“Yeah, agents can be a pain in the ass,” a GalleyCat reader wrote yesterday in response to one editor’s badmouthing of literary agents. “But let’s put this in perspective. For a few years I worked as a publicist for fiction and poetry and book review editors thought I was a pain in the ass. We are all a pain in someone else’s ass in the chain of making a book.” She even has a flow diagram to demonstrate her theory:
“In my opinion, publishing books might be the best job in the world,” this insider continues. “We work with ideas and the creative people who think of them. As book publishers, we’re (one of) the gate-keepers over which ideas make it into print. How cool is that?”
Not everybody in the industry, however, shares her optimistic outlook.
“The greatest myth about agents,” says one veteran editor with more than a decade of experience in the business, “[is that] agents at places like William Morris know more than an agent who works from her kitchen table. A big name agent is just a salesperson who may or may not be right.” OK, fine; you’re only as good as your last project. That’s as true for agents as it is for editors and authors.
Really, though, what this person hates isn’t so much agents as crappy books, and once again the gripe is a familiar one. “Unless an author is famous he/she is not going to get on national TV,” the anonymous editor says, “and TV sells books.” On the other hand, the argument continues, the more famous you are, the less likely you are to be able to write, and “what the public gets are books that would better serve as doorstops, instead of engaging and thought-provoking works.” As I pointed out yesterday, editors can blame agents all they want for putting that stuff on the table in front of them, but nobody’s putting a gun to their head and telling them to pick it up—or, if somebody is, maybe that might be a better explanation for why the editors who have been writing in this week hate their jobs so much.
“Art has been put aside for commerce,” the complaint winds down. “Authors like Twain, Dickens, or Hemingway could not get published today. Did Hemingway have a radio show? What was his platform?” Now we’re just getting silly. I’ll spot this person one out of three, on the dubious proposition that Dickens might be considered in need of editing by today’s standards. But come on: Hemingway is a perfect historical example of the author as hyped-up media personality, and Twain? You’re going to argue there’s no market today for acerbic social commentary from a liberal atheist? Somebody tell Christopher Hitchens he’s going to have to give all those royalties back. (And even Hitchens fans—heck, maybe even Hitchens—would concede that Twain could out-funny him handily.)