I've been reading you. I'm sorry you had to go through all that. I never even tried to find an agent because I'm old and don't have time for their BS, I don't have a voice that is "commercial," and I am "privileged" enough to be able to afford to self publish. It's going well. No complaints. No one (except my editor) asks me to change anything. I think you will continue to do great things. You already are. You don't need publishing to tell anyone that. We can all see it (read it) for ourselves. Congratulations!
Liza, your literary path sounds a lot like mine, and hundreds of other talented writers that I know or have encountered in my years in the business. I think what bothers me most about the publishing industry is the smugness of agents and editors who clearly don't know very much about what makes good literature, and instead substitute social politics as the yardstick for the measurement of quality.
I've been around this industry long enough to know that “minor edits” are to a manuscript as hanging, drawing, and quartering are to a human body, so I sympathize. I've had agents, twice, and publishers, twice, and still never found a fit between their interests and mine.
But I have to challenge your notion that the humanities have traditionally been about the big questions or beauty and meaning. The humanities, per se, is an institution of very recent invention, essentially formed of those disciplines that were rejected by the science faculty in the modern conception of the university. The questions of beauty and meaning have traditionally belonged to philosophy, and the idea that literature is principally a means to explore them is very recent, as is the notion that it is the task of the academy to teach people to write or to define what literature should be.
The traditional roots of literature lie in storytelling, and stories have traditionally been concerned with those things that affect ordinary people who tell and who listen to stories, not with those things that occupy the minds of aristocratic philosophers. They were concerned with bravery, and honor, and ingenuity, and romance. They were concerned with the things that go bump in the night. They were what people sought out to help them become wise and brave in facing the perils of their workaday lives. And, of course, with the human appetite for sensation, absurdity, and titillation.
The state of literary fiction that you rightly deplore today is, in fact, the direct result of the capture of storytelling by the "humanities" that you see as the state from which literature has fallen. But that state of literature, captured by the academy and recast as a tool of philosophical inquiry, was not the prelapsarian state; it was the origin of the fall. The current deplorable state of literature is the inevitable conclusion of the academic and philosophical capture of literature that you so admire. As philosophy collapsed into nihilism, it inevitably dragged literature down with it, leaving it in a state where it can only portray ennui temporarily relieved by sensation.
The solution is not to go back to the beginning of the slippery slope. Even if you could climb it, you would only slide down it in the same way again. The only solution is to cast off abstraction and grand ideas and return to a literature of the concrete virtues lived in the real world, a literature whose aim is to make us wise and brave.
You spent ten years in the query trenches and came out with only one conclusion: the industry is broken, and you're a genius. That's not analysis — that's a defense mechanism. You rail against the commercialization of literature, yet your entire Substack is a masterclass in self-branding. You sell your rejection story the way others sell sex scenes — as content that captures attention and drives engagement. The market didn't reject you because it hates philosophy; it rejected you because your product didn't find a buyer, and instead of adapting or accepting that, you declared the marketplace illegitimate. That's not a critique of capitalism — that's entitlement dressed as principle. You want the market to validate you, but you also want to feel morally superior to it. You can't have both. You call it a fight for literature. In reality, it's a fight for self-esteem. You offer nothing but grievance and self-admiration — and demand the world recognize it as a manifesto. Maybe it's not the industry. Maybe it's the books
I wonder if she finished reading normal people. Because with small moments like the one she pointed out as inadequate, the novel builds to something big and insightful and moving. I'd rather read Rooney than "philosophical musings" untethered from living.
Also I've read lots of philosophical novels in the past year. Rebecca Goldstein's practically made a career of writing "philosophical chick-lit". Pretty good and slow and dense and all that stuff.
Liza. If you self-publish your novels I will buy them. As an author myself I’ve gone that road and was not very successful. But you have an extraordinary platform — great reach — and an authoritative voice.
Self publishing seems to be the remedy. I'm interested in your novels, but I only see your poetry books on Amazon. Where, if anywhere, are hard copies of your novels available?
I've been writing about this stuff for 15 years on my blog. Beyond politics, I think it has to do with algorithms, hashtags, the focus on brevity and keywords. I remember reading a TLS review that trumpeted the arrival of some great newcomer, just out of high school, and the excerpt focused on the character's thong digging into their ass. That was the plot point. It was really hard for me to navigate a soulless world that calls that 'culture.'
They've gone beyond 'the character's thong digging into their ass.' Now with the advent of plastic surgery, the thong disappears into their ass." I shudder to think what will come next.
Read through the article. It sounds awful what you had to endure. I'm tempted to say that you're at least lucky that all those agents didn't flat out ignore or ghost you, but what actually happened is likely worse.
Michael O. Church has a lot of theories which he writes about on his Substack about why publishing is the way it is. Per Michael, publishing these days is mostly about leveraging the social clout of authors, while what they actually write is mostly irrelevant.
Writing and literature feel so bad, and so uniformly bad, in this day and age, because publishers and agents don't care about stories, but rather about how many followers on Instagram or TikTok you have.
Michael also opines that publishers these days tend to favor debut authors who are young and female (as opposed to not-quite-so-young dudes) because social media algorithms favor such individuals. Per Michael, there is no feminist conspiracy to keep young white guys out of publishing, but instead they are just optimizing their roster of authors to conform to the demands of social media algorithms. Now, I don't know of all that's true or not, but that's his theory.
He also notes young female debut authors (who perhaps won't assert rights, ask difficult questions or stand up for their artistic vision) are also easier to exploit. Which is always convenient for big businesses.
“I needed to figure out what was getting published today.”
Uh oh! And when I did, BAAAARRRRFFFFF!
“Every day, thousands of immensely talented novelists are shut out by an industry that pushes out the same type of novel produced by the same institutional pipeline because they dared to say something different.”
This is true. And so I’ve had to, for the last twenty years, self-publish, despite being commercially published four times. And I knew and know that it is not because I cannot write. It’s because I can not and ‘will’ not write the trendy gurl fantasy bs they want.
“When publishing professionals routinely label incoming literary fiction submissions as “too philosophical,” what they’re really saying is that these submissions are of the wrong philosophy. They want cadaver books with non-philosophical memes. Books written by and for mostly young people, mostly women, who believe in nothing anymore except for their own sexual pleasure and the company of other like-minded young women.
Liza, thank you for keeping the heat on the so-called Literary Professionals.
I hope you don't mind if I mention that soon (in a couple weeks) I will be publishing my latest book, Seeing Sunny Again. It would be nice to have a few beta readers (I currently have none. Anyone interested, please PM me.) All I will say about this book is that it is likely very different from everything contemporary Big Publishing is putting out.
I don’t understand. Clearly there is a market for good literature, even if it is smaller right now, it is the homeschool crowd, it is the people longing for true meaning and beauty, the young people returning to church.
I follow Angelina Stanford on her podcast, Literary Life, where they discuss classical good literature, and they just started their own publishing house, Cassiodorus Press.
It feels to me like Bari Weiss and the Free Press, If you are grounded in good and true principals, then the woke publishers can’t capture you. We have to build from the ground up, not try and infiltrate back into the institutions that have been captured.
Having queried a hundred or so of them (independent publishers), they absolutely have succumbed. What happens is that a few of the usual suspects get on the boards or are hired on as editors, and nothing but woke craps issues forth forever more.
And it's not all about the fame, the money, the visibility: it's about your message, about being heard, about what you have to say to the world and whether it will listen to you back in turn. Literature is a way of communicating; poetry is a way of seeing the world, as is fiction – not a commercial success!
Right on! May I add that the obsession with plot methods like the Save the cat screenplay outlines are destroying any interior work a novelist may wish explore - and the reason is obvious: publishers are desperate to have their books adapted into movies... cheers!
As a debut author currently in the query trenches, I’ve reached the point where I’m doing it myself. I’m a retired NYPD detective writing crime fiction about victims, families, detectives, addicts, and the people who live in the gray areas. My goal isn’t to deliver a lesson or affirm a worldview. It’s to tell the truth as I witnessed it. What resonated most was your observation that readers are no longer asked what a work of fiction means; they’re asked whether it signals the “right” meaning. That distinction matters.The streets don’t operate according to approved narratives. Neither do homicide investigations. The people I encountered over two decades in law enforcement were contradictory, flawed, generous, selfish, courageous, and damaged—often all at the same time. When writers are encouraged to smooth those edges into something ideologically acceptable, we lose the very thing fiction is supposed to provide: an honest examination of the human condition.The irony is that readers still crave authenticity. They want stories that trust them to draw their own conclusions. They want characters who feel real rather than exemplary.The best fiction doesn’t tell us what to think. It shows us how people live, suffer, survive, and sometimes redeem themselves. The meaning belongs to the reader.
Thank you for articulating something many writers have been feeling for a long time.
I've been reading you. I'm sorry you had to go through all that. I never even tried to find an agent because I'm old and don't have time for their BS, I don't have a voice that is "commercial," and I am "privileged" enough to be able to afford to self publish. It's going well. No complaints. No one (except my editor) asks me to change anything. I think you will continue to do great things. You already are. You don't need publishing to tell anyone that. We can all see it (read it) for ourselves. Congratulations!
Liza, your literary path sounds a lot like mine, and hundreds of other talented writers that I know or have encountered in my years in the business. I think what bothers me most about the publishing industry is the smugness of agents and editors who clearly don't know very much about what makes good literature, and instead substitute social politics as the yardstick for the measurement of quality.
I've been around this industry long enough to know that “minor edits” are to a manuscript as hanging, drawing, and quartering are to a human body, so I sympathize. I've had agents, twice, and publishers, twice, and still never found a fit between their interests and mine.
But I have to challenge your notion that the humanities have traditionally been about the big questions or beauty and meaning. The humanities, per se, is an institution of very recent invention, essentially formed of those disciplines that were rejected by the science faculty in the modern conception of the university. The questions of beauty and meaning have traditionally belonged to philosophy, and the idea that literature is principally a means to explore them is very recent, as is the notion that it is the task of the academy to teach people to write or to define what literature should be.
The traditional roots of literature lie in storytelling, and stories have traditionally been concerned with those things that affect ordinary people who tell and who listen to stories, not with those things that occupy the minds of aristocratic philosophers. They were concerned with bravery, and honor, and ingenuity, and romance. They were concerned with the things that go bump in the night. They were what people sought out to help them become wise and brave in facing the perils of their workaday lives. And, of course, with the human appetite for sensation, absurdity, and titillation.
The state of literary fiction that you rightly deplore today is, in fact, the direct result of the capture of storytelling by the "humanities" that you see as the state from which literature has fallen. But that state of literature, captured by the academy and recast as a tool of philosophical inquiry, was not the prelapsarian state; it was the origin of the fall. The current deplorable state of literature is the inevitable conclusion of the academic and philosophical capture of literature that you so admire. As philosophy collapsed into nihilism, it inevitably dragged literature down with it, leaving it in a state where it can only portray ennui temporarily relieved by sensation.
The solution is not to go back to the beginning of the slippery slope. Even if you could climb it, you would only slide down it in the same way again. The only solution is to cast off abstraction and grand ideas and return to a literature of the concrete virtues lived in the real world, a literature whose aim is to make us wise and brave.
You spent ten years in the query trenches and came out with only one conclusion: the industry is broken, and you're a genius. That's not analysis — that's a defense mechanism. You rail against the commercialization of literature, yet your entire Substack is a masterclass in self-branding. You sell your rejection story the way others sell sex scenes — as content that captures attention and drives engagement. The market didn't reject you because it hates philosophy; it rejected you because your product didn't find a buyer, and instead of adapting or accepting that, you declared the marketplace illegitimate. That's not a critique of capitalism — that's entitlement dressed as principle. You want the market to validate you, but you also want to feel morally superior to it. You can't have both. You call it a fight for literature. In reality, it's a fight for self-esteem. You offer nothing but grievance and self-admiration — and demand the world recognize it as a manifesto. Maybe it's not the industry. Maybe it's the books
I wonder if she finished reading normal people. Because with small moments like the one she pointed out as inadequate, the novel builds to something big and insightful and moving. I'd rather read Rooney than "philosophical musings" untethered from living.
Also I've read lots of philosophical novels in the past year. Rebecca Goldstein's practically made a career of writing "philosophical chick-lit". Pretty good and slow and dense and all that stuff.
Please don't use ChatGPT to write comments.
Liza. If you self-publish your novels I will buy them. As an author myself I’ve gone that road and was not very successful. But you have an extraordinary platform — great reach — and an authoritative voice.
ditto, where can I get your books?
Self publishing seems to be the remedy. I'm interested in your novels, but I only see your poetry books on Amazon. Where, if anywhere, are hard copies of your novels available?
I've been writing about this stuff for 15 years on my blog. Beyond politics, I think it has to do with algorithms, hashtags, the focus on brevity and keywords. I remember reading a TLS review that trumpeted the arrival of some great newcomer, just out of high school, and the excerpt focused on the character's thong digging into their ass. That was the plot point. It was really hard for me to navigate a soulless world that calls that 'culture.'
They've gone beyond 'the character's thong digging into their ass.' Now with the advent of plastic surgery, the thong disappears into their ass." I shudder to think what will come next.
Read through the article. It sounds awful what you had to endure. I'm tempted to say that you're at least lucky that all those agents didn't flat out ignore or ghost you, but what actually happened is likely worse.
Michael O. Church has a lot of theories which he writes about on his Substack about why publishing is the way it is. Per Michael, publishing these days is mostly about leveraging the social clout of authors, while what they actually write is mostly irrelevant.
Writing and literature feel so bad, and so uniformly bad, in this day and age, because publishers and agents don't care about stories, but rather about how many followers on Instagram or TikTok you have.
Michael also opines that publishers these days tend to favor debut authors who are young and female (as opposed to not-quite-so-young dudes) because social media algorithms favor such individuals. Per Michael, there is no feminist conspiracy to keep young white guys out of publishing, but instead they are just optimizing their roster of authors to conform to the demands of social media algorithms. Now, I don't know of all that's true or not, but that's his theory.
He also notes young female debut authors (who perhaps won't assert rights, ask difficult questions or stand up for their artistic vision) are also easier to exploit. Which is always convenient for big businesses.
“I needed to figure out what was getting published today.”
Uh oh! And when I did, BAAAARRRRFFFFF!
“Every day, thousands of immensely talented novelists are shut out by an industry that pushes out the same type of novel produced by the same institutional pipeline because they dared to say something different.”
This is true. And so I’ve had to, for the last twenty years, self-publish, despite being commercially published four times. And I knew and know that it is not because I cannot write. It’s because I can not and ‘will’ not write the trendy gurl fantasy bs they want.
“When publishing professionals routinely label incoming literary fiction submissions as “too philosophical,” what they’re really saying is that these submissions are of the wrong philosophy. They want cadaver books with non-philosophical memes. Books written by and for mostly young people, mostly women, who believe in nothing anymore except for their own sexual pleasure and the company of other like-minded young women.
Liza, thank you for keeping the heat on the so-called Literary Professionals.
I hope you don't mind if I mention that soon (in a couple weeks) I will be publishing my latest book, Seeing Sunny Again. It would be nice to have a few beta readers (I currently have none. Anyone interested, please PM me.) All I will say about this book is that it is likely very different from everything contemporary Big Publishing is putting out.
Best in your writing career!
More power to you Liza. Keep going, onwards and upwards!
Which smaller and independent publishers are there that have **not** also succumbed to the recent dismaying trends in publishing?
I don’t understand. Clearly there is a market for good literature, even if it is smaller right now, it is the homeschool crowd, it is the people longing for true meaning and beauty, the young people returning to church.
I follow Angelina Stanford on her podcast, Literary Life, where they discuss classical good literature, and they just started their own publishing house, Cassiodorus Press.
It feels to me like Bari Weiss and the Free Press, If you are grounded in good and true principals, then the woke publishers can’t capture you. We have to build from the ground up, not try and infiltrate back into the institutions that have been captured.
Having queried a hundred or so of them (independent publishers), they absolutely have succumbed. What happens is that a few of the usual suspects get on the boards or are hired on as editors, and nothing but woke craps issues forth forever more.
And it's not all about the fame, the money, the visibility: it's about your message, about being heard, about what you have to say to the world and whether it will listen to you back in turn. Literature is a way of communicating; poetry is a way of seeing the world, as is fiction – not a commercial success!
Yes, it is all about the message. And with contemporary publishing, there is only one message that is allowed in. I'll let others decide what that is.
Right on! May I add that the obsession with plot methods like the Save the cat screenplay outlines are destroying any interior work a novelist may wish explore - and the reason is obvious: publishers are desperate to have their books adapted into movies... cheers!
Applauding you from afar. You're younger but much deeper than I am. I hope your ideas echo in ever-widening circles.
Published author here. Not worth it. “Pale Fire” though🔥 🙌
Loved this article.
As a debut author currently in the query trenches, I’ve reached the point where I’m doing it myself. I’m a retired NYPD detective writing crime fiction about victims, families, detectives, addicts, and the people who live in the gray areas. My goal isn’t to deliver a lesson or affirm a worldview. It’s to tell the truth as I witnessed it. What resonated most was your observation that readers are no longer asked what a work of fiction means; they’re asked whether it signals the “right” meaning. That distinction matters.The streets don’t operate according to approved narratives. Neither do homicide investigations. The people I encountered over two decades in law enforcement were contradictory, flawed, generous, selfish, courageous, and damaged—often all at the same time. When writers are encouraged to smooth those edges into something ideologically acceptable, we lose the very thing fiction is supposed to provide: an honest examination of the human condition.The irony is that readers still crave authenticity. They want stories that trust them to draw their own conclusions. They want characters who feel real rather than exemplary.The best fiction doesn’t tell us what to think. It shows us how people live, suffer, survive, and sometimes redeem themselves. The meaning belongs to the reader.
Thank you for articulating something many writers have been feeling for a long time.