Yeah. I spent years trying to get an agent for my debut literary punk rock YA novel. Dozens of agents read the book; one agent read it three times and sent me these glowing emails about it but then disappeared. One agent literally told me it would be hard to market a book about an upperclass WSM. Everyone's looking for 'marginalized voices,' as if there are only a couple books by Black writers, etc. Walk into any major bookstore: You'll be confronted with the opposite. I have no problem with that, but be honest and open to ALL perspectives, not just a select woke few.
Thank you so much for this, Alex. As a fellow self-publishing writer I've been waiting for a piece like this for years. I look forward to reading more of you.
Not sure if this observation is off topic, but here goes anyway: About six or seven years I decide to read aloud to my wife seven New Yorker short stories sequentially. All seven were abysmal! -truly absurd! The plot lines, characters, themes were beyond salvation. It seemed as if disjointed, incredulous, and poorly written stories were a badge of honor.
Normally, I had ignored New Yorker stories in favor of the main content of the publication, which may have had a whiff of merit in the old days. For whatever reason, I decided it was intellectually honest to give short story authors the benefit of the doubt and give their stories a try. I now realized I was right in the first place. What detritus! Their quality would have embarrassed a clever high school fiction writer.
I've since gotten sick of the woke ideology of the New Yorker and cancelled by subscription. And I do not miss their 'short stories'.
Do you know that more books with big advances and big publicity campaigns are doing poorly now than say 10 years ago? 20 years ago? I think you may be cherry-picking.
What an inspiring piece you have written; it restores my faith that all is not lost in the publishing world, that I will no longer seek older well written books by authors vetted for quality, that I will no longer be reel from the leftist fiction and non fiction populating the bookshelves of my local library. We are constantly lectured by the smug left of cheering censorship efforts however falsified. But censorship, or book “challenges” only occur after publication. Preemptive censorship, powered by sensitivity readers, leftist editors, amplified by academia and corporate interests, and ubiquitous throughout the Internet is the new way, a mugging of free thought and expression.
Thank you Alex Perez for clarifying what so many have noticed. And thank you - TFP - for being a platform that allows your mission statement to reflect your actual efforts.
"Eighteen months after Gullaba self-published, Bernard Schweizer, a former English professor, launched a brand-new publishing house in January 2023. Called Heresy Press… Also in January of this year, Chelsea Hodson, a writer who formerly taught at Bennington College in Vermont, started her own imprint—Rose Books.”
My question here is not a substance thing but a process one. How does one actually go about launching a publishing house? Or a think tank? Or anything of that sort which requires a lot of capital and paperwork? One of the difficulties that many of use who are intellectually inclined and who are simultaneously well established in their jobs, but who are not content with what is being offered in it (or in the world for that matter) and want to try and offer something different... we don't know how to offer that something else. The thought of launching something else is daunting, so much so that it might even stop most of us in our tracks.
So, what are the practical steps needed that can help someone who wants to take a shot at doing something different, do it? Starting a substack is cute and maybe worthwhile, but there is a hell of a lot more needed if you really want to institutionalize that idea. What is that more? How do you package it? What do you do to make it a real thing? I ask this particularly from the perspective of one who is not well connected.
I've written a novel involving a Native American character who in an act of love takes the fall for a crime he didn't commit. No, I'm not Native American. I'm a human being who feels some small sympathy for the human condition and therefore I feel totally entitled to write about it. Why not? That's why I subscribe to the Free Press. Sent it to an agent I know who passed it around to the Brown and Swarthmore 26-year-old lasses in his shop and most of the feedback was how--if, God forbid, this ever sees the light of day--it would have to be vetted by sensitivity readers. I'd rather have sex with a feral hog than submit anything I've written to sensitivity readers.
I'm an author who has published a book with a major imprint at a Big 5, and with another on the way—but I also enjoy writing a Substack newsletter, and am publishing a book with an independent start-up imprint next year, in addition to the traditional one. I've even looked into starting my own imprint. In other words: I've seen both sides, and I have skin in the game. Some of what is here is true to my experience; much of it feels like straw men, though, and I feel this piece is framed in too much of a binary political way to due justice to the complexity within the traditional publishing industry, as well as the challenges of independent publishing. One problem with framing this article in terms of "risk-taking" is that the new model usually involves publishers that want to pay extraordinarily low advances and give the author a much higher % of the sales; which, on the surface, is always pitched like a great thing for the author; on the flip side, it actually means that the publisher has less skin in the game, and is taking far less risk. There's something ironic about that. When I bet on a person, I really bet on them; enough so that it hurts when I'm wrong.
Excellent article. One thing worth noting is that entry-level salaries in publishing are notoriously low. (I made $14K a year as an editorial assistant at Viking 1980-82). This has had the effect, over time, of weeding out young people who didn't have help from parents, trust funds, or a willingness (in my case) to take much less than I could have gotten selling my skills in some other field. Over time, this resulted in a notably un-diverse publishing industry, with few people of color working as editors and literary agents. Why should a talented black humanities grad from the Ivy League take a pittance when so many other places, including investment banking and elite law schools, were looking to recruit? This isn't my own speculation; it's something that's been widely discussed. (The editor of my first book, Erroll McDonald, was one of the very few black trade-book editors back in the 1990s and he mentioned this relative paucity of black editors.) In the summer of 2020, the publishing industry went through a particularly wrenching version of the Come-to-Jesus moment that many sectors of the panicked American elite went through. (The film industry, prodded by the Oscars So White hashtag, did the same thing.) Things tilted hard in the direction of....well, the sort of dynamics that Perez is talking about here--dynamics led, as Perez pointed out in a celebrated/reviled interview, by white women determined to Right the Wrongs by Any Means Necessary. I'm glad to see Adam Bellow mentioned in this story. He's one of the people--and there are a few--pushing back against this Wokeness Inc. trend.
Thankfully i subscibed to Free Press today. Wrapping up a book on america's housing and homeless crisis, i figured the progressive narrative would be a issue having read articles by authors on housing in the "news" section with no intimate industry knowledge with distorted/politicized views. I wondered why publications like the NYTimes would assign staff writers to report on complex housing topics at an age when they probably still need mom and dad co-signing their first lease out of college. I wont get as discouraged now when get turned down after they realize im a white male, and 30 years experience on the topic of my book.
As with the newspaper industry, the book publishing industry has been its own undoing. And it is delightful. I look forward to seeing excellence from the small new independent houses and self-published authors.
As a traditional published and marginally successful author, Alex is right on the nose with this article. We remain publicly silent (mostly) because we have families and mortgages. However I do push back internally and if they balk, my agent reminds them in a very polite way that my name is on the cover. I write fiction to entertain, not make political statements, and word mean things. One thing I've notice since I was first published (in 2006) is that the copy editors are now going woke. They question some of my word choices and phrases. I just STET any changes, or ignore their "suggestion." I think a lot of authors do this, but I could be wrong.
What a great, eye-opening essay! None of what Mr. Perez writes is shocking to anyone paying attention to the woke, PC takeover of culture and institutions, but it is still surprising how deeply and thoroughly wokeness has embedded itself and how dedicated it is to limiting the free expression of ideas that don't conform to the woke, progressive dogma.
As for the "takeover" of literature by female writers, this is something I've noticed with Amazon Prime's monthly free book download offering. For 3-4 years, I've noticed that most of the authors are female, but the past couple months, all of them have been. As this trend has increased, I've found fewer and fewer offerings that seem worth my time, regardless of the cost. While there are books by female writers that I enjoy, as a man, I typically identify with and enjoy more books written from a man's perspective, and that's something I'm not going to apologize for.
Yeah. I spent years trying to get an agent for my debut literary punk rock YA novel. Dozens of agents read the book; one agent read it three times and sent me these glowing emails about it but then disappeared. One agent literally told me it would be hard to market a book about an upperclass WSM. Everyone's looking for 'marginalized voices,' as if there are only a couple books by Black writers, etc. Walk into any major bookstore: You'll be confronted with the opposite. I have no problem with that, but be honest and open to ALL perspectives, not just a select woke few.
Here's my book (The Crew, by Michael Mohr): https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B0CTRRBM6J/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?ie=UTF8&qid=&sr=
I write about my experience here: https://michaelmohr.substack.com/p/literary-agent-rejections
Michael Mohr
Sincere American Writing
https://michaelmohr.substack.com/
Thank you so much for this, Alex. As a fellow self-publishing writer I've been waiting for a piece like this for years. I look forward to reading more of you.
q
Not sure if this observation is off topic, but here goes anyway: About six or seven years I decide to read aloud to my wife seven New Yorker short stories sequentially. All seven were abysmal! -truly absurd! The plot lines, characters, themes were beyond salvation. It seemed as if disjointed, incredulous, and poorly written stories were a badge of honor.
Normally, I had ignored New Yorker stories in favor of the main content of the publication, which may have had a whiff of merit in the old days. For whatever reason, I decided it was intellectually honest to give short story authors the benefit of the doubt and give their stories a try. I now realized I was right in the first place. What detritus! Their quality would have embarrassed a clever high school fiction writer.
I've since gotten sick of the woke ideology of the New Yorker and cancelled by subscription. And I do not miss their 'short stories'.
Superb -- At once depressing and inspiring.
Do you know that more books with big advances and big publicity campaigns are doing poorly now than say 10 years ago? 20 years ago? I think you may be cherry-picking.
What an inspiring piece you have written; it restores my faith that all is not lost in the publishing world, that I will no longer seek older well written books by authors vetted for quality, that I will no longer be reel from the leftist fiction and non fiction populating the bookshelves of my local library. We are constantly lectured by the smug left of cheering censorship efforts however falsified. But censorship, or book “challenges” only occur after publication. Preemptive censorship, powered by sensitivity readers, leftist editors, amplified by academia and corporate interests, and ubiquitous throughout the Internet is the new way, a mugging of free thought and expression.
Thank you Alex Perez for clarifying what so many have noticed. And thank you - TFP - for being a platform that allows your mission statement to reflect your actual efforts.
"Eighteen months after Gullaba self-published, Bernard Schweizer, a former English professor, launched a brand-new publishing house in January 2023. Called Heresy Press… Also in January of this year, Chelsea Hodson, a writer who formerly taught at Bennington College in Vermont, started her own imprint—Rose Books.”
My question here is not a substance thing but a process one. How does one actually go about launching a publishing house? Or a think tank? Or anything of that sort which requires a lot of capital and paperwork? One of the difficulties that many of use who are intellectually inclined and who are simultaneously well established in their jobs, but who are not content with what is being offered in it (or in the world for that matter) and want to try and offer something different... we don't know how to offer that something else. The thought of launching something else is daunting, so much so that it might even stop most of us in our tracks.
So, what are the practical steps needed that can help someone who wants to take a shot at doing something different, do it? Starting a substack is cute and maybe worthwhile, but there is a hell of a lot more needed if you really want to institutionalize that idea. What is that more? How do you package it? What do you do to make it a real thing? I ask this particularly from the perspective of one who is not well connected.
I've written a novel involving a Native American character who in an act of love takes the fall for a crime he didn't commit. No, I'm not Native American. I'm a human being who feels some small sympathy for the human condition and therefore I feel totally entitled to write about it. Why not? That's why I subscribe to the Free Press. Sent it to an agent I know who passed it around to the Brown and Swarthmore 26-year-old lasses in his shop and most of the feedback was how--if, God forbid, this ever sees the light of day--it would have to be vetted by sensitivity readers. I'd rather have sex with a feral hog than submit anything I've written to sensitivity readers.
I'm an author who has published a book with a major imprint at a Big 5, and with another on the way—but I also enjoy writing a Substack newsletter, and am publishing a book with an independent start-up imprint next year, in addition to the traditional one. I've even looked into starting my own imprint. In other words: I've seen both sides, and I have skin in the game. Some of what is here is true to my experience; much of it feels like straw men, though, and I feel this piece is framed in too much of a binary political way to due justice to the complexity within the traditional publishing industry, as well as the challenges of independent publishing. One problem with framing this article in terms of "risk-taking" is that the new model usually involves publishers that want to pay extraordinarily low advances and give the author a much higher % of the sales; which, on the surface, is always pitched like a great thing for the author; on the flip side, it actually means that the publisher has less skin in the game, and is taking far less risk. There's something ironic about that. When I bet on a person, I really bet on them; enough so that it hurts when I'm wrong.
Excellent article. One thing worth noting is that entry-level salaries in publishing are notoriously low. (I made $14K a year as an editorial assistant at Viking 1980-82). This has had the effect, over time, of weeding out young people who didn't have help from parents, trust funds, or a willingness (in my case) to take much less than I could have gotten selling my skills in some other field. Over time, this resulted in a notably un-diverse publishing industry, with few people of color working as editors and literary agents. Why should a talented black humanities grad from the Ivy League take a pittance when so many other places, including investment banking and elite law schools, were looking to recruit? This isn't my own speculation; it's something that's been widely discussed. (The editor of my first book, Erroll McDonald, was one of the very few black trade-book editors back in the 1990s and he mentioned this relative paucity of black editors.) In the summer of 2020, the publishing industry went through a particularly wrenching version of the Come-to-Jesus moment that many sectors of the panicked American elite went through. (The film industry, prodded by the Oscars So White hashtag, did the same thing.) Things tilted hard in the direction of....well, the sort of dynamics that Perez is talking about here--dynamics led, as Perez pointed out in a celebrated/reviled interview, by white women determined to Right the Wrongs by Any Means Necessary. I'm glad to see Adam Bellow mentioned in this story. He's one of the people--and there are a few--pushing back against this Wokeness Inc. trend.
Thankfully i subscibed to Free Press today. Wrapping up a book on america's housing and homeless crisis, i figured the progressive narrative would be a issue having read articles by authors on housing in the "news" section with no intimate industry knowledge with distorted/politicized views. I wondered why publications like the NYTimes would assign staff writers to report on complex housing topics at an age when they probably still need mom and dad co-signing their first lease out of college. I wont get as discouraged now when get turned down after they realize im a white male, and 30 years experience on the topic of my book.
As with the newspaper industry, the book publishing industry has been its own undoing. And it is delightful. I look forward to seeing excellence from the small new independent houses and self-published authors.
As a traditional published and marginally successful author, Alex is right on the nose with this article. We remain publicly silent (mostly) because we have families and mortgages. However I do push back internally and if they balk, my agent reminds them in a very polite way that my name is on the cover. I write fiction to entertain, not make political statements, and word mean things. One thing I've notice since I was first published (in 2006) is that the copy editors are now going woke. They question some of my word choices and phrases. I just STET any changes, or ignore their "suggestion." I think a lot of authors do this, but I could be wrong.
Great post. And very heartening news about all the rebel presses. I had really given up on submitting to legacy journals.
What a great, eye-opening essay! None of what Mr. Perez writes is shocking to anyone paying attention to the woke, PC takeover of culture and institutions, but it is still surprising how deeply and thoroughly wokeness has embedded itself and how dedicated it is to limiting the free expression of ideas that don't conform to the woke, progressive dogma.
As for the "takeover" of literature by female writers, this is something I've noticed with Amazon Prime's monthly free book download offering. For 3-4 years, I've noticed that most of the authors are female, but the past couple months, all of them have been. As this trend has increased, I've found fewer and fewer offerings that seem worth my time, regardless of the cost. While there are books by female writers that I enjoy, as a man, I typically identify with and enjoy more books written from a man's perspective, and that's something I'm not going to apologize for.