wrote an important book, The Digital Literary Sphere. Brouillette has an excellent book you'll both want to read forthcoming from Duke, Content Machines, on internet platforms and fiction
Sorry, I accept the amendment, my shorthand was partially to indicate that I also would include some other books by Post45 folks. (And thanks for adding the new Brouillette—agree that it will be very close to Naomi’s interests)
I would, then, also add Jordan Carroll’s really truly marvelous Reading the Obscene, published by Post45’s book series at Stanford, which is fantastic on mid-20C editors, readerships, and obscenity law
Yes, me too. Also Lightspeed is a nice get. Rare to have a come-up in like three different publishing ecosystems simultaneously (University-press cross-over nonfiction, tradpub fiction, and sf): a unique path!
This was illuminating in parts and yet in some ways --inevitably--a partial view of the literary fiction segment of the publishing industry.
I don't speak here as an insider, but as someone who is married to an insider, a former assistant editor at Jonathan Cape in London who later moved over to the business side of publishing at FSG --or more accurately Hachette but with close links to editors at the imprint on marketing and commercial matters--in New York, and then left the industry in 2017 in no small part because of the gatekeeping, filtering, call it what you want, that NK writes about here.
In fact, my wife would be even more excoriating in her opinions: she would say it was the "insufferable conservatism" and the "distressing Incestuousness" (her words) of the literary fiction scene in New York that made her leave the industry for good.
In any case, I do have a personal interest too. I read (and listen) to a lot of literary fiction these days and follow releases quite closely. So to begin with, I found the use of the term "sociology of literature" to be pretentious and obfuscating, but as I read on the meaning became clearer. As a one-time management consultant myself, I kept thinking of it as "industry structure" and "vendor agreements". The product here of course, is not a beverage like Coke but a cultural product of high cultural prestige, literary fiction. The vendors to the publishing houses are the literary agents.
The chain begins with the author. And the production system has some important appendages (MFA programs), which are increasing in importance, sadly, resulting in a professionalization of literature, thus creating a standardization and homogenization of writing, especially to be found in the literary fiction that originates in the US. The increasing importance of small-press literary magazines as a potential catchment area was new to me but I wonder if they too are another expression of the sterile banality of the MFA programs.
The bits that Naomi did not really touch on are the critics or reviewers in high-quality media such as the New York Times and the Guardian (and till recently WaPo). Weeklies in the US like the New Yorker and those in Britain, such as the New Statesman are also influential. And then you have the festivals and prizes. Put all these together and you finally get something like an ecosystem.
I mention all this, not because I wanted NK to write an even longer piece but because if she wants us to really understand the ecosystem we have to see how enmeshed these different elements are in each other. Andrew Wylie or Chris Parris-Lamb (of Gernert) are not just close to the top editors at the literary imprints at Penguin Random House or Hachette or HarperCollins but they are in contact with fiction reviewers in the top print media organizations, even as editors from Knopf or Chatto are also in constant contact with them. The leading MFA programs, I am told, are cultivating their own ties with agents and editors, to make it even more entwined. It is at least good to know though that the Booker Prize does not have a fixed judging panel, whereas the Pulitzer's unchanging Prize Board is an invitation to the cronyism that is the mark of contemporary American literary fiction.
Publishing a book can be really hard. That is why Amazon has direct Kindle publishing as an alternative. Now that is just like a drip of water into an ocean. I always wanted to work in publishing on the inside. I reviewed books for a long time and never got noticed.
Good writing can only be read if you know where to find it. I was an English major and know the basics of writing , good writing in science is harder. Fiction is judged narrowly. I am optimistic with a large splash of pessimistic. I have not sold anything except for $5 and medium has yet to pay me.
Marketing is hard for some people and comes naturally to others.
There is good writing and there is luck. Luck comes to those who never give up like so many authors. They know people, if you write something good, you are expected to write something else good. Deadlines and pressures can lead to drinking. There are walss of rejection letters.
Octavia Butler was like this. I am writing to survive my layoff and I have some money. Life can hard for an author.
Octavia Butler, I believe, had her breakout through meeting Harlan Ellison. She hustled for that meeting, too. If she is an inspiration for you, and you are serious about wanting to get an audience for your work, then I would try and hustle and find a gatekeeper to let you in.
"I am writing to survive my layoff and I have some money. Life can hard for an author."
Ayup. I was just writing a note to Michael Swanwick, about the importance of having a spouse/S.O. with a good job with good insurance. A concern that goes far beyond writers, to any freelance professional starting a new venture....
The reasons literary agents are disliked are simpler than that.
(1) There's a mismatch between what they say they do and what they actually do. They say they trudge through slush piles to find the most promising and talented authors. In reality, they are looking for quick flips and compliant personalities. They don't read; if you get a biased, dismissive skim, you're expected to treat it as a major favor. They're product developers and risk managers. There's nothing evil about this. It's how corporate products are made. But it has nothing to do with literature. Literature is something whose existence agents and publishers use to sustain the undeserved trust that readers still place in them and their tastes; they therefore benefit from literature, but they are of no benefit to literature, and have not been for at least 25 years.
(2) Publishing's first respectability crisis in the 1920s—before what we call "traditional publishing" existed, the process of making and distributing books was messy and expensive, and most authors could not secure patronage, and therefore ended up in debt to their printers—is why what is now called "traditional publishing" exists at all. The regime in which "money flows to the author" (lol) was invented because what existed before it was so predatory and hostile. Six or seven decades later, publishing's second respectability crisis—slush piles grew; authors couldn't get read by editors and were forced to rely on vanity presses, a bad look for everyone involved—forced editors not only to tolerate agents, but make them the first-line gatekeepers. We're now in the third respectability crisis, in which getting read by an agent is even more unlikely than getting read by an editor was in the 1990s; publishing is trying to compensate for its own necrotic failure by cherry-picking indie successes and, through doing so, saying it's championing new voices when what it is actually doing is putting the financial risks on the author.
As for agents, they claim to do a job they fail to do, and probably can't do. I wouldn't be able to spot the best book out of 300 unsolicited submissions. It would take me thousands of hours, and my eyes would glaze over. However, unlike them, I don't make that claim. If I could stand in front of millions of people and claim my tastes are God's own, the way traditional publishing does, I still wouldn't, because it wouldn't be honest.
The mismatch between what is claimed and what is real infuriates people.
It seems like the argument of the book under review here is that some agents do care about taste. It also argues that these agents got into the game by championing unlikely successes. This seems to be similar to how being an A&R for a record label works: if you can find one "hit" or one "culturally relevant" artist, you can make your career.
Can you tell me more about publishing's first respectability crisis? One of the things I study is publishing in the 1800s, and it seems like many authors were paid, and that big publishers, Charles Scribner, Henry Holt, existed.
Arguing about whether agents care about taste is like arguing about an exterminator's favorite color or religious beliefs. It's irrelevant to the job they actually do. In 2026, they're in the business of scoring quick hits that can be pitched in four minutes over lunch. And if the editor says no at the end of that four minutes, they don't "champion" an author and risk losing that connection by insisting the editor read; they move on and pitch someone else. They're part of an assembly line.
It's not a thing to be pissed off about; publishing is an ugly business, but it's far, far, far less evil than what Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and the oil/gas giants (not to mention the MIC) get up to. We only hate it so much because we love literature; otherwise, the attitude toward this slowly dying industry would be pity, not anathema.
Authors could make good money in the 1800s, if they played the commercial game well, but there were also authors like Poe who died broke. You had to run an entire business: raise funds for your printing costs, find a printer who'd fix mistakes rather than introduce new ones, hand-sell the books. The one-stop-shop model in which you get your funding, editing, printing, marketing, and distribution from the same firm—the catch being that it's extremely hard to get a deal, since you're applying for a financial grant that must come before anything else—is relatively new; it's about 100 years old, and it came into existence because the old model bankrupted so many writers.
In the first respectability crisis, this model where "money flows to the author" was made, and the pay-for-print operations (when that had been the norm for centuries) were cast as "vanity presses," and the narrative was pushed that a writer with any skill would be able to get a "real publisher." And maybe it was true back then; I don't know, as I wasn't alive.
The second respectability crisis is the one that gave agents their major role. The system worked, but only because only serious writers knew that literary agents existed—it relied on an informational barrier that didn't survive the Internet. Anyone who wanted an agent just went and got one. Once everyone found out about agents, though, we ended up back at square one with the query system, which is really just an elaborate excuse for dysfunction—it's no longer an embarrassment to get wrong answers if an agent can just say "it wasn't pitched right"—and also a way to keep hopeless writers busy optimizing cover letters no one will read.
The third respectability crisis is the current one that traditional publishing probably won't survive. But self-publishing relies on a rapidly enshittifying Internet. I'm not bullish on literature's future, to be honest. The writing world is a low-trust society; traditional publishing is an active source of continuing damage, but I also don't see how the problem would fix itself organically even if TP disappeared.
Hm. I guess I still don't understand the first respectability crisis. Sometimes, to me, it seems like publishing firms in the 1800s will say things like: okay, thanks for this manuscript, we will publish it and pay you this much. More rarely, they will say: okay, we will publish this and give you a certain percentage of sales. I think Dickens publishing in America was a pioneer of this kind of deal. Finally, they may say: okay, we will publish this but you have to pay for the plates to print it. But that latter, which sounds like what you're describing, doesn't seem like the dominant mode.
So, are you saying that the predatory behaviors are more of a 20th- (and 21st-) century factor? You could be right. You seem to know more about the 19th than I do.
My understanding has always been that the 1920-90 era of traditional publishing was the historical anomaly, and that for most of our history—as is the case now, as well—writing has been an awful business to be in.
I've been looking forward to reading this book. Thanks for the coverage. For a good history of publishing up to around the '90s, you might like Al Silverman's THE TIME OF THEIR LIVES. It gave me the impression that the old-time publishers weren't as much interested in literary novels as collecting literary authors they could show off at their cocktail parties.
Also, your title is deceptive. I thought it was going to be about the jerks in publishing, such as the professionally successful, but personally awful editor who was banned from going to another floor so the people on it wouldn't have to deal with her anymore.
I appreciate this essay. I learned so much from this. I am querying and told by some it’s literary and others it’s upmarket. But to further confuse, it’s a romance that I’m told to downplay by calling it a love story. 😩 Meanwhile, instead of this I wonder if I would have better luck writing short stories to get an agent to read my work.
At the meet-up, I tried to give you some constructive criticism, and I bungled it. But this piece includes an example of what I meant. In this piece, the parentheticals work like grace notes. They make the sentences' rhythms vary, without making things less clear. You're still speaking plainly, but the style is a little more 'catchy.' Maybe you have always been doing this, though, and I am just a bad reader...
I am desperate to read this book! Everything I have learned about agents (Wylie, Ellen Levine, so on) has felt like occult knowledge. It does not surprise me things are so stratified: power laws strike again!
I don't recall where I read it, but there was an interesting profile of Sally Rooney which described her quest to get Wylie, iirc, to represent her. Zadie Smith has described Rooney as, above anything else, "steely." Smith also said this was the most important trait to have as a writer. With only 25 gatekeepers to prestige, that makes sense.
On The Program Era: I didn't share your sense that McGurl thinks MFA fiction is bad, or homogenizing. I think he wrote the book to refute this assumption. I think he is ambivalent. He ends the book, if I remember correctly, with a question: "how can we not be grateful?"
If you haven't, I would recommend After the Program Era. It is an edited volume, responding to the Program Era. There is a great essay about the job market for MFAs by Julianna Spahr, and an interesting look about the Gordon Lish school of fiction.
No worries! I appreciated the feedback, and now it’s nice to put a name to the commenter :) After the Program Era really sounds up my alley! I am going to check it out
This is a great post, and I thank you for giving a name to the academic niche I defended my dissertation in but wasn’t sure how to describe—sociology of fiction is the perfect term.
Getting started on a literary agent career seems like a chicken and egg problem. You need to have a reputation to attract writers, you need writers with notable sales to have a reputation. I gather it's only a career option if you already have a reputation of some sort?
Really enjoyed this post, Naomi. As always, I appreciate the blend of personal narrative and critical analysis. I agree with a lot of what you say here about the strengths and limitations of recent works on the publishing industry and literary institutions more broadly. I haven't yet read McGrath's book, but I'm looking forward to doing so as soon as it's released.
The one qualification I'd make about your assessment of the sociology of literature is that the works you cite are almost all from academics associated with one scholarly group: Post45. Those authors have a very specific methodology, which tends to prioritize the study of single institutions (publishing, creative writing, etc.) over the complex of "interlocking institutions" that, as you rightly note, combine to produce literature as we know it today. I agree with you that McGurl's The Program Era and Sinykin's Big Fiction are important contemporary works that are well worth reading. But I also worry that focusing on such a small group of recent academic works that share key methodological premises risks giving us a very narrow portrait of what the sociology of literature looks like across the academy. This is as true of the critics (i.e. Lorentzen) as the proponents of the new sociology. In my eyes, it's like taking what one conglomerate publisher like Penguin has done over the past two decades and assuming it's representative of publishing as a whole.
I don't mean this to take away from your really insightful reading of those recent works. But I do see an increasing trend on lit stack of limiting discussions of the sociology of literature to a handful of folks in the Post45 group, and I hope these discussions will eventually broaden to include others working in the field these days. My own canon would include the three major sociologists of the book in the post-Bourdieuian tradition (Gisèle Sapiro, John Thompson, and Pascale Casanova) as well as literary scholars such as Simone Murray, Claire Spires, Lee Konstantinou, Sarah Brouillette, Günter Leypoldt, and my colleague Andrew Goldstone. To my mind, Sapiro, Konstantinou, and Brouillette are particularly good on the issues of prestige you raise in the post.
Finally, fwiw, I respect that you divulged that you and McGrath share an agent. In a relatively small cultural world, these kinds of connections are inevitable, and I think the best approach is to be transparent, as you are.
Are there standout books from the other traditions that I should read? I think the Post45 group makes an effort to write in a way that’s accessible to a general audience, so it’s easier to approach their work. But am definitely interested in a broader picture :)
Yes! John Thompson's Merchants of Culture and Book Wars are both foundational books and relatively accessible. He is a trained sociologist, so these books rely heavily on interviews with industry folks. I'd also recommend Sapiro's The Sociology of Literature, Casanova's The World Republic of Letters, Brouillette's Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace. Bourdieu's The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field is very jargon-heavy, but remains the book that launched a thousand literary sociology theses. I'd also check out Lee Konstaninou's essay on the sociology of lit in The Chronicle from a few years ago (https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-sociology-of-literature-comes-of-age). If I think of others, I'll add them here!
Excited for these recs! Maybe I will terrorize my readers with more sociology of literature.
I would enthusiastically also recommend Clayton Childress's Under the Cover. (It influenced my own book on The Last Samurai.) I'm rereading it now for something else I'm writing on Everett's James, and am reminded it's exceptionally well-written and a very good complement to Laura's book.
Seconded! Childress's book is terrific. (And he's an actual sociologist, unlike most of us.)
Do it! You’re playing a really important role here. And you have enough separation to criticize us when you disagree!
Definitely second Merchants of Culture, especially because you, Naomi, mentioned your interest in tracking the structural changes in the publishing industry since the mid-20th century.
Evan Brier's Novel Competitions (which is a Post45 book) is also very good
I'll second everything Jeff's saying here. (Except Evan Brier's excellent Novel Competition is not a Post45 book, it was published with Iowa, and as far as I know he's never been closely linked with Post45 except belatedly publishing in the journal.) Simone Murray, who Jeff mentions, wrote an important book, The Digital Literary Sphere. Brouillette has an excellent book you'll both want to read forthcoming from Duke, Content Machines, on internet platforms and fiction
Sorry, I accept the amendment, my shorthand was partially to indicate that I also would include some other books by Post45 folks. (And thanks for adding the new Brouillette—agree that it will be very close to Naomi’s interests)
I would, then, also add Jordan Carroll’s really truly marvelous Reading the Obscene, published by Post45’s book series at Stanford, which is fantastic on mid-20C editors, readerships, and obscenity law
Other great, accessible sociology of (US) literature books:
- Janice Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature
- Janice Radway, A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire
- Laura Miller, Reluctant Capitalists: Bookselling and the Culture of Consumption
- Ted Striphas, The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Control
Your essays are essential reading on Substack. I'm glad I follow you.
And here I was thinking we were all coming together to hate on sawmills.
What an incredibly comprehensive, straightforward and thoughtful summary. I appreciate your generosity--there was some heavy lifting with this post. D
Thanks!
Woo-hoo! You're on a roll, Naomi.
"E]ditors want to acquire high-prestige books. And it’s because...people love prestige."
<rimshot!>
Now, I need to go read your prize-winning essay on, of all things, Conan the Barbarian!
--
Three grad students looking for men.
Our favorite activities are:
1. Eating
2. Drinking
3. Sleeping
4. Making fun of people. [personal ad, from Tucson Weekly]
Thank you!
I loved that Valac story. Looking forward to (eventually) reading the next one!
Yes, me too. Also Lightspeed is a nice get. Rare to have a come-up in like three different publishing ecosystems simultaneously (University-press cross-over nonfiction, tradpub fiction, and sf): a unique path!
Yes! What’s great is popularity in all three can feed into the same metric (online followers) so they don’t feel quite as distinct from each other now
This was illuminating in parts and yet in some ways --inevitably--a partial view of the literary fiction segment of the publishing industry.
I don't speak here as an insider, but as someone who is married to an insider, a former assistant editor at Jonathan Cape in London who later moved over to the business side of publishing at FSG --or more accurately Hachette but with close links to editors at the imprint on marketing and commercial matters--in New York, and then left the industry in 2017 in no small part because of the gatekeeping, filtering, call it what you want, that NK writes about here.
In fact, my wife would be even more excoriating in her opinions: she would say it was the "insufferable conservatism" and the "distressing Incestuousness" (her words) of the literary fiction scene in New York that made her leave the industry for good.
In any case, I do have a personal interest too. I read (and listen) to a lot of literary fiction these days and follow releases quite closely. So to begin with, I found the use of the term "sociology of literature" to be pretentious and obfuscating, but as I read on the meaning became clearer. As a one-time management consultant myself, I kept thinking of it as "industry structure" and "vendor agreements". The product here of course, is not a beverage like Coke but a cultural product of high cultural prestige, literary fiction. The vendors to the publishing houses are the literary agents.
The chain begins with the author. And the production system has some important appendages (MFA programs), which are increasing in importance, sadly, resulting in a professionalization of literature, thus creating a standardization and homogenization of writing, especially to be found in the literary fiction that originates in the US. The increasing importance of small-press literary magazines as a potential catchment area was new to me but I wonder if they too are another expression of the sterile banality of the MFA programs.
The bits that Naomi did not really touch on are the critics or reviewers in high-quality media such as the New York Times and the Guardian (and till recently WaPo). Weeklies in the US like the New Yorker and those in Britain, such as the New Statesman are also influential. And then you have the festivals and prizes. Put all these together and you finally get something like an ecosystem.
I mention all this, not because I wanted NK to write an even longer piece but because if she wants us to really understand the ecosystem we have to see how enmeshed these different elements are in each other. Andrew Wylie or Chris Parris-Lamb (of Gernert) are not just close to the top editors at the literary imprints at Penguin Random House or Hachette or HarperCollins but they are in contact with fiction reviewers in the top print media organizations, even as editors from Knopf or Chatto are also in constant contact with them. The leading MFA programs, I am told, are cultivating their own ties with agents and editors, to make it even more entwined. It is at least good to know though that the Booker Prize does not have a fixed judging panel, whereas the Pulitzer's unchanging Prize Board is an invitation to the cronyism that is the mark of contemporary American literary fiction.
Fascinating! Thanks for your perspective
Publishing a book can be really hard. That is why Amazon has direct Kindle publishing as an alternative. Now that is just like a drip of water into an ocean. I always wanted to work in publishing on the inside. I reviewed books for a long time and never got noticed.
Good writing can only be read if you know where to find it. I was an English major and know the basics of writing , good writing in science is harder. Fiction is judged narrowly. I am optimistic with a large splash of pessimistic. I have not sold anything except for $5 and medium has yet to pay me.
Marketing is hard for some people and comes naturally to others.
There is good writing and there is luck. Luck comes to those who never give up like so many authors. They know people, if you write something good, you are expected to write something else good. Deadlines and pressures can lead to drinking. There are walss of rejection letters.
Octavia Butler was like this. I am writing to survive my layoff and I have some money. Life can hard for an author.
I feel insignficant but I still write. Someday...
Octavia Butler, I believe, had her breakout through meeting Harlan Ellison. She hustled for that meeting, too. If she is an inspiration for you, and you are serious about wanting to get an audience for your work, then I would try and hustle and find a gatekeeper to let you in.
sure do want to publish me. I guess you are offering right?
"I am writing to survive my layoff and I have some money. Life can hard for an author."
Ayup. I was just writing a note to Michael Swanwick, about the importance of having a spouse/S.O. with a good job with good insurance. A concern that goes far beyond writers, to any freelance professional starting a new venture....
The reasons literary agents are disliked are simpler than that.
(1) There's a mismatch between what they say they do and what they actually do. They say they trudge through slush piles to find the most promising and talented authors. In reality, they are looking for quick flips and compliant personalities. They don't read; if you get a biased, dismissive skim, you're expected to treat it as a major favor. They're product developers and risk managers. There's nothing evil about this. It's how corporate products are made. But it has nothing to do with literature. Literature is something whose existence agents and publishers use to sustain the undeserved trust that readers still place in them and their tastes; they therefore benefit from literature, but they are of no benefit to literature, and have not been for at least 25 years.
(2) Publishing's first respectability crisis in the 1920s—before what we call "traditional publishing" existed, the process of making and distributing books was messy and expensive, and most authors could not secure patronage, and therefore ended up in debt to their printers—is why what is now called "traditional publishing" exists at all. The regime in which "money flows to the author" (lol) was invented because what existed before it was so predatory and hostile. Six or seven decades later, publishing's second respectability crisis—slush piles grew; authors couldn't get read by editors and were forced to rely on vanity presses, a bad look for everyone involved—forced editors not only to tolerate agents, but make them the first-line gatekeepers. We're now in the third respectability crisis, in which getting read by an agent is even more unlikely than getting read by an editor was in the 1990s; publishing is trying to compensate for its own necrotic failure by cherry-picking indie successes and, through doing so, saying it's championing new voices when what it is actually doing is putting the financial risks on the author.
As for agents, they claim to do a job they fail to do, and probably can't do. I wouldn't be able to spot the best book out of 300 unsolicited submissions. It would take me thousands of hours, and my eyes would glaze over. However, unlike them, I don't make that claim. If I could stand in front of millions of people and claim my tastes are God's own, the way traditional publishing does, I still wouldn't, because it wouldn't be honest.
The mismatch between what is claimed and what is real infuriates people.
It seems like the argument of the book under review here is that some agents do care about taste. It also argues that these agents got into the game by championing unlikely successes. This seems to be similar to how being an A&R for a record label works: if you can find one "hit" or one "culturally relevant" artist, you can make your career.
Can you tell me more about publishing's first respectability crisis? One of the things I study is publishing in the 1800s, and it seems like many authors were paid, and that big publishers, Charles Scribner, Henry Holt, existed.
Arguing about whether agents care about taste is like arguing about an exterminator's favorite color or religious beliefs. It's irrelevant to the job they actually do. In 2026, they're in the business of scoring quick hits that can be pitched in four minutes over lunch. And if the editor says no at the end of that four minutes, they don't "champion" an author and risk losing that connection by insisting the editor read; they move on and pitch someone else. They're part of an assembly line.
It's not a thing to be pissed off about; publishing is an ugly business, but it's far, far, far less evil than what Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and the oil/gas giants (not to mention the MIC) get up to. We only hate it so much because we love literature; otherwise, the attitude toward this slowly dying industry would be pity, not anathema.
Authors could make good money in the 1800s, if they played the commercial game well, but there were also authors like Poe who died broke. You had to run an entire business: raise funds for your printing costs, find a printer who'd fix mistakes rather than introduce new ones, hand-sell the books. The one-stop-shop model in which you get your funding, editing, printing, marketing, and distribution from the same firm—the catch being that it's extremely hard to get a deal, since you're applying for a financial grant that must come before anything else—is relatively new; it's about 100 years old, and it came into existence because the old model bankrupted so many writers.
In the first respectability crisis, this model where "money flows to the author" was made, and the pay-for-print operations (when that had been the norm for centuries) were cast as "vanity presses," and the narrative was pushed that a writer with any skill would be able to get a "real publisher." And maybe it was true back then; I don't know, as I wasn't alive.
The second respectability crisis is the one that gave agents their major role. The system worked, but only because only serious writers knew that literary agents existed—it relied on an informational barrier that didn't survive the Internet. Anyone who wanted an agent just went and got one. Once everyone found out about agents, though, we ended up back at square one with the query system, which is really just an elaborate excuse for dysfunction—it's no longer an embarrassment to get wrong answers if an agent can just say "it wasn't pitched right"—and also a way to keep hopeless writers busy optimizing cover letters no one will read.
The third respectability crisis is the current one that traditional publishing probably won't survive. But self-publishing relies on a rapidly enshittifying Internet. I'm not bullish on literature's future, to be honest. The writing world is a low-trust society; traditional publishing is an active source of continuing damage, but I also don't see how the problem would fix itself organically even if TP disappeared.
Hm. I guess I still don't understand the first respectability crisis. Sometimes, to me, it seems like publishing firms in the 1800s will say things like: okay, thanks for this manuscript, we will publish it and pay you this much. More rarely, they will say: okay, we will publish this and give you a certain percentage of sales. I think Dickens publishing in America was a pioneer of this kind of deal. Finally, they may say: okay, we will publish this but you have to pay for the plates to print it. But that latter, which sounds like what you're describing, doesn't seem like the dominant mode.
So, are you saying that the predatory behaviors are more of a 20th- (and 21st-) century factor? You could be right. You seem to know more about the 19th than I do.
My understanding has always been that the 1920-90 era of traditional publishing was the historical anomaly, and that for most of our history—as is the case now, as well—writing has been an awful business to be in.
Yes something like that. I wouldn't have wanted to be (especially a foreign) writer in the 19th century US!
I've been looking forward to reading this book. Thanks for the coverage. For a good history of publishing up to around the '90s, you might like Al Silverman's THE TIME OF THEIR LIVES. It gave me the impression that the old-time publishers weren't as much interested in literary novels as collecting literary authors they could show off at their cocktail parties.
Also, your title is deceptive. I thought it was going to be about the jerks in publishing, such as the professionally successful, but personally awful editor who was banned from going to another floor so the people on it wouldn't have to deal with her anymore.
Thanks for the recommendation!
I appreciate this essay. I learned so much from this. I am querying and told by some it’s literary and others it’s upmarket. But to further confuse, it’s a romance that I’m told to downplay by calling it a love story. 😩 Meanwhile, instead of this I wonder if I would have better luck writing short stories to get an agent to read my work.
At the meet-up, I tried to give you some constructive criticism, and I bungled it. But this piece includes an example of what I meant. In this piece, the parentheticals work like grace notes. They make the sentences' rhythms vary, without making things less clear. You're still speaking plainly, but the style is a little more 'catchy.' Maybe you have always been doing this, though, and I am just a bad reader...
I am desperate to read this book! Everything I have learned about agents (Wylie, Ellen Levine, so on) has felt like occult knowledge. It does not surprise me things are so stratified: power laws strike again!
I don't recall where I read it, but there was an interesting profile of Sally Rooney which described her quest to get Wylie, iirc, to represent her. Zadie Smith has described Rooney as, above anything else, "steely." Smith also said this was the most important trait to have as a writer. With only 25 gatekeepers to prestige, that makes sense.
On The Program Era: I didn't share your sense that McGurl thinks MFA fiction is bad, or homogenizing. I think he wrote the book to refute this assumption. I think he is ambivalent. He ends the book, if I remember correctly, with a question: "how can we not be grateful?"
If you haven't, I would recommend After the Program Era. It is an edited volume, responding to the Program Era. There is a great essay about the job market for MFAs by Julianna Spahr, and an interesting look about the Gordon Lish school of fiction.
No worries! I appreciated the feedback, and now it’s nice to put a name to the commenter :) After the Program Era really sounds up my alley! I am going to check it out
This is a great post, and I thank you for giving a name to the academic niche I defended my dissertation in but wasn’t sure how to describe—sociology of fiction is the perfect term.
Great post, thank you!
Getting started on a literary agent career seems like a chicken and egg problem. You need to have a reputation to attract writers, you need writers with notable sales to have a reputation. I gather it's only a career option if you already have a reputation of some sort?
As a genre writer , I'd love to read some analysis related to novels outside literary fiction.