Notebook: How Do Your Novels Grow?
Behind the scenes in an industry that struggles to reward and encourage great work
I was invited to talk this week with publishing observer Jane Friedman, whose newsletter for writers I find to be so smart and informative that I quote it here all the time. The subject was “How Does Literary Talent Get Discovered Today?,” a question that fascinates me. There are so many new avenues for great writing to get to people, and yet in other ways visibility for writing seems to be contracting every day. The nub of the problem is that a proliferation of access, whether through all kinds of digital means (from TikTok to the Kindle to electronic submission portals to newsletter platforms like this one) creates a crisis of discovery: how to find what speaks to you—or what to preserve for future generations—in the great cacophony of what’s out there. When someone announces a new “platform” or delivery mechanism promising democratically to bypass gatekeepers and give writers a direct path to publication, like the “Black List” for fiction I wrote about a few months ago, it must in the end replace one circuit of gatekeeping with another (in the case of the Black List, staff editorial assistants with gig reviewers). At the post-production end, the discovery problem is represented by Amazon, which with a few big-box stores accounts for more than 80 percent of all book sales. Without a human intermediary to offer judgment or recommendation, books are sold on the crudest of identifiers—is it by or about a person I have heard of? does it visibly address a subject I already care about? Agents facing all the world’s manuscripts, now expedited by one-click electronic submission from a legion of writing-program graduates and other technology-assisted aspirants—are inevitably drawn into similarly formulaic descriptors—why notice this? how can I pitch it?—just as the publishers to whom they appeal have at their backs Amazon’s cookie-cutter incentives. Successful books are often keyed to a catchy premise that can be communicated quickly. The only alternative to biologically time-limited human appreciation is robotic differentiation: popularity-contest algorithms, or whatever other sorting mechanisms AI comes up with.
Industry professionals blame “media” for failing to cover books and expand the aperture for attention, without fully reckoning that “media” itself is facing to perhaps a more extreme degree the existential threat of capturing and maintaining audiences in a digital environment: books coverage has as much trouble getting clicks as literary novels have getting noticed on Amazon (I can say from experience). Book publicists used to spend all their time sending review copies to local newspapers and radio stations; now they labor to cultivate a constantly shifting legion of individual online influencers. Virality, like discovery in Amazon and the slush pile, tends to adhere to quick takes rather than the more complex, developed, localized response to a book that a newspaper reviewer or a local bookseller could offer. Publishers look to author’s personal “platforms” to juice sales; authors fear they must turn into full-time personal-brand tenders; and yet a number of big-ticket flameouts have demonstrated that a social media following is in itself not sufficient to sell books.
The “Big Five” corporate book publishers who have been absorbing scores of smaller and medium-sized publishers since the sixties, and now control 80 percent of the book market, are drawn by this logic—and an obligation to shareholders that did not constrain the family-owned enterprises they assimilated—into placing safe bets on books that more readily sell in large numbers. The hegemony of consolidated corporate publishing, and the ease now of publishing with digital tools, has allowed a proliferation of smaller publishers—driven by passion and idealism, mostly, unlike the once hucksterish small-time operators that the Big Five mostly gobbled up–to capture the work the large publishers increasingly leave behind. This is great! When one talks to big publishers they point to the abundance of smaller publishing as a sign that the system is healthy, and Jane’s awareness of the rich ecosystem of self- and micro-publishing also makes her a frequent optimist.
But smaller publishers labor for visibility in an Amazon-dominated marketplace, pressing the larger-smaller ones also to rely increasingly on sales metrics in acquiring books, and the smaller-smaller ones more and more often report that they are not able to break even in a distribution system that has adapted itself to scale, making the smaller publishers increasingly dependent on philanthropy, which in turn channels taste-making into what can be pitched to grant-givers and donors and away from a more granular response to the readership. One editor I spoke with argued that nonprofits also do the heavy lifting of literary discovery post-publication: they are funding the prizes and fellowships and reading series that bring attention to bold and original creative work, often produced by smaller publishers, that would otherwise be swamped out by the big-round-numbers of Amazon and big-box orders. (These nonprofits, both in book publishing and book-recognizing, would suffer mightily if the National Endowments and other government grant-making were eliminated, as successive Republican administrations have been determined to do. Until now, the NEA and the NEH have always in the end survived with bipartisan support.)
The tight margins of small publishers mean that they cannot place substantial bets on promising work and a career-long payoff as larger companies once did, hence small-press authors do not receive advances that can contribute meaningfully to their livelihood for the time they are making the work. The system creates many opportunities, but these opportunities flourish at the margins, and depend on risk-takers and people working jobs that require multiple high-level skills with scant remuneration or job security. To expect understaffed small publishers to do the work of literary discovery in a universe overwhelmed by tech-enhanced scale seems a bit wishful, recalling a term invoked by set-upon librarians during the pandemic: vocational awe, the idea that some professions are so exalted that any level of personal sacrifice can be expected of their practitioners (an expectation that seems to come to rest most often on women). The diminishing suasion of vocational awe can be seen in the growing movement to unionize the literary professions.
Writing enduring literary work and publishing it is a much more perilous business than it was thirty years ago, when medium-sized publishers were able to support both staff and writers producing books for what are now considered modest audiences. Many well-established writers now struggle to find a place on major publishers’ lists. (A question I have always wondered about: one of the [few] virtues of Amazon is that it has created—I understand, but have never seen quantified—a more robust market for “the backlist,” books published in the past with an enduring audience, which used to depend on bookstore shelf space or individual special orders to sell. Does a writer with a long career have more “value” to the publisher as a result of Amazon backlist sales?)
It is a serious risk, eyed warily by agents and editors alike, to acquire a book for too much money and saddle the author with a reputation for falling short. In the past privately owned publishers could persist with an author through several modestly selling books as their readership grew, but now highly detailed sales metrics in necessarily bottom-line-driven corporations make such investments very difficult to defend internally. Other factors are making margins even slimmer and putting downward pressure on available investment for risky work: high cost of paper and production (worsened potentially by impending tariffs); inflation-era reduced spending power by readers; library funding cuts, intensified by chillingly censorious political campaigns. Publishers have said for a while that book prices are due for an increase, which would further inhibit growing the readership.
A high advance from a major publisher guarantees an internal commitment to publicity and marketing support, but a too-high advance that does not deliver returns threatens a career. Some feel that work by formerly marginalized writers is sought-after these days by agents and editors, but major publishers lack the marketing expertise to sell these books to new and sometimes unfamiliar audiences, saddling their authors with a toxic history of low sales. Writers are baffled to hear that many publishing insiders have felt at various points over the years that “too many” books are published—they do not receive enough promotional support, publishers don’t know how to sell them in the shifting environment where social media and influencers have replaced traditional media coverage, the recurrent claims for the next-new-thing’s excellence exhaust readers and leave them cynical.
Another layer of the problem is recent shifts toward “efficiency” in corporate publishing—driven by slimming margins—that have led to layoffs and buy-outs of a generation of experienced editors, and replacement of editors in top-level management positions with executives from sales and marketing. Agents are not sure if a next generation of talent-spotters is in place; they don’t know who in the structure of corporate publishing can or will advocate for commercially risky writing. Remote work, and the legitimate challenge in recent years to old-fashioned editorial apprenticeship models that sometimes looked like servitude (vocational awe, again), have left the industry with a threadbare process for career development. What was once the work of an editor is increasingly farmed out to a “book doctor” hired by the author long before a contract to help them create the pitch and shape the book; nonfiction increasingly demands proposals of such a high level of detail that they nearly amount to having researched and written the thing long before a publisher gets involved, slimming the publishers’ eventual role to promotion and sales and marketing.
Still, new work gets published, even in the most commercial settings, and, as Jane has shown in a study for her newsletter (subscription required), contra “The Black List,” some of it comes from people who are not visibly on any sort of inside track. How do they get there? They are not, Jane shows, all people with large social media followings or a history of viral breakouts. A few people still get published based on a “blind pitch” to an agent. Most probably get noticed in writerly communities like bookstores and authors’ groups and small magazines and eventually find an influential admirer to put in a word for them. It famously took four extremely enthusiastic endorsements within publishing over many years to bring Slow Horses author Mick Herron to fame. The most common route probably begins in a prestigious MFA program, where one can be noticed by an agent, or a professor or a visiting writer who will refer them to an agent, who may spend years preparing them for the eventual pitch—but plenty of people in prestigious programs do not find successful careers publishing books (no longer a requirement for a durable MFA career).
Talking with agents and publishers and magazine editors, I found one thing that emerged from many conversations was the simple fact that people with exceptional ability tend to get noticed. Among agents, who are responsible for all “Big Five” book contracts now and most with medium-sized and prestige smaller publishers, recommendations from trusted writers are a premiere source. I was reminded of going around to galleries with a friend who was a painter, and meeting other artists along the way, and realizing that their shared ideas about new work, which they passed on to curators and critics, was kind of a coin of the realm of reputation. Many agents and editors insisted that these circles aren’t all elite or exclusive–they circulate in the prestige creative writing departments but also in conferences and the among the younger staff of publishers and magazines and booksellers, and regulars at bookstore events and writiers’ groups and other local gatherings. One magazine editor, who told me that their editors were able to read all submissions because their small submissions fee allowed them to create paid positions for readers, said he felt that they were still able to publish all the irresistible things they came across: perhaps the percentage is a near constant, though it might have been easier for less irresistible things to be published in the past. A writer who takes the time to identify literary magazines and agents who are close to their sensibility, and demonstrates that effectively, can still capture the attention of otherwise overwhelmed gatekeepers.
Unlike Jane, my work is not helping writers get published. My work is helping the world-changing work of writers of substance get read—a societal need that I think transcends the water-cooler tribulations of the publishing industry and its spreadsheets. I think writers could be thinking a little more about how to cultivate reading, and a little less about how to advance their careers. Beyond the “twitter-pitches” or viral sensations that lead to a mainstream book contract, or the star in a prestige writing department who has the resources and knows how to pull the right levers to get ahead, do we have the structures as a society to get the ideas we need before the eyes of the people who need to see them? Right now we almost do not. Increasingly the tech multipliers control the levers of power in policymaking and industry, squelching the individual and the local. We are dependent on passionate people sacrificing themselves, working within systems that punish complexity and ambition, to nourish the reading we need, and too many of us live in a profoundly denuded landscape of ideas.
Ann Kjellberg is the founding editor of Book Post. You can read her other Notebooks on publishing, writing, and the life of ideas here. She edited a small literary magazine and has worked for publishers, a bookseller, and, from 1988–2017, at The New York Review of Books.
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I read this post with interest, both as a novelist and auditor of the conversation between Ann and Jane about how literary talent gets discovered today. At points in the conversation, I kept thinking about Virginia Woolf's comment in "A Room of One's Own" that the world doesn't really care about poets and writers. Despite the fact that a book is a material production, the writer's process has been too ephemeral to nurture, hence the importance of the room and that bit of money that makes the room possible. I find comfort in Woolf's observation of the world's distinterest. Her observation resonates with what Ann and Jane termed the "secret sauce" of being found, discoverred as a writer, which is word-of-mouth, and word-of-mouth is based on craft and practice and commitment. While I cannot control agents or publishers or much else in this life, I can control the study of my craft, the frequency I practice, and the commitment that keeps me returning to the page. Has anyone ever said making literary art is easy? Many thanks to Ann and Jane!
It doesn't. Literary talent appears when it is forced forward and the publishing industry finally takes the money. This is always the case except when there is a system to nourish the writer and the editor. In the early part of the 20th century, Paris was the place. In the mid-1960s, young writers flooded back from the war and began to craft postmodernist novels.
That means that writers should just write and let society figure out that they have a societal problem that needs to be fixed.