Don't Become a Writer. It's Embarrassing.

If you're bad, you're making a fool of yourself. If you're good, it's even worse.

I’ve been a literary agent for… well, I’m not telling you how long. It’s not the career I wanted, but I don’t entirely despise it. I work in an office, and I make enough money to support myself, one dog, and three cats. Out of all the books I’ve represented, there are four or five I’m genuinely glad to have spotted. In all, it could be worse. I’ve seen people work jobs that have literally killed them, and mine won’t. To be disappointed instead of miserable is, I suppose, a luxury. Honestly, I prefer my life over that of any author whose work I respect. You want to talk about a path I don’t envy? We’ll talk about the 95% of authors who aren’t celebrities.

Is my job glamorous? Here’s the truth. It’s somewhere in the middle, as far as jobs go. The industry’s decline, and the sense of powerlessness that comes with it, is a bummer. Day to day, though, it’s not so bad. I like the people I work with. I have less time to read books I actually enjoy than you do. I make a quarter of what you would think based on my age, my level of education, and the city I live in because I have to live there. Some of my clients are millionaires, but all of those were rich before they started selling books. For example, I’ve got an executive who loses money on every title because he buys his way onto the bestseller list, but earns it back tenfold on the corporate ladder. Businessmen don’t read much, but they’re constantly buying books for each other, and what I’ve done for his name has kept him in the running for the top jobs in the country. To be honest, I’m probably responsible for more reputations than for books worth reading.

I don’t prefer that ninety percent of my time is spent on unworthy books. Authors, especially unpublished ones, overestimate the power I really have. When it comes to my real writers, I can’t even get them read half the time, let alone published. Celebrities and business book guys are easy, but writers all want to work on projects of serious depth, and those are extremely difficult to sell. “Very online” young men have recently discovered traditional publishing’s abandonment of serious literature, and think it’s a problem of “wokeness.” It’s not. I have white male geniuses I can’t get editors to read, and I have black female geniuses I can’t get editors to read. This is an everyone problem.

Recently I had “the talk” with my teenage nephew who is starting to show concerning literary aspirations. He’s a smart kid, and he could probably grow up to be the sort of writer I would enjoy reading, but I told him to stick with computer science, make a few million dollars, and—if he still wants to write—do it in his second career. It’s not that I couldn’t get him an inside track. I could easily land him an agent—a good one—and arrange a decent starter deal in his early twenties, and if he were willing to write to market and ignore his real interests, he could probably make… a third of what he’ll get as a software engineer. The book tours, the take-off-three-years-to-write advances, and the important reviews? Those are for publishing royalty. I’ve achieved perks like that for authors with platform, celebrity, and resources, but I haven’t seen the strength of the writing itself be a factor in a deal, at all, since the 2000s. In nonfiction, you don’t even get a fact checker unless you’re packing.

I should let you in on a little secret. Almost no one in our world has time to read anything properly. Writers get furious when they find out how much we skim, but so do acquisitions editors and marketing directors and publicists, not to mention half of the reviewers you’ve heard of. Authors write gushing praise (because their houses “request” they do so) of books they wouldn’t say three good words about if they actually saw what was in them. The most influential members of the public, I have to say, aren’t much better. I look at Amazon or Goodreads to see the reviews of a book I know well, and at least one of the top three will come from someone who didn’t understand the book’s basic premise. BookTok? Don’t get me started. Do I skim? Sure, because everyone else does. I almost have to, because if I give a book a real read I will be become too biased to see it the way skimmers will. I know the preferences of the most important people in this industry because it’s my job, and I will tell you there are only three decision-makers who actually read for quality, and they’re all over fifty. Deep reading is an eccentric hobby. This has been true for at least twenty years: the quality of the writing does not influence the chances of your work being picked up by a publisher, the size of the advance you get, or the amount of publicity you are given. If your book survives a decade, which most don’t, then it will influence whether it is taught in schools. That’s it. As far as external rewards go, that’s all the words count for.

If my nephew has it in him to write, he’ll find a way to make it happen after twenty years in software, and writing will still be there. Meanwhile, it’s nine at night and I’m clearing out sad query letters from people who never got “the talk” from anyone and believe they’re one call from someone like me from a writerly life that hasn’t existed for decades. Sometimes, rejection is a favor. Mediocre writing is embarrassing, even when it sells. Excellent writing is only valued by excellent people, and they’re in short supply. I once turned down a very capable author, for her benefit in my belief, after she said she’d “do anything” to meet a publisher’s deadlines. Please don’t say this if you want an agent who actually cares about your welfare to keep going, because “do anything” is code for leaving one’s day job, which would be financially suicidal considering how low advances for real literature are. I knew she was the sort of person who would develop false hopes no matter how much I tried to convince her of this industry’s realities, so I turned her away.

In truth, I’m not impressed by writers as a crowd. There are so few good ones. I’ve read a bunch who’ve wowed me, but they’re mostly dead. I’ve met, maybe, sixteen, and they’re never at the interesting parties. “I have a novel.” So does everyone else. Most books take a long time to write, don’t lead to wealth or useful fame, and put the author’s reputation and employability at risk (a low risk—again, nobody reads.) You wrote it? Good for you. You’re the happiest you’ll ever be if you don’t tell a soul. If the work’s bad, you don’t want it out there. If it’s good? I have seen zero exceptions to the rule that, the better you are at writing, the worse you are at selling it. Good writers are rare and they are weird people. Unfortunately, selling your own writing is ninety percent of the job these days, even if you get a trade deal. My sense is that anyone smart enough to become a writer worth giving a damn about has other options. Medicine. Engineering. Public service. Get a good day job so you, unlike me, can retire when you’re my age, and then write your book.

We all need good new text, but not that much. If the world produced at least a hundred good books per year (I suspect it does) and had systems that could connect them with readers (it does not) it would be a happier place. However, the junk gets the publicity, causing us to lose readers and making it even harder to sell serious literature. You want to make the world better? You’re unlikely to do it as a writer. Become a good reader. We actually need those.

Comments are open. Don’t ask me for a job (you don’t want any job I can get you) and, for the love of God, don’t try to query me here. If you still want to be involved with traditional publishing, then I’m a lousy writer after all.