Male and Pale is Stale: Responses to an Open Letter to the WGA 

Trouble in the Publishing Industry

After your piece on the WGA, I just wanted to share that the issues you are covering in the film industry are also pervasive in the publishing world.

I doubt this will be a surprise, but for about six years, I was in what we term the “query trenches,” where you are basically submitting a query (aka request for representation) to literary agents. To do this for fiction, it is generally expected that you will have a completed manuscript that, if the agent is interested, will request to read the full item. Now, most authors will never be able to live off their writings, and the average career is something like two books. This is because unless the publisher really believes in you or you are already famous, they tend to send your work out to die, and if it takes off, they claim credit. It is a rather vicious numbers game that most debut authors are kind of their own to find and build an audience.

Anyway, while I was going through the process, I had several agents on my first manuscript actually request the full manuscript. I got very encouraging feedback, but they all basically said, yeah, the market isn’t right for ________ but the consistent comments were they couldn’t sell a DC-based book and that a debut should have a simpler story. They all encouraged me t submit my next one to them so I took their feedback in and wrote a novel that would fit what they were asking for. When I hit them up again, they all asked for the full manuscript again and were effusive with praise for it, but they all again passed for various reasons. I got curious because the reasons again were all over the map, and most of them didn’t make sense because they tended to contradict each other’s reasons.

Two of them, however, said something along the lines of “Oh, five years ago, I would absolutely sign you.” I took this as an opportunity to do some exploratory questioning. They finally said, in a roundabout way, there is no way they could take an unknown debut white male author to an NYC publishing house and sell them on YOU. (This is kind of the mirror universe of American Fiction but is a sad reality.)

Now, the publishing world is admittedly weird, and its economics are even stranger. Most publishers are basically living off the top 1-2% of writers (anyone you see in Target or Walmart) for most of their profitability, and then some of the next 5-8% of authors cover their operating costs. Most of the rest of the 90% will, at best, break even slightly. Their advantage is they are not responsible or even really paying for the product until final production, and most of that is outsourced to freelancers. Additionally, with changes to the process, the agents have been both empowered as gatekeepers and, more importantly, from the perspective of the publishers’ first round editors that they do not have to pay for. If you want to see how bad it is, you can just search MSWL (Manuscript Wish Lists) to see what agents are calling for and then ask the reasonable question, “Who do they think is going to read this?”

“…oh five years ago I would absolutely signed you.”

Now I do not blame the agents. Most of them have two or three side jobs because they do not get paid until the author does, and often with a debut that will only be around 20-30K, which the agents get 15% of, and they likely will need to split that with their agency. So they might work with an author for 3-18 months without pay and then get $1,500 for their efforts. So they have to pick up books they can sell quickly and easily to the publishers. (These low wages for agents and many of the frontline staff in publishing also encourage activists or people with rich parents.)

In practical terms, since half of debut authors will never write a second book. Almost none of them will ever see a dime after their advance, in fact many NYT bestsellers need to maintain day jobs for their whole literary career. Therefore the publishers feel safe signing authors so that they can say they “signed _____” when they interact with their compatriots because debuts are viewed as a loss. It is this exact reason you end up with authors like Jumi Bello, who apparently sold a fiction book without actually having a manuscript and then engaged in plagiarism to complete her book and then plagiarized her apology for plagiarism. If you start to scratch the surface, you will find that, basically, publishing is even crazier than the WGA and Disney Files.

Perhaps the only advantage that aspiring authors have is that it has never been easier to go the self-publishing path. My interactions with the agents, combined with my developed understanding of the publishing world, pushed me in this direction. However, that path also has a host of challenges and difficulties; however, it at least ensures that you won’t be told to change your story for X or make sure character Y is this, even if it makes no sense. But it still comes with its own issues and challenges. For example, as an unknown indie author, I don’t even feel safe following certain accounts with my author account on social media just to avoid staying below the radar of the crazies.

Anyway, I have gone on way too long, which is a vice of being a writer.