Men, Substack, Novels

My summer book proposal course starts July 7. Feel free to email me with questions if you are interested.

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Last week’s newsletter on what trends in book collecting tell us about ourselves is here.

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Almost exactly one year ago, I wrote a newsletter about acquiring John Pistelli’s Major Arcana. The book published a few weeks ago. I thought I’d write a up few observations about the chatter that has ensued.

MEN

• That John is a man did not figure into my decision at all. As I wrote last year, it was his answers to interview questions, which discussed literary history and the current climate for literary fiction in America, that prompted me to read the novel.
  

• I’ve been writing a newsletter hosted by Substack for seven years. I never spent any time on Notes until last summer. It was then, after I signed up Major Arcana, that I learned about the ongoing conversation about men being shut out of (or whatever verb you prefer) literary fiction. Since then, I’ve read a lot of newsletters and posts about this topic, and these are my conclusions:

  
  
  1.) Yes, it is true that many agents who like to sell novels to Big 5 imprints have been less interested in novels by white men over the past few years. This is not because those agents and/or editors are primarily women, nor because they have mid tastes. Of course both of those facts may be true, but what drives agented submissions and Big 5 acquisition is the market. And the market for the past few years have been dominated by what we could shorthand as “women’s fiction.” We could of course go into why the market has swung this way. But it’s the money that people have been following.
  

  2.) If you are a writer eager to get an agent who might sell your novel to a Big Five imprint for the most possible money, you should be working on novels that are currently likely to sell as many copies as possible. This is how business almost always works. If you want to sell a novel that you think is literarily important you shouldn’t be trying to get as much money as possible. This is how art almost always works.

  
  3.) People with the most power have the most control over agendas and priorities in a business. All of the Big Five are helmed by men. Men are not being shut out of publishing, full stop.
  

SUBSTACK

• What interested me about Major Arcana vis a vis Substack is that it was originally serialized. If you read it, you will notice how each chapter as a certain wholeness, a form, one that is based on its original publication as standalone chapters (that were also part of a whole). The novel contains the traces of its own production. I find that an enormously fascinating aspect of the work, and one that it will carry into the future, much as “cliffhanger” has become an integral part of literary works due it its roots in how suspense can be built, and comes from the ending of a Thomas Hardy novel.
  

• People who are writing novels who also have newsletters hosted by Substack, and who spend time in the Notes of that platform are not doing the same thing, at all. That’s not to say there isn’t a bourgeoning literary community of such folks, which I do find interesting, but it’s a very different matter, something like when authors first started tweeting (which I actually wrote about for the NYT in 2012). That’s about a new literary community, and not about a school of writers who might share similar literary traits (though they may share similar themes and interests).
  

NOVELS

• Honestly, I thought that after the news of my acquisition of Major Arcana, which many people who chat on Substack chatted about, Belt would receive more queries from people (mainly men) with ambitious literary novels of their own. But no. We’ve received a few—maybe two or three? And as I continue to read the writing of many novelists who I am finding out about on Substack, I have not been interested enough in any of them to reach out about acquisition either (the quality of Major Arcana, it should go without saying, was the primary reason for my reaching out. It’s hard to write such a strong novel. Most cannot). So thus far there has been no growth or pipeline that I’ve seen re: novels and Substack and traditional publishing (in nonfiction it’s an entirely different matter). Part of me wonders if those fellas are instead querying agents and hoping to receive a big advance from a Big Five imprint. To them I’d suggest what I mention up above under “Men.” And also what I just said about how hard it is to write a really great novel.
  

• There is a lot of great literary fiction being published, today, in the past few years, coming out in the next few years, by men and women and others. It is largely concentrated in the catalogs of small, independent presses, for whom the market is not the primary driver. Novelists who publish with these presses do not receive large advances, because small, independent presses cannot gamble with money the same way conglomerates can. Literary novelists seeking to publish work that is not currently the sort that sells a lot of copies should not also seek to publish with publishers for whom hitting the bestseller list is a priority. This is nothing new. This is not about prim women editors. This is not about gender. This is about money, and power. That is nothing new—or unique to publishing— either.