Agents, Awards, Taylor Swift, The Day Job, and This Very Thing You Are Reading

Catching up

Look, I know no one needs a newsletter on publishing on a Saturday in February, especially during a moment in which the New York Times app seems to be constantly updating minute-by-minute a developing story (and when opening up the New York Times app itself involves another layer of journalistic disappointment and ennui. I need to give it up for PBS Newshour.). For the first time since the pandemic, not even the “Play” tab appeals (I have, meanwhile, been listening to The Rest of History podcast while playing Spell Tower—make of that what you will.) But it turns out that I, a person who writes a newsletter about publishing, welcomes the chance to peck out some letters this Saturday after a few weeks gone quiet.

Just busy, that’s all. With some things I can show you. Like our lovely new 2025 catalog. An NBCC finalist nod for one of our titles. An ALA award for another title (what wonderful surprises!) I’ve also acquired a few new titles, moved another through the proofreading process, discussed initial print runs for forthcoming titles, worked with the supremely competent and thoughtful Afton Montgomery to enliven our social media feeds and improve our website, and sent out some follow up emails for ongoing publicity campaigns.. We moved a few titles in production to the beautiful “ready for printer” stage, and I spent a week in Charleston at the home office having meetings and, more importantly, chit chat with my colleagues. I read and responded to queries from authors pitching us their books (I am quite behind on these, so if you are one of those people, know it’s me, not you). I continued to work on our budget for the next fiscal year, and play around with my document called “Tentative pub dates.” I’ve had discussions about endpapers and stickers. I emailed.

I also doordashed a copy of 2024’s bestselling book, Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour, from Target (the only place you can buy it, though there are plenty of third party sellers on Amazon who will hook you up), an absolutely fascinating and extraordinarily important project that has received less press than it should have, for research for a future newsletter (not this one, alas). Swift circumvented every single “conventional wisdom” of publishing, sold more books than anyone else, and, astronomically flummoxing, made a ton of rookie mistakes along the way in editing and design. The mere act of ordering a book from the place I get my I’m-too-tired-to-cook dinners is something worth slowing down and thinking about. I look forward to that moment.

In publishing-related reading, this Katy Waldman piece about a controversy in Romantasy is fascinating, especially the part where a writer spends ages revising a book with an agent before sending to editors (and sometimes before deciding not to send it at all). This is not uncommon, and this aspect of what an agent does—what some agents do—is a topic I do wish we would all discuss more openly and debate. Are agents editors? Kim clearly acts as one here. Should they be? What are the costs? What are the advantages? And what role, to pull back, do “activist agents” (or whatever) have in shaping the literary landscape, on the books that are brought to market?

(Shout out here to Alia Hanna Habib and Laura McGrath, agent and author respectively, who have a book about agenting out soon).

I continue to spend time poking around on Substack Notes, where I follow a bunch of people (a group? a school? Not sure) who are sick of traditional publishing and want to shake things up. Ross Barkan launched the Metropolitan Review this week as part of this movement (vibe?) I wrote about this scene (?) back in June. I’m very interested in what’s going on there, sometimes appalled and sometimes engaged. I also continue, per their celebration of what Substack is enabling for them, my decades long insistence that the platform you use is always already problematic, and the key is to be ready to pick up and leave at a moment’s notice. With Substack as with, oh, you know, the brute fact of antisemitism, my suitcase is always packed (apologies this absurd conflation).

I continue to find space to escape the noise of my day and our days by reading ancient history, having moved from Cleopatra to Alexander the Great to Mary Beard’s SPQR, but in this last book on Roman history, the blissful release of losing myself in a more brutal and unimaginable world has been upset by crashes coming from this one. But it is the epitome of egotism to reduce the past to an analogy of the present. That’s a foreign country, and I live here.