The most-disliked people in the publishing industry

The most-disliked people in the publishing industry

One way of studying literature is through direct experience. You read a book, you observe that it is excellent, and you try to describe the experience of reading it.

But there also exist other ways. And one of the most promising new approaches to come out of the academy is the “sociology of literature”—the study of how ‘literature’ is created, experienced and defined by the world at large.

Right now, in 2026, one of the main ways literature is constructed is through a set of interlocking institutions—creative-writing departments, book review pages, prestige publishers, grants and fellowships and residencies and awards—that all have the explicit aim of encouraging literary excellence.

The study of these institutions has resulted in a number of interesting books. The two most well-known are Mark McGurl’s The Program Era, which examines MFA programs, and Dan Sinykin’s Big Fiction, which looks at the publishing industry. But these books are far from alone, there was also Inside The Critic’s Circle (on book prizes), and I’m sure many others.

The sociology of literature can be controversial. In his review of Big Fiction, Christian Lorentzen took aim at the whole field, saying that Sinykin “reduces aesthetics and their pleasures to market strategies and susceptibilities”.

But I think this criticism doesn’t really hold up. And here’s why:

Imagine that we had a ‘sociology of literature’ study that was about the dynamics of a medieval scriptorium. Imagine that you could embed yourself as a fly on the wall in the meeting where various monks advocate for the copying of different medieval manuscripts. This is also a marketplace. Every manuscript takes six months of work and takes hide of fifty sheep. Now imagine you hear some monk advocating that they make a copy of this poem, Beowulf. The existence of this poem is one of the great mysteries of English literature. Why did some monastery in the 11th-century spend so much time and energy copying a centuries old poem that likely has a pre-Christian origin?

We can surmise many different possibilities. It’s preserved as part of the Nowell Codex, which includes information on many monsters and marvels. Maybe it was preserved because Beowulf is about a set of monsters: Grendel and his mom and the dragon. Perhaps they didn’t care about the poem as a literary object at all.

But maybe that’s putting the cart before the horse. Maybe they actually assembled the rest of the codex around Beowulf, to create an ostensible reason for preserving this unique text. Was the desire to preserve Beowulf the whole reason for the existence of the manuscript? Or was its preservation only incidental, because it happened to fit with the overall theme of the project?

This would be a highly fascinating thing to know, and it would influence the way we read Beowulf. If we understand Beowulf to have been preserved because of its literary quality, then we might understand its poetic features as being typical of a certain genre of poetry that’s largely lost. Whereas if we understand Beowulf to have been preserved only incidentally, then we cannot guess with nearly so much confidence about its origins.

Similarly, in contemporary times, it is interesting to know how the publishing industry handles the idea of literary quality. Is quality merely incidental to their aim (which is to sell books and make a profit)? Or is quality at the core of their mission?

Publishing is not just a business

While they were both excellent books, I felt that The Program Era and Big Fiction suffered from a similar issue. They both treated their respective subjects (MFA programs and corporate publishing) as homogenizing institutions, which force writers into certain molds.

I think there’s an element of truth to this analysis, but it leaves out a critical part of the picture, which is that the people who work in these institutions tend not to conceptualize their activity in this way. If you talk to any MFA professor, they’ll say their main priority is to preserve the student’s voice—whatever makes their work unique. Similarly, if you talk to any editor at Little Random (the corporate publisher profiled by Big Fiction), they’ll say their aim is to publish books that are unique and move the culture forward.

That’s the thing about publishing. The industry only functions because the people in it are willing to work for not much money. Bertelsmann (the owner of Random House) is a for-profit corporation just like Palantir (a defense contractor), but the employees of Random House don’t need to be paid as much as the employees at Palantir, because Random House is perceived (by its employees) as fundamentally good, something that serves humanity, while Palantir designs software that the government uses to find targets for drone strikes. Jobs at Random House are much harder to get than jobs at Palantir, even though jobs at Random House are paid much more poorly. No college-grad would work for Palantir for $55k (the starting salary for an editorial employee at Random House).

This is also true when it comes to the suppliers, the writers. It took me a lifetime of work to write a book that Random House was willing to sell, but I’m not being paid for those years of labor. I am giving a huge corporation a product to sell, but I am doing it for a fraction of what it cost me to produce that product.

That dynamic is baked into the economics of the business. As such, the business itself requires that perception that it’s somehow serving the cause of literature as a whole.

In my opinion, the sociology of literature has, up to now, not really taken into account these dynamics. Yes, literature is structured by institutions that serve their own self-interest, but that self-interest requires a lot of other people to give them their labor at a very low cost. And that can only happen if the business does enough to maintain this glow of prestige.

Middlemen

That’s why it was so exciting to read Laura McGrath’s forthcoming book, Middlemen: Literary Agents and the Making of American Fiction. This is the first time I’ve read an academic book (McGrath is a professor at Temple) that really seems to take into account the wispy hard-to-define reputational dynamics that’re at the core of how the publishing industry functions.

And McGrath’s book is about probably the most mysterious and most-disliked actors within the industry: literary agents.

Literary agents are the main gatekeepers in contemporary publishing. If an author wants to sell a book to a major publisher, then the author needs to find a literary agent who can successfully market their manuscript to editors.

Although editors exercise some selectivity—rejecting fifty manuscripts for every one they publish—literary agents exercise a much prior and more extreme selectivity, oftentimes rejecting hundreds of queries just to find a single client.

But how do they decide which projects they want to represent?

Some agents probably only care about money: they pick high-value projects and sell them aggressively, maximizing their own returns. Agents get paid 15% of what their author makes, which means agenting is the part of the industry that most closely resembles an actual business. There’s only two ways to get rich in publishing: become a commercial breakout author, or become the kind of literary agent who represents those authors.

But agents who are entirely profit-oriented are not the subject of McGrath’s book.

Instead, she is writing about the agents who specialize in representing prestige fiction. As she notes, this is only a small subset of America’s overall population of 1,500 literary agents. Most agents, according to McGrath, specialize in nonfiction. Even out of agents who primarily sell fiction, more than 70 percent of the deals are for expressly co