I once had an editor at a small press say that not only did she want to publish the book I had sent to her, she wanted to reissue my whole back catalogue as well. In a subsequent get-to-know-you call, I mentioned that I am Catholic. I saw her face fall. I never heard from her again.
the average book sells 500 copies, so what they mean is the 500 copies that will be sold to the library association have to have certain elements. More people would be reading and buying books if they weren’t all filled with that crap.
Yes. 500 is the average, even for big NYC houses. One of my self-published books sold 64,000 copies. Despite that, doing that on my own, I can't get an agent to look at my newest stuff.
Sherman Alexie shared that on his page some time ago as an encouragement to people doing their thing on Substack and feeling like they weren’t “making it.” I verified the number and then the scales fell off…. These arrogant people are gatekeeping for 500 copies?!?! They have sunk an entire industry over their own prejudices and now can only really offer the average writer 500 copies in sales?!?! I think there is some weird funding mechanisms (or money laundering) supporting those publishing companies. 500 in sales on average, huge bonuses for political memoirs nobody reads, and the writers that are famous enough to sell a million copies don’t really need them as a middleman anymore.
The Guardian. Which also gatekeeps book reviews. They can afford to be post-capitalist thanks to the billionaire Scott Trust. The paper's wealth was originally built from trading in slave cotton.
I know one of the many editors who rejected the actual J. K. Rowling back in the early 90s. She has never owned up to regretting it, and her reason for rejecting it was broadly political. "The Harry Potter books are reactionary, middle-class fantasies about the magical worlds that open up to you if only you can get into the right, exclusive school".
She preferred to publish "realistic" young adult novels about kids caring for alcoholic parents on housing estates. Her publishing house was bought by Egmont Group and she was set to work editing Spice Girls annuals. She resigned and emigrated to New Zealand.
1 - Several agents I researched for a SF novel I pitched earlier this year are upfront about exclusively wanting to represent minority authors, or exclusively wanting to pitch antiracist or queer or victimhood stories. I am a left-leaning person myself and my novel had left-wing themes, but even I would be too conservative (or not ideologically orthodox enough) for these agents. And there are quite a few of them.
2 - Interest in Christianity among agents is never expressed. Several of them mention other faiths in their “what I’m looking for” section. I recall at least one wanted works that deconstructed or undermined Christianity, but no one wanted it portrayed well. It seems the “Christian fiction” market has created a stupid binary in publishing.
3 - ChatGPT will say what it thinks you want to hear; it is not an authority and should never be cited as one.
Thanks for showing what we all suspected: agents are out of the closet commies. Fuck these people and go Indie. We're starting a literary revolution here. None of their alleged victim groups even read. The irony is the kids who read YA are themselves normal (aka "privileged") and all this is either being projected on them or their parents and teachers gave them a taste for self-hating white porn.
This is the most important article you have ever written, Liza! It's also quite fitting you posted this in the wake of Charlie Kirk's brutal and tragic assassination. Listen up people! It's time you stopped hoping the mainstream publishing industry would reform and give up on it already! It's dead and its never coming back! This essay is proof of that without question. The publishing industry could care less about the quality of work, they want to find writers that are liberals, progressives or leftists and books with messages that relate to identity politics, social class, trauma, or the diaspora-whatever diaspora that may be. Those are not books any sane person would read. We don't need another book about a fat black Transgender woman who suffered trauma by someone in class disagreeing with her or yet another garbage novel about a two-spirited asexual aromantic otherkin who identifies as Han Solo. What we need is actual GOOD literature! As Liza shows with all these ridiculous and discriminatory posts, literary agents are all left-wing ideologues dedicated to spreading the gospel of social justice through the books they help get published. For example, the knucklehead who told Liza her stupendous novel The Leverkuhn Quarter, could benefit from "a sharper focus of Elise's privilege." Really?! Her privilege?! No, Liza's book is fine the way it is, that would ruin it. Also, they say they won't accept the work of conservatives, white men, Jews, Zionists, gender-critical feminists, and people of faith or anyone else who doesn't fit their mold of what a "good" writer should be. This article really exposes the dark underbelly of the publishing industry. It is abundantly clear that conservatives, libertarians, moderates, and others have no place in it.
Imagine for a moment, if someone wrote a novel about a young woman in college who is sexually harassed by a Transgender person or an Arab Israeli who is in the IDF and joins up after October 7th because he wants to defend his country against the feral band of Islamist rapists that is Hamas. There is no way in h*** that book would ever get published or any agents would want it. Let's say you had a really great author who was the total package: could write, had great prose, could string together a sentence like it was no one's business, etc. they were basically the next Ray Bradbury or George Orwell. But they publicly talk about how they voted for Donald Trump three times and are strongly anti-illegal immigration. They'd get blacklisted so fast your head would spin! Or let's say you had a religious Catholic author who wrote a book about a woman who has an abortion but regrets it or about a pastor that speaks out against drag queens in Church. They would be labeled a sexist, a homophobe and a reactionary and their book would be labeled the next Mein Kampf or The Turner Diaries. The publishing industry is bigoted, hateful, sinful, intolerant, and the complete opposite of inclusive. Let's get real here folks, you want good contemporary literature that reflects the broad spectrum of views and opinions in this country? Support indie publishing houses and self-publishing books. This is Liza's best piece in a long time and a clarion call for a literary revolution! The garbage the industry puts out today like the trash Colleen Hoover and Sally Rooney write will never hold a candle to actual timeless literary classics like Romeo and Juliet, The Canterbury Tales, The Master and the Margarita, War and Peace, The Great Gatsby, The Adeventures of Huckleberry Finn, Gone with the Wind, All Quiet on the Western Front, This Side of Paradise, Up from Slavery, The Souls of Black Folk, Notes of a Native Son, Around the World in 80 Days, Gulliver's Travels, Journey to the Center of the Earth, Dracula, Frankenstein, The Wizard of Oz, and Twenty Thousands Leagues Under the Sea.
On another note, why are they so obsessed with novels on talking about colonial oppression? You people do know right that western colonialism wasn't all just a story of unremittent sadness and sorrow, right? It had many, many benefits for colonized people. In fact, I'd argue based on the historical record the benefits outweighed the costs to subject peoples. First off, western colonialism was more progressive, enlightened and humane than colonialism as practiced by any other culture. The Arabs, Mongols, Turks, Chinese, Japanese, and Indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere were all MUCH more brutal colonial rulers than the British, French, Belgian, German, Dutch, and Portuguese Empires were. European colonialism to be sure could be very brutal and came with racism, discrimination, atrocities, injustices, exploitation, and corruption. All of that is most certainly true and it certainly has left behind some negative legacies in the third world. But and this is the side of the story that doesn't get told and doesn't get a fair hearing in the publishing industry and academia today, western colonialism had many, many benefits to native peoples as well. Just to name a few: competent governance, expanded education, improved public health, widened employment opportunities, the abolition of slavery, improved administration, creation of basic infrastructure, women's rights, the enfranchisement of minority groups or untouchable classes, fair taxation, access to capital, the generation of historical and cultural knowledge, national identity formation, increased literacy, liberal democracy, human rights, free-market capitalism, the rule of law, free trade, the Christian Church, and many more. It's like Dinesh D'Souza would say to anyone who asked him what the British Empire did for India. He'd respond, "Apart from roads, railways, ports, schools, a parliamentary system of government, rights, separation of powers, checks and balances, the rule of law, and the English language...nothing!"
I took one look at the traditional publishing scene and decided that there wasn't enough time or patience in the world to bother with it. Self-publishing is an expensive slog, but better that than being lectured on the inherent white male privilege of some guy who got his legs blown off in an ambush and is bleeding out alone.
Good piece. You describe how gatekeepers in the publishing industry want their own beliefs to permeate the artistic creations they support. But this has been the case for a long time. A friend attending art school in the 1990s was told by her professors that her work failed to tell the onlooker anything about her gender. Ironically, these feminists were male. When I was a graduate student in ethnomusicology in the 1980s practicing musicians were stigmatized for not being sufficiently academic. A relative of mine who went to art school in the 1950s had to submit an abstract painting to get her degree even though she has always been a figurative artist.
It is bizarre how so many enterprises warp the reality of the marketplace to their own detriment. When you can't even trust money, you know you've got a problem.
The way things are, self-publishing is a better choice. Or publish with a small press. The marketing is incredibly difficult but so is the marketing for any business. Also one needs to experience a little success and then broaden it.
The ideological drive in the publishing industry is really bizarre, when you think about it.
My own fantasy novel has very few political aspects to it. 30 years ago, nobody would call it a political book. Like all works, it deals with my ideas of right and wrong, challenges and failures, etc., but there's nothing political in it.
But because it didn't explicitly include queer characters, explicitly critique privileged groups and capitalist societies, nobody would look at it.
It wasn't really that it was ideologically different that caused the problem. It's that it wasn't explicitly ideologically pure to the left. It was the idea that unless a story checks ALL the progressive boxes, and unless the author does too, it will likely be rejected.
I realize you're focused on the writing, rather than the business side of this industry...but I'm curious if you happen to know roughly what is needed to start up a publishing firm these days?
I've imagined the capital requirements aren't (relatively) all that high...but I have no first-hand knowledge.
I guess I'm wondering, why do you think conservative authors haven't simply launched their own publishing houses; Or perhaps they have but there's some other barrier to them breaking into the mainstream. Is it distribution?
Like you, I find it impossible to believe that there's "no market" for any writing that isn't a thinly-veiled rehash of de rigeur Leftwing politics.
It's distribution. The cost of making books is very low. The cost of identifying the market for books and developing channels to market books effectively is very high, which is essentially why publishing has formed into these huge conglomerates. If marketing was cheap and easy, there would be no reason for the big publishers to exist.
Thanks for the reply, Mr. Baker. Since I see you're an author yourself -- and that you're serializing your novels through Substack -- have you found that to be the best option for alternative publishing, or is it merely one of multiple strategies you've found helpful?
Not sure how helpful it has been. Of the two novels that I serialized, one has been my best seller and the other my worst seller. But honestly, I think the core strategy is simply to write a marketable book. I can't count the number of "I don't usually read books like this, but..." reviews I have received. That's the problem in a nutshell. I don't write the books people *think* they want to read, even though they like them if they do.
Also, large publishers have economies of scale, and can afford to take risks as long as they have some hit books to pay the bills, or a corporate sugar-daddy.
I think the most significant factor is Amazon's monopoly in the West, and which publishers it chooses to work with. This is why progressive activists gravitate towards the major publishers and platforms, because their goal is to become cultural gatekeepers, not to publish objectively good or profitable work.
One of the potential benefits of Substack is creating that marketing channel, which you rightly point out can be very difficult for new writers to achieve.
I've asked myself this too. There are plenty of small, independent publishers who do conservative nonfiction, but virtually none who do fiction. Why? If storytelling is so powerful and persuasive, why isn't anyone investing in promoting that on the conservative side?
And yet, I read books like _Lessons in Chemistry_ that receive awards and accolades and thousands of 5-star reviews and ask myself, "Is this what women want? Are the majority of female readers really this anti-religious, anti-male, anti-conservative?" Maybe the answer is yes, even though it doesn't reflect the reality I live in.
But if chance starts with the smallest viable audience, fiction writers with a conservative worldview should feel emboldened to continue putting their work out in the public in whatever forum they can.
After 25 years, I've turned in my stripes. I'll never work with New York again, but I'm here to support your efforts in your one-woman crusade. I wish you luck, but tbh, I hope they never publish you and I mean that sincerely. You think you're miserable now... Wait until you actually get a deal! Then the torture starts. Stick to the self-publishing and grow yourself with gumption and force of will, IMO. You've got time on your side, and it's a good fit for you.
As someone who had a book deal with a New York publisher, which changed the work's title without my agreement and then didn't promote the book at all, I think I know what you mean. However a good publisher or agent does add value compared to self-publishing, and frees the writer to concentrate on writing and speaking opportunities.
In my view, we most of all need an industry that wants to sell books that a lot of people will actually read or listen to, rather than buy to virtue signal, or ignore completely. That inevitably means appealing to a broader section of society than activist publishing staff care about. Their focus seems to be on state book buyers such as government employee librarians and teachers, which is consistent with communist ideology of course.
A key problem I've identified is that with the market moving towards audio books, Audible is so dominant in the West that you need Amazon staff approval to sell and promote a work, on their terms. Therefore I think part of the solution will be a genuinely independent ebook and audio book app for phones which profit shares with authors.
Depends. If you’re nonfiction, why not give it a try? Most fiction writers pay for their own edit nowadays. The editor at your publisher does not edit your book or will only work on the first fourteen pages usually. After you’re onboard, either your agent or your editor will introduce you to another editor who will charge you 10k to edit your work. They’ll improve your flow etc, get you into a beat sheet, tell you the book they’re trying to copy, etc. But a self-published author could pay for that tbh. Also if you’re like Liza and you enjoy building an audience and producing your own content, what’s the point of signing with a publisher? So they can sell maybe a few hundred copies of your book after you paid them 10k to get it edited? Where are you going to “speak?” How are you going you sell enough copies of your fiction project there to pay for plane, hotel, food, rental car, insurance? Etc. You’re “speaking” engagements are online so anybody can do them. Nothing special to it.
The 1990s was thirty years ago and is not coming back for publishing IMO. The people who used to know how to run a functioning publication are all dead or decrepit. The people they trained to take over for them couldn’t take the pay cuts and/or were axed. What we have now is a zombie factory where people who want to posture on social media compete with one to each other for status because that’s all that matters to them. None of them have a good roster of writers. None of them have been particularly successful. It’s the way it is. Liza’s examples in her post are not fabricated nor cherry picked. 100% I can confirm that’s what these people sound like 24/7.
Thanks for the reply. I worked as an editor for the same publisher, and elsewhere, before getting that deal. If the publisher thinks the book will sell, they will pay to have it edited, no matter how bad the copy is (and it's amazing how many 'professional' authors can barely write at all). So if the publisher is charging the author, they are in the vanity press business and don't believe the book has any potential.
That’s old school rules. I agree it used to run that way, and I partially lived it when it was, but you’re dating yourself imo. No new author really sells enough to justify any investment in them at all and all the laid off editors are now “independent” and get their referrals through their old networks.
The big-5 live off their existing catalog and the classics. There was a huge proceeding about this when a proposed merger lost its political backing and they were all forced to disclose their financials. No one wants to look at it but it’s all there in dollars and cents. Plus we can all kind of feel it but we’re told it’s not true and we don’t want to accept that “making it” as a writer will never look like it did in the past. It’s like trying to become famous as a band by selling CDs at record stores or renting out studio space instead of using ProTools. It’s an economic model that we mourn and that isn’t coming back because times have changed.
You're right; I haven't been to a book fair since 2018, and my experience will have dated. As I understand it, publishers are now only interested in books that already have a platform to sell to, such as Jordan Peterson's YouTube followers provided originally.
Someone who pays for editing and also surrenders their rights in a book via an exclusive licence is being hustled, in my opinion. I also have doubts about how much value an editor can add if the book is already well-written.
I stopped attending stuff physically in 2017 after attending a writers conference in Washington state that was 200 women and me. I was the only man there. I spent fifteen minutes carefully walking the whole thing and making sure I wasn’t wrong. Was easy enough since no one would talk to me haha. A lot of stuff went virtual only around Covid so it’s much easier to attend this stuff but I’d still say it’s more of a way for agents to pay their bills since the books they sell certainly don’t!
For my personal writing, I worked my network exclusively afterward and managed one final shot when a retired New Yorker editor, from the old school, came out of his semi-retirement to represent a project of mine. But he did not have the fire any longer, IMO. He was in his seventies and had had a long career and then passed away quickly from a medical condition. Covid was happening and the deal disappeared, like everybody else’s did so nothing special there.
But I actually think if a writer figures out this self-publishing thing and they find their niche, they can make decent money. It’s uncouth to talk about it but I’ve had a few self-published authors prove to me they made six figures in a calendar year. At least it does actually happen for somebody!
I'm a white male (and Jewish) who wrote a trilogy about an upper-class Brit who comes to northern New Mexico in the early 1960s. Try getting something funny published by agents who have no sense of humor. But had I written to agents as a Hispanic woman, I bet I would have gotten a much more welcoming response.
The time has come to think bigger than individual agents. This is a fight that conservatives are never going to win. The rot is not at the levels of individuals, but institutions. Even if an individual agent wanted to diversify the thought of their portfolio, they would have every colleague and (more importantly) their superiors coming down on them like a ton of bricks. It seems highly unlikely that most agencies will reform.
Conservatives need to found competing institutions that do not compromise on quality. This not only restores balance to the marketplace for authors and consumers, but the industry. Way harder to do, but it’s where we are.
I've heard from two black women writers in my area that have had encounters with publishers and agents that they didn't want their books unless it was about the struggle, racism, equity, etc. One of them wanted to write a YA about horses and a horse farm, her favorite subject.
I once had an editor at a small press say that not only did she want to publish the book I had sent to her, she wanted to reissue my whole back catalogue as well. In a subsequent get-to-know-you call, I mentioned that I am Catholic. I saw her face fall. I never heard from her again.
the average book sells 500 copies, so what they mean is the 500 copies that will be sold to the library association have to have certain elements. More people would be reading and buying books if they weren’t all filled with that crap.
Yes. 500 is the average, even for big NYC houses. One of my self-published books sold 64,000 copies. Despite that, doing that on my own, I can't get an agent to look at my newest stuff.
Sherman Alexie shared that on his page some time ago as an encouragement to people doing their thing on Substack and feeling like they weren’t “making it.” I verified the number and then the scales fell off…. These arrogant people are gatekeeping for 500 copies?!?! They have sunk an entire industry over their own prejudices and now can only really offer the average writer 500 copies in sales?!?! I think there is some weird funding mechanisms (or money laundering) supporting those publishing companies. 500 in sales on average, huge bonuses for political memoirs nobody reads, and the writers that are famous enough to sell a million copies don’t really need them as a middleman anymore.
Yes, I've long thought that as well. What kind of business loses money year after year?
The Guardian. Which also gatekeeps book reviews. They can afford to be post-capitalist thanks to the billionaire Scott Trust. The paper's wealth was originally built from trading in slave cotton.
Oh, and congrats on your successful book sales! That is wonderful!
Bizarre to think the publishing industry would be full of agents that live in fear they might, if they are not careful, sign the next J. K. Rowling.
That's very well put.
I know one of the many editors who rejected the actual J. K. Rowling back in the early 90s. She has never owned up to regretting it, and her reason for rejecting it was broadly political. "The Harry Potter books are reactionary, middle-class fantasies about the magical worlds that open up to you if only you can get into the right, exclusive school".
She preferred to publish "realistic" young adult novels about kids caring for alcoholic parents on housing estates. Her publishing house was bought by Egmont Group and she was set to work editing Spice Girls annuals. She resigned and emigrated to New Zealand.
1 - Several agents I researched for a SF novel I pitched earlier this year are upfront about exclusively wanting to represent minority authors, or exclusively wanting to pitch antiracist or queer or victimhood stories. I am a left-leaning person myself and my novel had left-wing themes, but even I would be too conservative (or not ideologically orthodox enough) for these agents. And there are quite a few of them.
2 - Interest in Christianity among agents is never expressed. Several of them mention other faiths in their “what I’m looking for” section. I recall at least one wanted works that deconstructed or undermined Christianity, but no one wanted it portrayed well. It seems the “Christian fiction” market has created a stupid binary in publishing.
3 - ChatGPT will say what it thinks you want to hear; it is not an authority and should never be cited as one.
I suspect that the mainstream publishing attitude came first, not the "Christian fiction" market.
Thanks for showing what we all suspected: agents are out of the closet commies. Fuck these people and go Indie. We're starting a literary revolution here. None of their alleged victim groups even read. The irony is the kids who read YA are themselves normal (aka "privileged") and all this is either being projected on them or their parents and teachers gave them a taste for self-hating white porn.
This is the most important article you have ever written, Liza! It's also quite fitting you posted this in the wake of Charlie Kirk's brutal and tragic assassination. Listen up people! It's time you stopped hoping the mainstream publishing industry would reform and give up on it already! It's dead and its never coming back! This essay is proof of that without question. The publishing industry could care less about the quality of work, they want to find writers that are liberals, progressives or leftists and books with messages that relate to identity politics, social class, trauma, or the diaspora-whatever diaspora that may be. Those are not books any sane person would read. We don't need another book about a fat black Transgender woman who suffered trauma by someone in class disagreeing with her or yet another garbage novel about a two-spirited asexual aromantic otherkin who identifies as Han Solo. What we need is actual GOOD literature! As Liza shows with all these ridiculous and discriminatory posts, literary agents are all left-wing ideologues dedicated to spreading the gospel of social justice through the books they help get published. For example, the knucklehead who told Liza her stupendous novel The Leverkuhn Quarter, could benefit from "a sharper focus of Elise's privilege." Really?! Her privilege?! No, Liza's book is fine the way it is, that would ruin it. Also, they say they won't accept the work of conservatives, white men, Jews, Zionists, gender-critical feminists, and people of faith or anyone else who doesn't fit their mold of what a "good" writer should be. This article really exposes the dark underbelly of the publishing industry. It is abundantly clear that conservatives, libertarians, moderates, and others have no place in it.
Imagine for a moment, if someone wrote a novel about a young woman in college who is sexually harassed by a Transgender person or an Arab Israeli who is in the IDF and joins up after October 7th because he wants to defend his country against the feral band of Islamist rapists that is Hamas. There is no way in h*** that book would ever get published or any agents would want it. Let's say you had a really great author who was the total package: could write, had great prose, could string together a sentence like it was no one's business, etc. they were basically the next Ray Bradbury or George Orwell. But they publicly talk about how they voted for Donald Trump three times and are strongly anti-illegal immigration. They'd get blacklisted so fast your head would spin! Or let's say you had a religious Catholic author who wrote a book about a woman who has an abortion but regrets it or about a pastor that speaks out against drag queens in Church. They would be labeled a sexist, a homophobe and a reactionary and their book would be labeled the next Mein Kampf or The Turner Diaries. The publishing industry is bigoted, hateful, sinful, intolerant, and the complete opposite of inclusive. Let's get real here folks, you want good contemporary literature that reflects the broad spectrum of views and opinions in this country? Support indie publishing houses and self-publishing books. This is Liza's best piece in a long time and a clarion call for a literary revolution! The garbage the industry puts out today like the trash Colleen Hoover and Sally Rooney write will never hold a candle to actual timeless literary classics like Romeo and Juliet, The Canterbury Tales, The Master and the Margarita, War and Peace, The Great Gatsby, The Adeventures of Huckleberry Finn, Gone with the Wind, All Quiet on the Western Front, This Side of Paradise, Up from Slavery, The Souls of Black Folk, Notes of a Native Son, Around the World in 80 Days, Gulliver's Travels, Journey to the Center of the Earth, Dracula, Frankenstein, The Wizard of Oz, and Twenty Thousands Leagues Under the Sea.
On another note, why are they so obsessed with novels on talking about colonial oppression? You people do know right that western colonialism wasn't all just a story of unremittent sadness and sorrow, right? It had many, many benefits for colonized people. In fact, I'd argue based on the historical record the benefits outweighed the costs to subject peoples. First off, western colonialism was more progressive, enlightened and humane than colonialism as practiced by any other culture. The Arabs, Mongols, Turks, Chinese, Japanese, and Indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere were all MUCH more brutal colonial rulers than the British, French, Belgian, German, Dutch, and Portuguese Empires were. European colonialism to be sure could be very brutal and came with racism, discrimination, atrocities, injustices, exploitation, and corruption. All of that is most certainly true and it certainly has left behind some negative legacies in the third world. But and this is the side of the story that doesn't get told and doesn't get a fair hearing in the publishing industry and academia today, western colonialism had many, many benefits to native peoples as well. Just to name a few: competent governance, expanded education, improved public health, widened employment opportunities, the abolition of slavery, improved administration, creation of basic infrastructure, women's rights, the enfranchisement of minority groups or untouchable classes, fair taxation, access to capital, the generation of historical and cultural knowledge, national identity formation, increased literacy, liberal democracy, human rights, free-market capitalism, the rule of law, free trade, the Christian Church, and many more. It's like Dinesh D'Souza would say to anyone who asked him what the British Empire did for India. He'd respond, "Apart from roads, railways, ports, schools, a parliamentary system of government, rights, separation of powers, checks and balances, the rule of law, and the English language...nothing!"
I took one look at the traditional publishing scene and decided that there wasn't enough time or patience in the world to bother with it. Self-publishing is an expensive slog, but better that than being lectured on the inherent white male privilege of some guy who got his legs blown off in an ambush and is bleeding out alone.
Good piece. You describe how gatekeepers in the publishing industry want their own beliefs to permeate the artistic creations they support. But this has been the case for a long time. A friend attending art school in the 1990s was told by her professors that her work failed to tell the onlooker anything about her gender. Ironically, these feminists were male. When I was a graduate student in ethnomusicology in the 1980s practicing musicians were stigmatized for not being sufficiently academic. A relative of mine who went to art school in the 1950s had to submit an abstract painting to get her degree even though she has always been a figurative artist.
It is bizarre how so many enterprises warp the reality of the marketplace to their own detriment. When you can't even trust money, you know you've got a problem.
The way things are, self-publishing is a better choice. Or publish with a small press. The marketing is incredibly difficult but so is the marketing for any business. Also one needs to experience a little success and then broaden it.
The ideological drive in the publishing industry is really bizarre, when you think about it.
My own fantasy novel has very few political aspects to it. 30 years ago, nobody would call it a political book. Like all works, it deals with my ideas of right and wrong, challenges and failures, etc., but there's nothing political in it.
But because it didn't explicitly include queer characters, explicitly critique privileged groups and capitalist societies, nobody would look at it.
It wasn't really that it was ideologically different that caused the problem. It's that it wasn't explicitly ideologically pure to the left. It was the idea that unless a story checks ALL the progressive boxes, and unless the author does too, it will likely be rejected.
I realize you're focused on the writing, rather than the business side of this industry...but I'm curious if you happen to know roughly what is needed to start up a publishing firm these days?
I've imagined the capital requirements aren't (relatively) all that high...but I have no first-hand knowledge.
I guess I'm wondering, why do you think conservative authors haven't simply launched their own publishing houses; Or perhaps they have but there's some other barrier to them breaking into the mainstream. Is it distribution?
Like you, I find it impossible to believe that there's "no market" for any writing that isn't a thinly-veiled rehash of de rigeur Leftwing politics.
It's distribution. The cost of making books is very low. The cost of identifying the market for books and developing channels to market books effectively is very high, which is essentially why publishing has formed into these huge conglomerates. If marketing was cheap and easy, there would be no reason for the big publishers to exist.
Thanks for the reply, Mr. Baker. Since I see you're an author yourself -- and that you're serializing your novels through Substack -- have you found that to be the best option for alternative publishing, or is it merely one of multiple strategies you've found helpful?
Not sure how helpful it has been. Of the two novels that I serialized, one has been my best seller and the other my worst seller. But honestly, I think the core strategy is simply to write a marketable book. I can't count the number of "I don't usually read books like this, but..." reviews I have received. That's the problem in a nutshell. I don't write the books people *think* they want to read, even though they like them if they do.
Also, large publishers have economies of scale, and can afford to take risks as long as they have some hit books to pay the bills, or a corporate sugar-daddy.
I think the most significant factor is Amazon's monopoly in the West, and which publishers it chooses to work with. This is why progressive activists gravitate towards the major publishers and platforms, because their goal is to become cultural gatekeepers, not to publish objectively good or profitable work.
One of the potential benefits of Substack is creating that marketing channel, which you rightly point out can be very difficult for new writers to achieve.
I've asked myself this too. There are plenty of small, independent publishers who do conservative nonfiction, but virtually none who do fiction. Why? If storytelling is so powerful and persuasive, why isn't anyone investing in promoting that on the conservative side?
And yet, I read books like _Lessons in Chemistry_ that receive awards and accolades and thousands of 5-star reviews and ask myself, "Is this what women want? Are the majority of female readers really this anti-religious, anti-male, anti-conservative?" Maybe the answer is yes, even though it doesn't reflect the reality I live in.
But if chance starts with the smallest viable audience, fiction writers with a conservative worldview should feel emboldened to continue putting their work out in the public in whatever forum they can.
Ask Raconteur Press and some of the other assorted sort of related small presses - https://raconteurpress.substack.com/
After 25 years, I've turned in my stripes. I'll never work with New York again, but I'm here to support your efforts in your one-woman crusade. I wish you luck, but tbh, I hope they never publish you and I mean that sincerely. You think you're miserable now... Wait until you actually get a deal! Then the torture starts. Stick to the self-publishing and grow yourself with gumption and force of will, IMO. You've got time on your side, and it's a good fit for you.
As someone who had a book deal with a New York publisher, which changed the work's title without my agreement and then didn't promote the book at all, I think I know what you mean. However a good publisher or agent does add value compared to self-publishing, and frees the writer to concentrate on writing and speaking opportunities.
In my view, we most of all need an industry that wants to sell books that a lot of people will actually read or listen to, rather than buy to virtue signal, or ignore completely. That inevitably means appealing to a broader section of society than activist publishing staff care about. Their focus seems to be on state book buyers such as government employee librarians and teachers, which is consistent with communist ideology of course.
A key problem I've identified is that with the market moving towards audio books, Audible is so dominant in the West that you need Amazon staff approval to sell and promote a work, on their terms. Therefore I think part of the solution will be a genuinely independent ebook and audio book app for phones which profit shares with authors.
Depends. If you’re nonfiction, why not give it a try? Most fiction writers pay for their own edit nowadays. The editor at your publisher does not edit your book or will only work on the first fourteen pages usually. After you’re onboard, either your agent or your editor will introduce you to another editor who will charge you 10k to edit your work. They’ll improve your flow etc, get you into a beat sheet, tell you the book they’re trying to copy, etc. But a self-published author could pay for that tbh. Also if you’re like Liza and you enjoy building an audience and producing your own content, what’s the point of signing with a publisher? So they can sell maybe a few hundred copies of your book after you paid them 10k to get it edited? Where are you going to “speak?” How are you going you sell enough copies of your fiction project there to pay for plane, hotel, food, rental car, insurance? Etc. You’re “speaking” engagements are online so anybody can do them. Nothing special to it.
The 1990s was thirty years ago and is not coming back for publishing IMO. The people who used to know how to run a functioning publication are all dead or decrepit. The people they trained to take over for them couldn’t take the pay cuts and/or were axed. What we have now is a zombie factory where people who want to posture on social media compete with one to each other for status because that’s all that matters to them. None of them have a good roster of writers. None of them have been particularly successful. It’s the way it is. Liza’s examples in her post are not fabricated nor cherry picked. 100% I can confirm that’s what these people sound like 24/7.
Thanks for the reply. I worked as an editor for the same publisher, and elsewhere, before getting that deal. If the publisher thinks the book will sell, they will pay to have it edited, no matter how bad the copy is (and it's amazing how many 'professional' authors can barely write at all). So if the publisher is charging the author, they are in the vanity press business and don't believe the book has any potential.
That’s old school rules. I agree it used to run that way, and I partially lived it when it was, but you’re dating yourself imo. No new author really sells enough to justify any investment in them at all and all the laid off editors are now “independent” and get their referrals through their old networks.
The big-5 live off their existing catalog and the classics. There was a huge proceeding about this when a proposed merger lost its political backing and they were all forced to disclose their financials. No one wants to look at it but it’s all there in dollars and cents. Plus we can all kind of feel it but we’re told it’s not true and we don’t want to accept that “making it” as a writer will never look like it did in the past. It’s like trying to become famous as a band by selling CDs at record stores or renting out studio space instead of using ProTools. It’s an economic model that we mourn and that isn’t coming back because times have changed.
You're right; I haven't been to a book fair since 2018, and my experience will have dated. As I understand it, publishers are now only interested in books that already have a platform to sell to, such as Jordan Peterson's YouTube followers provided originally.
Someone who pays for editing and also surrenders their rights in a book via an exclusive licence is being hustled, in my opinion. I also have doubts about how much value an editor can add if the book is already well-written.
I stopped attending stuff physically in 2017 after attending a writers conference in Washington state that was 200 women and me. I was the only man there. I spent fifteen minutes carefully walking the whole thing and making sure I wasn’t wrong. Was easy enough since no one would talk to me haha. A lot of stuff went virtual only around Covid so it’s much easier to attend this stuff but I’d still say it’s more of a way for agents to pay their bills since the books they sell certainly don’t!
For my personal writing, I worked my network exclusively afterward and managed one final shot when a retired New Yorker editor, from the old school, came out of his semi-retirement to represent a project of mine. But he did not have the fire any longer, IMO. He was in his seventies and had had a long career and then passed away quickly from a medical condition. Covid was happening and the deal disappeared, like everybody else’s did so nothing special there.
But I actually think if a writer figures out this self-publishing thing and they find their niche, they can make decent money. It’s uncouth to talk about it but I’ve had a few self-published authors prove to me they made six figures in a calendar year. At least it does actually happen for somebody!
I'm a white male (and Jewish) who wrote a trilogy about an upper-class Brit who comes to northern New Mexico in the early 1960s. Try getting something funny published by agents who have no sense of humor. But had I written to agents as a Hispanic woman, I bet I would have gotten a much more welcoming response.
The time has come to think bigger than individual agents. This is a fight that conservatives are never going to win. The rot is not at the levels of individuals, but institutions. Even if an individual agent wanted to diversify the thought of their portfolio, they would have every colleague and (more importantly) their superiors coming down on them like a ton of bricks. It seems highly unlikely that most agencies will reform.
Conservatives need to found competing institutions that do not compromise on quality. This not only restores balance to the marketplace for authors and consumers, but the industry. Way harder to do, but it’s where we are.
I've heard from two black women writers in my area that have had encounters with publishers and agents that they didn't want their books unless it was about the struggle, racism, equity, etc. One of them wanted to write a YA about horses and a horse farm, her favorite subject.