Anyone who takes part in or who is a serious observer of the arts in America knows what I’m talking about when I say that it’s dominated by a rigid caste of woke mandarins who are resistant to originality.
I’ll focus solely on my area: writing. Below I’ll leave some links to the larger picture. [OUCH; forgot to do that, remedying now.]
For those of you who don’t know the procedure, writing a manuscript is only the first part of bringing it to market. The second leg of the odyssey is querying literary agents. You query, wait, get rejected, query more, get rejected and then dejected. I’ve read stories of people who queried for as long as five years and gave up. Maybe some of these books did deserve to be left in the file cabinet, but how do we know whether there might be a gem in the trash? We don’t.
Back in the old days a writer would send a manuscript to an acquisitions editor. He (usually she) had a “slush pile” and it would take a long time to go through the manuscripts. During this period the writer was honor bound not to submit simultaneously. Some publishing houses still have acquisitions editors but this is rare.
Enter the agent—the middleman who has supplanted the acquisitions editor. Some literary agents are stars. Snag one of them and your book will be published and likely optioned to Hollywood, which is where the real money is. Snagging one of them unsolicited is impossible—they don’t even accept queries.
Most agents aren’t stars, they’re grubbing aspirants. The number of agents has exploded in the last few years, to accommodate the number of unemployable post-docs.
Let’s be fair to them: they offer a free service to a large number of wannabees, most of whom aren’t good. It’s like going up to someone in the middle of rush hour in Grand Central Station, tapping them on the shoulder and demanding, “Pay attention to me! I have something truly earth-shaking to tell you!”
I don’t blame literary agents for becoming jaded. Nor do I blame them for not knowing anything. As the late William Goldman said of the movie biz, “Nobody knows anything.” That’s true of books as well.
Let’s simply acknowledge that literary agents have power.
Let’s also acknowledge that most are left wing—radically so.
Here’s an example that I think is emblematic, a synecdoche of the situation.
Red Sofa is a “boutique literary agency” in Minneapolis, Minnesota. On May 28, 2020, while Minneapolis was engulfed by rioting, its founder, Dawn Frederick, tweeted that she had called the police on looters (a gas station, specifically). The tweets are gone but they they were screenshot by an adversary, here:
How Kay Taylor Rea describes herself:
OK! To continue:
All hell broke loose.
Ms. Frederick was ridiculed throughout the progressive Twitter- and blogosphere.
What did she do? Deleted her tweets and issued a groveling apology on her agency’s website, also now deleted but captured here:
Not good enough!
Three agents resigned from her agency, tweeted about it in the usual vitriolic wokespeak (I believe the “R” word was used). Frederick threatened to sue them for defamation. In short, a woke drama in three acts. I won’t recap the details, just read the links I’ve supplied below.
The Go Fund Me link indicates that the incident dribbled into nothingness. Frederick is still running her agency. The three hacks who were begging for $75K in legal fees raised a fraction of that and donated the surplus to leftist causes. Who cares about the drama?
I don’t. What I do care about is to identify the kind of person who is running the mainstream lit biz in our age (see below) and for whom: “Kay Taylor Rea, she/her queer, defund the police.”
These three may have failed in their attempt to destroy Dawn Frederick, but they’re still in the business. Nor do Frederick’s politics differ from theirs materially. Any writer who produces original work doesn’t stand a chance with this lot.
They run the show.
Which is where the Based Book Sale comes in. Instead of whining, Hans Schantz acted. He’s our Chris Rufo, a doer.
Some force has got to boot this corrupt class in the rear and send them packing, because they’re bad: mean, vicious, toxic and AWFL.
I personally don’t think that self-publishing is going to do it. I think it’s going to take an Elon, a visionary publisher who cares about bringing original voices to a mass audience, but that’s another story for another day. For now, we do what we can do.
This is not a left-right thing to me. I love books of all types, from all perspectives. I just want them to be honest. My kind of escapism is an escape to reality. And reality isn’t woke.
So, have a look at the books in the Based Book Sale. Amazon makes it easy on you—read the first chapter to see if it’s your cup of joe. Give it a try.
I read Neovictorian’s Sanity and had a great time. Links to this, and my books, below.
Don’t let AWFLs have a chokehold on what the public reads.
LINKS
Three Agents resigned. Grim note of irony: in addition to setting fire to such pillars of the power structure as gas stations, pharmacies and supermarkets, they destroyed indie book stores.
Red Sofa Literary Principal Threatens to Sue Other Agents, Author
Heather Mac Donald (that’s how she spells it) has written many articles in City Journal covering the woke onslaught of our great cultural institutions. Read them all, well, as many as you can stand.
The Revolution Comes to Juilliard
Beside the Pointe (yes, not even ballet is exempt!)
BOOK LINKS:
Thanks, Diana.
No publisher will ever approve anything remotely based, and everything that was allegedly an indie gathering quickly became anything but. It happened on Steam with games, it happened with books and Aethon, and there are likely other examples I am not personally familiar with.
The simple fact of the matter is that as long as "the right" claims culture is degenerate, the culture will be degenerate (anything truly based understands there are no political solutions because politics is the problem).