I read with mounting horror Abigail Fenton’s July piece on reading like an agent — and no matter that everything Fenton said was familiar to me, and no matter that she expressed it all intelligently and professionally.
Fenton, an agent, is talking about what it means to read as an agent, and here is some of the advice she gives:
Sifting through the slush pile is really like an intensified version of how readers choose what to buy or read: if a book doesn’t capture your attention immediately, you’re going to move on to something else. That’s why publishers spend so much time on titles, covers and descriptive copy, and why it is so incredibly important that your first page, first paragraph, first sentence, grab readers’ attention. If not… they’ll move on to something else.
Which of course is reasonable enough. The agent serves the market and the market treats books as a commodity, and therefore writers, if they’re going to survive, need to learn to treat their work as a commodity as well. So here are a few tips: “Literally make sure that every single word does count. No filler, no unnecessary description. Every word should be hooking the reader in.” And: "Lay your bait. Pose a question we’ll be desperate for the answer to.” All makes sense. What matters most of all is the packaging — the publishers are doing their part with their hard work on titles and covers and then the writer, like a wayward child, is supposed to flow into that and keep up their spot in the production line. The first page is of inexhaustible importance in convincing a reader to buy a book, and that means that the first page — really the first sentence — has to have the hook, has to keep readers reading. “This is key to reader satisfaction!” Fenton tells us. What falls by the wayside, needless to say, is a great deal — atmosphere, tone, build-up, subtlety, individuality — but no matter. Why is any of that of importance if you can’t move copies of your manuscript? And then it would be very hard to come up with any work of classic literature that fits Fenton’s test. Does Madame Bovary tell you what it’s all about in the first lines? Does Brothers Karamazov hook you right in with that multi-generational history of the Karamazov family? Does Moby Dick have hardly a wasted word?
What Fenton would tell you is that that was then and this is now, and here we get closer to the crux of the disagreement. She would say — not without reason — that we are in an economy of over-saturation and hyper-competitiveness. People like Flaubert or Dostoevsky could do alright in the rhythms of the economy of their time, but now, if you want anyone to read your book, you need to adapt to the marketplace and to be the best at it — the quickest, the most efficient, the hookiest.
And so here’s what’s been happening. Everybody trying to get published reads advice like Fenton’s, everybody sands away all their subtlety and individuality to do so, the people who adapt to it the best are the ones who are most opportunistic, the most sales-y to begin with, the ones who care about actual writing the least, and the best, most thoughtful writers either get their voices broken in the process or get marginalized, and the work that gets through has the same breathless, plugged-in style as everything else that gets through. Here is Merve Emre on the unenviable task she had of trying to judge the Pulitzers: “American publishing is not in a healthy state; the more directly its judgments are determined by the market and the mass media the sicker it will become: homogenous, inert, inexpert, cheap.” And here is Philip Graham on the cover art design that Fenton takes such pride in: “Perhaps nothing better exposed the sorry state of American publishing than the book cover style now known as The Blob: those vaguely abstract swaths of color serving as background image to the downward crawl of a book’s title printed in blocky letters, followed by the author’s name below in smaller font. When laid out on a bookstore’s New Arrivals table, they all appear incestuously related.”
Again, Fenton isn’t exactly wrong. The market condition is over-competition, and so the agents respond to that by eking out their profits with ‘optimized’ work, which is to say glorified commercial slop, and real writing is left out. Which, however, gives writers a choice. They can either play that game or try to create a new game.
And what becomes clear from insider talk like Fenton’s is how useless the industry game really is. You betray the thing you care most about in the world in order to move product that you’re extraordinarily unlikely, even if all goes well, to make any substantial money from. But if you say to yourself that what matters most to you here isn’t money but maybe prestige, maybe reputation, maybe even the integrity of what you’re doing, then the thing to do becomes to break ranks with the industry and look to somehow make it work in the new unmediated online spaces.
What’s becoming clear — although maybe it was always obvious — is that the market and real writing are entirely different forces. This is to say nothing against the market, which does a wonderful job regulating the price of eggs and milk and all kinds of other items. But the market curves are all entirely off when it comes to writing or art in general — the supply vastly outstrips the demand, because so many people are willing to put in the labor essentially for free, and that means that the market forces respond by creating conditions of artificial scarcity, hyping one ‘winner’ or another at the expense of everybody else. That’s the logical move for the agents and publishers to make, but it’s really not the logical move for writers. Writing is so intrinsically different that, now, in the atmosphere of over-saturation, may be where writers — real writers — have to forget about the market altogether. Their income is going to have come from somewhere else — which really is how it works even in the traditional market model. The prestige and reputation-growing are going to have to come from small, enthusiastic networks of the like-minded, as opposed to some review at the far end of a publicity process. And writers, in the end, are going to have to pursue a very different path to getting their books out than trying to calibrate to an agent who is trying to calibrate to a publisher who is trying to calibrate to bored consumers rummaging around on a sales table. Writers will have to just follow their star, and their truth, and write in exactly the way they want. If readers aren’t interested, then fuck them. There is a choice to be made, and we are grateful to people like Fenton for clarifying the choice. In the era of the over-competitive market, you either serve what the publisher wants or you serve what you believe in.
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