Yesterday Anne Trubek, founder and publisher of Belt Publishing, posted the provocatively titled “Are Agents Now The Real Publishers? And Are Publishers Making Themselves Redundant?” Her premise is that publishing is itself a creative act, and she thinks through how a publisher might differentiate itself from others, and where creativity lies within the Rube Goldberg machine that is contemporary book publishing.
In doing so she addresses the Big 5 publishers:
“The expectations are that the editors at the press need a book to be ‘done’ when they get a query. They won’t do much editing, and there’s so much competition, so when an agent sends a manuscript to the editor, the book needs to [be] just about printer-ready — some copyediting and proofing, sure, but not much beyond that.
“But what does it mean for a book to be ‘done’ when it has not gone through the publishing process? It means that what publishers do is not germane to the book itself. That publishers don’t shape manuscripts. That their work is less creative and more operational.
“Because this is now the way things work with many Big Five presses, agents are now the people who do the heaviest lifting when it comes to shaping a book.”
She keeps thinking through this situation and arrives at the reasonable questions of “what is a publisher actually for?” and also whether or not the agent, having done all of this editorial heavy lifting, would be better positioned to move the book through production, that is, become the publisher him or herself.
These are pertinent questions, and I’ve already written about some of these ideas before here:
To summarize myself and to put it slightly more bluntly than Trubek does: literary agents are pimps.
Trubek is absolutely correct that a publisher forfeits its aesthetic judgment, its designation as a publisher vs being merely a printer (a book-binder, a marketer; they do not even distribute them) when it outsources its queries to an agent. A grim, necrophiliac incident from a few years ago is instructive here. In 2015 HarperCollins published Harper Lee’s Go Tell a Watchman and described it as the sequel to To Kill Mockingbird, though it quickly became apparent that the text was actually that classic novel’s nascent form, as yet untouched by editorial guidance. In the related brouhaha, the history of how Watchman became Mockingbird was documented. That is, it was the result of an intense collaborative relationship between publisher and writer. Back then the publishers employed figures who served as a kind of book doula, creating the best environment for the best book to be born. I believe these people were called editors. If it weren’t for that heavy editorial hand, it’s arguable that we would never have had To Kill a Mockingbird, much to the devastation of 8th-grade English teachers everywhere. (P.S. if there is a Hell, all the people who participated in the exhumation of this text and the exploitation of Lee, then senile and near death, will go there.) But now these figures are called agents and they do the same intensive editorial work, with the major exception that they do not put any money up to publish the book. They get paid a cut when the book gets bought, pimp-like, but they don’t write the check.
As I get older and slightly more cynical (only slightly!), I think that the one who puts up the money, the person who pays the bills, is the one who is the true publisher/producer/etc. They are the ones with skin in the game. If the book doesn’t get sold, the agent has indeed lost time — uncompensated labor. But they’re still not the one who’s going to pay for all that printing and shipping and have to take it in the teeth when they pulp those remainders.
To be clear, I don’t think the agent-as-pimp comparison is completely negative. Sometimes one needs a pimp! Or at least an explanatory sidekick. There are complex financial transactions that due to their sensitive nature absolutely benefit from a neutral-ish middle-person. Buying a house, engaging in a complicated insurance transaction, the thorny contractual stuff. The kind of stuff your parents warned you about. It’s not fundamentally evil. But with any kind of consultant figure, one who doesn’t make anything, or put up their own capital, or whose contribution to human flourishing isn’t immediately apparent, there is the constant question of “what is that guy doing here?” — aside from raising the price of the underlying transaction, aside from functioning as a kind of professional turnstile.
Are there publishers actively publishing as a creative act, who are distinct aesthetic entities? Absolutely. But they tend to be of the more independent and small press variety where the skin that is in the game is a lot more precious. The books hew closer to aesthetic objects rather than commodities. Everyone keeps wailing online about AI in book publishing, but have you been to Barnes & Noble lately? Have you seen the covers on the table? I’ve seen more aesthetic risk and individuation in the cereal aisle. Oh, look, there goes another middle-aged woman finding herself after heartbreak. Oh, look, another searing historical family saga that is somehow related to WWII. And the turnstiles only let through one sub-30 female novelist a year. I wish her all the best, and I hope they let her publish a second book after her kid is born.
All I can think is that, overwhelmed by the sheer volume of manuscripts, by the ever-growing mountain of editorial decisions to make, publishers employed the prophylactic of agents, a filtration device, one that has worked too well, one that has alienated them from the crucial job of editing books themselves. This changed the nature of publishing from editorially focused to production focused, as Trubek says. As a result, readers have virtually no interest in or awareness of the publishing house. The only people who care who published a given book are other writers, who are always everywhere aspiring, and thus keeping score. I would say that publishing house inside dope is the province of dorks but that would be an insult to dorks. (All hail the New Directions colophon!)
And yet, publishers are valuable, because despite their aesthetic impotence they remain good at one thing and that’s getting books on those Barnes & Noble tables. Or on the tables at the hip indie cultural touchstone of your choosing. It’s all about distribution. I remember buying the Miranda July novel All Fours a couple years back in the Orlando airport. I was already aware of it and was surprised to see that novel, presumably high brow, in the airport. A smooth move, publicity wise. (Side note: it’s a good novel. I find July’s public persona slightly grating, but her talent is undeniable.) A writer friend of mine quipped once, when his own father compared his newly published novel to a can of peas lining the shelves at a grocery store, that his novels weren’t peas, and he was right, but also wrong. They are peas. They’re going to be shelved just like peas. They are relentlessly physical objects. (Still working through why I can’t get excited about ebooks). It takes a lot of skill to make the trains run on time.
And maybe that’s the real lesson here. Maybe the publishers are right: the aesthetic/editorial judgment doesn’t matter. What matters is getting peas on shelves. If they’re on the shelves, if they look like the other peas, people will buy them. Who knows what will actually sell, people are so weird in their tastes, but whatever takes off, they can get more of those same peas to that shelf pronto. Maybe that’s what the publisher is really good for and good at. The best of what has been thought and said was always a low priority — more of a side quest. They just outsourced the part they don’t really care about: what the book actually says.