The Midlist, the Middlemen and the Future of American Literature

A few years ago, an academic acquaintance published a groundbreaking work of scholarship with a top academic press for his field. About a year later he got a report from the press informing him that his book, the fruit of a decade’s labors, had sold fewer than 100 copies. He seemed a bit shell-shocked by the news. At least it got him tenure.

I love books—a love I get to channel into my own work as a writer of books and book reviews and as books editor here at Mere Orthodoxy, as we publish reviews of both academic and trade books, including some fiction and poetry too. And yet, writers and readers also can never get away from this basic reality: books today are a big business. Sure, in the case of academics, there are university presses that are nonprofits, and they habitually live in the red, all for that noble goal of advancing knowledge. But it is the for-profit publishers who bring to the world the books that my neighbor may take to the beach; or books the local library might proudly display on the “New Releases” shelf; or ones that I would select to give time and again for friends’ birthdays, Christmases, and graduations.

How do these books get made? The process from acquisition to publication is notoriously complex and at times opaque, but for writers of fiction, in particular, it involves a key figure—the literary agents who are the middlemen of the publishing world. Their role in the process of publishing, though, has historically been in the shadows.

Until now. In her new book that I could not put down, Middlemen: Literary Agents and the Making of American Fiction, professor and literary scholar Laura B. McGrath presents the fruits of her own labors of a decade. Since 2016, McGrath has interviewed over 75 literary agents whose views she presents in the book on conditions of anonymity. In addition, she interviewed a number of prominent industry leaders, including agents and publishers, who did agree to be named. She spent hours in formal interviews and less formal conversations and interviews in person and online, she sat in on industry work meetings and lunches, and she attended the internationally renowned Frankfurt Book Fair. She also ended up getting an agent to contract her own book, published with Princeton University Press, a top-of-the-line academic-trade cross-over press.

The result is an in-depth examination of the publishing industry over the past century and a half, and how it became what it is today: “The agent’s intuition about the literary marketplace and their subsequent negotiation between manuscript and product, writers and readers, form and finance, has not only shaped the way that books have been made, but which books have been made in the first place. The agent’s representation and mediation have shaped nothing short of contemporary literature.”

The overall story could be summed up as follows. Once upon a time, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, most authors did not have agents but handled the business side of their writing themselves. But then some savvy individuals found that they could help authors broker much better deals in selling their work to top magazines and publishers. Indeed, the earliest agents helped fiction writers sell their short stories profitably to magazines. And so, a new business model was born, whereby writers could leave the business side of things to agents, while sticking to that thing they most wanted to do—writing. Today, many of the top presses—the Big Five—only communicate with agents, these middlemen, when acquiring books.

Of course, reality is even more complicated than this sounds. And the additional factor here, perhaps, is the agents’ literary taste. The story of modern fiction publishing, McGrath shows, has been dominated and shaped by particular agents who in many cases took a risk on what they thought was an extraordinary book by an unknown writer, and the gamble paid off. The agent’s taste, in other words, ended up being just what the public would love too—and at the right moment. Such agents then become over time magnets for other successful writers—and, in turn, to be represented by a top agent is key to becoming a top-selling novelist too. Success begets more of the same in this industry, making the agent more and more influential with publishers in the process.

So, for instance, a young Sterling Lord took a chance on Jack Kerouac, whose controversial On the Road made them both a fortune. Another agent, Candida Donadio, took a similarly bold risk in representing Joseph Heller’s innovative Catch-22 (originally Catch-18). The eventual success of her first client against all odds (coming on the heels of many rejections first by publishers) paved the way for her to represent successfully other bestselling novelists, including Thomas Pynchon and Philip Roth, in a career that spanned a half-century. Not bad for a high-school graduate and daughter of Sicilian immigrants.

But, as it turns out, modern literary agents do a whole lot more than promote to publishers the books that they think should be published. They also do a lot of behind-the-scenes polishing and editing of manuscripts. They take books in the category of “this feels like it could be something” and make it into that something that will actually attract the eye of an acquisitions editor. “At least half of the books I’ve sold, I do more editorial work before the sale than the editor does afterward,” one agent told McGrath. “Good agents are editing agents,” another said.

Of course, there is much guesswork in the process, even for the best agents—just as is the case for the best publishers. True, McGrath notes, agents sometimes take on books that they know may not be outstanding successes, but ones that they think should exist. Indeed, short story collections, which notoriously do not sell well, belong in this category. But at least short story collections have one key redeeming value for agents: they are habitually over-represented on the short lists of major awards. And while awards do not always translate into sales, they translate into prestige for authors and their press, which means something too. Besides, sometimes a good short story writer will go on to write bestselling novels down the road—George Saunders readily comes to mind, for instance.

Still, the uncertainty of the business side of writing, even for the best of agents, looms in the background of the book. For every story of a book that an agent took on and sold for a massive advance and that went on to win major awards and become a bestseller, there is a story of a similar risk that did not pan out. Readers are a fickle sort, and sometimes books just flop. As a result, in an astounding statistic, “approximately 60 percent of debut novelists do not publish a second book.” Why? Because after taking a major risk on a debut novel, a flop means no one wants to take a similar risk again on a second one. A debut novelist who accepted a six-figure advance that the book could never earn out becomes overnight a has-been. But the result on the contemporary literary landscape is striking: “The literary field of the twenty-first century is defined by its immaturity.”

What we are describing, in other words, is the disappearance of the midlist for the top publishing houses, a phenomenon in which publishers and at least some literary agents are at least partly complicit, McGrath suggests. But what is the cost of this disappearance for American literary landscape? It’s hard to know, because we are speaking here of the invisible library of books that might never get published, because a writer’s first book only had modest success and did not earn out the advance. Still, recent publishing history offers some hints.

The literary and music critic, Ted Gioia, reflected on the disappearing midlist in connection with his own publishing career. While his third book sold an impressive 100,000 copies, he notes that his first two books sold very modestly, and yet his then-editor signed him for his second book when the first one was barely out. His personal Substack now boasts over 284,000 subscribers, attesting to his success in reaching readers. But implied loudly in his piece is the question: what if based on his first book, he was never allowed to write the second and third? There is a well-established history of midlist writers slowly building up to eventually publish a bestseller, if only the path to do so exists for them yet.

Even more remarkable is the story of the novelist Cormac McCarthy, considered by some one of the best American novelists. Except, McCarthy’s books were commercial flops for decades, notes book critic and writer Joel J. Miller. Indeed, no literary agent was involved in McCarthy’s highly unconventional novel debut: “McCarthy, a college dropout, sent the typewritten manuscript of his debut novel to Random House because, as he said, ‘it was the only publisher I’d heard of.’ The book landed on the desk of Albert Erskine, an editor whose pen had marked up the pages of William Faulkner, Robert Penn Warren, Ralph Ellison, James Michener, and Malcolm Lowry, among other luminaries.”

Clearly the seasoned editor loved McCarthy’s work and saw promise in it, but his acceptance of McCarthy’s novels turned out to be an exercise in extreme patience—and must have seemed like outright foolishness to others: “Random House published The Orchard Keeper in 1965. Unfortunately, readers paid no attention. The book was a flop, as were all the books McCarthy published throughout the seventies and eighties: Outer Dark (1968), Child of God (1973), Suttree (1979), even a book now regarded as a highpoint in American literature, Blood Meridian (1985). Despite critical acceptance, none sold more than couple thousand copies upon release and all drifted out of print.”

McCarthy finally hit it big in 1992 with All the Pretty Horses, and then fans started reading his earlier novels. Miller’s point, though, is that no editor today would take this sort of risk—a thirty-year gamble! McGrath’s research certainly supports this point. For one thing, the middlemen have grown more cautious, as have the publishers. Breaking into publishing has become harder—and so has publishing each subsequent book.

Except, not all publishing is subject to the exact same trends. The demise of Washington Post’s book review section earlier this year raised this question: Are people still reading? And if so, who is still reading—and what? Poet and literary critic Adam Kirsch stated in The Atlantic that “The Literary Ecosystem Is Dying.” But it doesn’t seem like this is entirely the case—although it may appear so, when looking at some portions of the literary ecosystem. In mid-April, though, I attended the biennial Calvin Festival on Faith and Writing, a vibrant and joyful gathering of writers and readers, publishers and agents. And I have many reasons to believe that the conservative Christian literary ecosystem is thriving right now—by many metrics, it is growing, not shrinking.

Indeed, the tale of this particular ecosystem and the role of agents and editors in it is a story still waiting to be told—and I hope someone will take it up.