For the true beginner, there can be no end. From the moment they sit at the desk, the unemerged writer faces a step-by-step gauntlet of workshopping, applying, contesting; of liking screenshots of Publishers Weekly deals announcements, making astral connections between time periods, and writing sex scenes from a distant gender’s point of view; it is a culture of fees, of Moleskines, and bios that read seriously, seriously, jokingly; of tips, tools, and works in progress in, one can only assume, sheds; of deadlines for floodgate submission periods and inboxes full of L’s; of checks for $50 like birthday gifts from doting grandmothers (though no one calls to remind you to cash them); of sending out short fiction like so many state-fair-quality butternut squashes and banging out personal essays a decade after boom’s end. All that, and what to show for it, and what to tell?
Among those ostensible first steps in the writing trade is to simultaneously storm the gates of literary agents, the subject of Laura McGrath’s Middlemen. It follows Dan Sinykin’s Big Fiction—a history of the publishing conglomerate—and elaborates on Mark McGurl’s deathless Program Era (or, what little of “MFA discourse” makes actual reference to it) in describing clearly but with the occasional interesting verb our current literary economy. McGrath sees agents as a missing link, traders of “symbolic capital,” a split difference between market manipulators and keepers of the flame of tastefulness in an algorithmic world. Incidentally, Middlemen also makes a near pass, ever so close to an observation of the dark matter of books. The vast majority of contemporary literature is not in fact published but submitted. If, as Christian Lorenzen wrote, “the dominant literary style in America is careerism,” then it’s the writers without careers who are most responsible.
We have only approximate measure of the slush. In Everything and Less, his book on Amazon, McGurl faintly detects an “underlist, a vast ocean of inert literary content stored on the server at marginal cost.” This anti-canon may or may not include samples attached to an estimated 20,000 annual applications to MFAs, with acceptance rates plummeting below 2%—nearly as discriminating as a no-name literary journal or a deluged sci-fi magazine. Add to that McGrath’s conservative estimate of 15-17 million full manuscripts in the slush piles of literary agencies, plus the 1.4 million new titles per year earning royalties via Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP). What is significant about these marginally publishable literary acts, these ten pages in the body (of the email), is not how they are read but their conspicuous unreadness. Merely implied in the familiar story of technological advance—the speed and volume and “overload” of information—is the correspondingly exponential increase in futility. Go forth and “find your voice,” the Submitters were told. And so it was a million times found, and then promptly lost.
In publishing, this futility is something of an open secret. Penguin Random House, largest seller of books, and most eager to sell them best, testified in court that the sales of only 4 percent of its books effectively subsidized the rest. “Everything is random in publishing,” said CEO Markus Dohle, to serve his argument that a merger with Simon & Suster would hardly create a monopoly in, among other things, bookselling acumen. But the numbers back him up. According to BookScan, of the 3.2 million new titles of 2021, fewer than 1 percent sold more than 5,000 copies. This reality jars somewhat against the narrative of a P&L-fixated “superorganism” that marshals its editors and marketers in the production of data-driven page-turners, a supposedly well-oiled machine built to dominate the bestseller list.
A glance at that list tells a different story. Big-5 publishing has routinely dipped into the underlist for romantasy, fanfic, and film-adaptable sci-fi on personal websites—books already technically published, with proven sales or downloads or likes on forums or communities or platforms that haphazardly systematize iterative plays on genre. (Ruby Dixon’s self-pubbed Ice Planet Barbarians series’ big blue sex aliens with knots are followed up by Bull Moon Rising’s sex minotaurs’ ruts from Ace, 2025, but both, for instance, have horns). On any given week,[1] half the NYT trade and hardcover fiction lists might emerge from this end-around traditional publishing, forcing agents and editors to pivot into the role of recruiters. This is publishing’s adaptation of the gimmickry of modern culture industries: the ability to set aside the success of one’s own product and still make on-time deliveries of shareholder profit. It should go without saying that if publishers were leveraging proprietary knowledge of what books their customers want to read, readers would be reading them. Two things can be true: that the business has been remorselessly optimized for sales, and the sellers are coming from outside the house.
Exclusion generates the prestige toward which unpaid labors strive.
Once upon a time, the Crichtons and the Grishams ruled a mass market for books, and the literary novel thrived in its wake—“high-cultural pluralism” (McGurl’s beautifully circumspect genre distinction) or “books about race” (McGrath’s blunt assessment of the market for it); Knausgård, Cusk, and the unlikely household names of autofiction; the McCarthy western among fuzzy “genre hybrids” —a definition which Middlemen insightfully elides in proposing the lit agent’s capricious taste as the precise locus of art and commerce (i.e. the “cultural dislocation” of super-agent Nicole Aragi’s list). But the most influential literary genre is the one that clearly doesn’t exist. “MFA fiction”—ordered with extra solipsism by the CIA—has made for eloquent and blistering pans, but serves primarily as a voodoo doll of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop.[2] Textbook examples of MFA style (“Was it the woman in the lace-top thigh-highs, chemise wrap, or the Taylor strapless bra”—a character browsing the Victoria’s Secret catalogue in Grover’s piece from Noah Baumbach’s Kicking & Screaming) are vague enough to read as projections of anxiety about literature’s unstreamable irrelevance, which academics and rank-and-file Submitters would prefer to attribute to guys in your MFA and publishers’ aping of algorithmic data-ism, rather than face a esque apocalyptic landscape where publishers can’t sell books, and literary agents gatekeep a mainstream that doesn’t exist.
What is listed in the last remaining book sections and shelved in the last remaining bookstores play their diminishing parts, but a structural theory of books culture is incomplete without accounting for the profound outnumbering of traditional publishing’s successes by the pages upon pages of the Submitters’ foiled ambitions: futility at scale. The compelling factor of the MFA era and conglomeration is not top-down mechanization—in any case an overstatement of corporate competence—but the bottom-up professionalization of writing that tried to meet it halfway, and necessarily failed to meet it there. Exclusion generates the prestige toward which unpaid labors strive.
Sinykin argues that the contemporary author is themself a fiction, an industrial composite; and so is the failed author, who attempts to navigate a system that’s not supposed to work so much as protract the emergent, extractive process for the aspirer and facilitate their art’s contribution to its own obsolescence. The plight of the Submitter tracks with the paradox of the internet age: those same democratizing elements—more MFA programs, more literary prizes, the publishing industry’s belated commitments to diversity, reckless access to social media platforms where writers do freelance publicity for themselves —lengthen the odds of the lottery by increasing the overall number of ticketholders, and tend to strengthen the hand of elite institutions. If college students are indeed struggling to read beyond the short excerpts of test prep, it seems plausible that books culture as we knew it could never reemerge. The age of the Submitters is here but, fittingly, might already be over. Everyone back in the pool.
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Is writing work? The question sends books discourse into regular paroxysms. Rates are disclosed. Postings with a starting salary in NYC receive a measured response. Paeans to the dignity of the writing trade are juxtaposed with a tiered rejection from the Coastal Nebraska Review and calls for this nonprofit run out of a storage space on the Platte to increase its pay, however commendable, from the less-than-fair amount of fifty bucks.
When a writer in workshop is told to “earn” plot contrivances in a short story, and revisions on a second draft are described as a particularly luckless rideshare shift, self-mythology is soon to follow. A real job is but a rite of passage, worked instead. The professional identity of “writer” transcends a relatable protagonist’s past as “just” a waiter. To stave off this fate, today’s working writers are “productive” with their days spent in a rush to make aspirational word counts, and format the pitchdeck of self virtually required of them, all in service of an unworkable principle: to value their own work at precisely the time the market has priced that work at zero.
We hear there’s a thing that can help us cheat. Oh, wow, can it help us feel cheated too?
A book manuscript is a dying houseplant, mistakenly fed words. It is a lot of work. Only, unlike most work, it most often comes to nothing. To insist on writing, then, according to McGurl, is to insist on “destroying time, the time it takes to write the books that will sit inertly as lines of code on a server.” And yet, liberating writing from the capitalist ethic has its own value. Rather than a piece of writing dignified by money, the work of writing is dignified by a reader’s time.
Because work can always be done faster. As the force-feeding of words to LLMs seemed to put writers at existential risk, a clumsy line of defense was drawn: that there was something definitively unmistakable about human writing. The suspicious em dash—and the easily disprovable notion that only AI used them—was offered as a telltale sign. Updated arguments have proved no more workable: distinguishing our “choices” from theirs, or laboring to define bad writing with better writing. There is no way to define human writing in the abstract; it is the act of writing, the process, that cannot be properly replicated without hours upon years of destroyed time. The uncanniness, in the debris, of hearing one’s own voice. Of, one could say, finding it. It is not as if the only question of literature is Can one be fooled? Which, of course, we can. And so what? We hear there’s a thing that can help us cheat. Oh, wow, can it help us feel cheated too?
There are very real representational problems with regard to realism, phones, and internet life’s microwave instructions for rendering the literal ironic and the ironic literal. On the other hand, the constraints are phantoms: Big Data cliches, Balkanized audiences eating up cliched ethnography. The displacement of little magazines by Substack’s incentives makes for a venue shortage, but the fracturing of audience is another abstraction, just as easily replaced by something more visceral: a popular revolt against runaway artifice and its adoption by corporate culture. If authenticity should be once more the high principle of culture, writers have a free hand to take up the mantle of universality—however riddled with contradiction, false sentiment—and write the social novel of the way we live now. The novel’s real and true question—“What do you think about when you masturbate?”—rings eternal, propelling our narratives, compelling us to do the work of conscience.
Though our words may amount to nothing but feed for the servers, our mere existence composes a letter to young Submitters, its message loud and not very clear: It doesn’t matter who you are, it only matters what you have to say, or vice versa; be relentless, never quit; outline the plot, lose the plot, username, password, username, password. Believe in your novel, which you made up; vow revenge on the NEA. Make an unsolicited life for yourself—make every which way you turn into a Wendy’s. Take every last thing personally—leave nothing to chance. If you have a short biographical statement to make, which is to say in 500 words connect who you are with near certain failure, state it now though the heavens fall. Username, password. To spend one’s life at the desk is to sit with one’s unlived lives; to make peace with destroyed time, to submit, submit, submit. In one of those lives unlived you are a writer; in one of those unlived lives you have heard a reply.
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[1] Take the self-pub-starters of the NYT Paperback Trade Fiction list of May 3, 2026: Andy Weir, whose first book, The Martian, was serialized on his personal website; Freida McFadden, who self-published for a decade before Netflix adapted The Housemaid; Matt Dinniman, popularizer of the “litRPG” genre, started out on a self-pub platform, then moved on to KDP, where SJ Tilly aims for a book a month; singer-songwriter and septuagenarian lawyer Allen Levi had already sold 150,000 copies of Theo of Golden himself before Simon & Schuster bet they could sell at least a few more (37 weeks on the list, mostly atop it); and Navessa Allen straight-up posted chapters on Goodreads before signing on to Zando and PRH’s arguably narrower distribution. Pointedly, none were discovered according to an agent’s discriminating taste or molded by an editor into a font of commercial storytelling.
[2] Graduates of Harvard, a prestigious college not in Boston but nearby, have 17 times the chance of winning a literary prize, but a degree from Iowa confers an edge to the tune of 49 times.
