Big Hollywood and Big Beer have taken heat for pushing wokeness over common sense, but the literary world seems to be flying happily under the radar. Since most publishing houses don’t accept submissions directly from fiction writers, it is necessary to go through an agent. For many good reasons, a screening process is required. 

During my years as an art student, I observed two key traits that determined who succeeded in this rarefied arena: perseverance and productivity. If an artist relied strictly on perseverance and productivity, a great deal of patience was also required. But a third factor could speed up the process:  connections. If you knew the right people, you would be more likely to find gallery representation. Notice, I didn’t include talent in this short list. If an Italian man can duct tape a banana to a wall, name it “Comedy,” and sell “an edition” of three at a Miami art fair for $100,000-$150,000 each, then I don’t have to explain my reasoning. 

Well before the Miami exhibition closed, the rotten banana and the duct tape were thrown into the trash. The fact that people had paid a hundred grand to own this garbage might have been the punchline, especially considering that “Comedy” was not produced by a Biden. However, the savvy buyers got the last laugh. Five years later, Sotheby’s has valued “Comedy” at between $1 million and $1.5 million. To be more accurate, this valuation has been attached to a certificate of authenticity that grants the bearer permission to tape a banana to a wall with the blessing of the Italian prankster.

When I was painting and creating prints, I developed good connections. Gallery owners occasionally asked me to show them my work, but I always declined the invitations. I simply knew I was not productive enough to meet their expectations. An agent visiting my studio offered to represent me, after looking through my portfolio. He pulled out a handful of prints that he particularly liked and told me I needed to make more just like those. Maybe I should have agreed to his terms, but at the time I was not inclined to stifle my creativity for commercial success. 

The world of books is somehow more impenetrable. It seems logical that a writer willing to pigeonhole his/her work to the wishlist of the gatekeepers has better odds of getting published than does a gifted individualist. However, I have no firsthand knowledge to back this up. 

My first novel is set in the late 18th century, and the hero is a wealthy British Army officer. With the completion of the manuscript, I was confident in my talent and excited about my prospects for getting published. As the denial emails piled up, I continued to pore through the wishlists of literary agents. So many of them were looking for LGBTQ+ novels, that I told my friends that I should have written a book about a couple of Asian lesbian chefs in 1930’s Paris. 

Still, I was determined. I went to Manhattan to attend a writers conference. My hotel was on West 57th Street, just a couple of blocks from the Art Students League of NY, which I had attended years ago. (The hotel is now the temporary home of hundreds of illegal migrants.)  The next day, I took a brisk walk down 8th Avenue to an office building just past 37th Street, where I would attend some seminars and meet with two agents and an editor.

Only one of the discussions that day really stood out. All four of the panelists were women. Three were late Millennials and one was Gen-X. The three younger ones seemed like good buddies. They spent a lot of time laughing about how much they love to sign authors who write books with product placement, and they traded anecdotes about why that was so great. For instance, the book might be about a woman named Jennifer, who gargles daily with Listerine. Then the agency could hit up Johnson & Johnson to sponsor the launch party or pay for publicity. If the book mentioned that Jennifer liked to go to bars and drink Bud Lite, they would ask Anheuser-Busch to cater a book signing. 

Of course, even the most skillful product placement is futile, if no one ever reviews the submission. The Gen-Xer chimed in with her advice on how the aspiring novelist can get her manuscript reviewed. “The opening line of your cover letter should inform me of how we met,” she divulged, in all seriousness. “If we don’t know each other, then tell me who referred you.”  I was waiting for the suggestion on what would get her attention if I was contacting her cold, but she clammed up. It was starting to feel like I just blew a couple of thousand dollars on this trip. Oh well. Maybe the one-on-one sessions would go better.

My first conference was with Julia. She was in her early twenties. Her demeanor suggested that she was enduring a fierce bout of PMS and that our 10-minutes together was about nine minutes too long. I had sent her the first 50-pages of my manuscript which, to her credit, she had read. It was clear that she didn’t like it. “You have to take out the passage about the teapot,” she grumbled. “It’s boring and no one is going to care about it.”

“I can’t take it out,” I said. “It’s important later in the narrative.” 

“Oh.”

There are plenty of popular novels that have extraneous passages, and books like that have become a pet peeve of mine. However, that’s not how I write. Maybe a 50-page sample was not enough to convey that impression to Julia. Or, given her youth and limited experience, maybe anything longer than a text message was beyond her attention span. 

Next I met Jo. She was an older woman with the kind of self-confidence that you seldom encounter outside of New York. “If you want to land an agent, you need to cut 45,000 words from your manuscript,” she declared.

If my jaw didn’t drop, it was only because I felt like I was choking. “How?”

“I’ll give you the name of the best editor in the country. Call Sarah. See if she is available.”

Okay, none of this was good. My final interview was with Amy. She instantly lifted my spirits. “What you have accomplished is extraordinary!” she gushed. 

I told her about the cuts that Julia and Jo said I need to make.

Amy shook her head. “They’re wrong,” she said. “If anything, you need to add more. I would like to see more descriptions.”

Unfortunately for me, Amy was not an agent. Although in the end I took her advice and not Julia’s or Jo’s, that did not get me closer to my objective. After spending more than a year looking for an agent, I ended up self-publishing, because I needed to move on to my next project.

It happens that I particularly love writing about strong, inspiring men, who lived in the late 18th century. My latest manuscript is a novel based on the life of a British Army officer from the time of King George III. Looking at the wishlists of woke gatekeepers simply discourages me. I am not foolish enough to think anyone would solicit books about “privileged white colonizers,” but it is hard to believe that there is a clamoring for fiction with LGBTQ+ characters.   

Some folks who categorize people by skin color and cultural origin might disparage many of my characters. But everyone of the men and women in my books shares a common thread of humanity with us all. If I can’t compel a reader to view a British general or the King of England as a complex human being, than I have not done my job. Yet, like the art world of my younger days, perhaps the publishing world is less about talent and more about marketing and who you know.

The dominance of a woke agenda among literary agents is hardly the biggest problem facing us. Even so, I question if a gatekeeper is really meant to function as a roadblock. On the day after the election, I looked at the X-Twitter feed of an agent. She made it clear in her postings that she is a “Queer for Palestine,” who echoes the call for global intifada. Unhinged by the Harris loss, she ordered all Trump voters to immediately unfollow her. Considering that she uses this account for professional purposes, I wondered if anyone at her agency was concerned about how her views reflect on the company, or if they all looked at things the same way.

In any event, a palpable frustration with the status quo has broken out and is spreading. Maybe I’m as old-fashioned as the characters I write about, because I hunger for a semblance of reason, decency, and decorum. I guess I have a wishlist too. And I know I’m not alone.