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So I'm starting the search for a literary agent for my fantasy adventure novel. I haven't sent out any queries yet-- I've got at least one more round of beta readers and I still need to perfect a query letter-- but I've been looking through manuscriptwishlist and querytracker for prospective agents. Now this didn't come as a surprise or anything, but the ratio of female to male agents is something like 7:1. And making some assumptions based on biographical elements, I'll wager that the ratio of female to straight male agents is something like 15:1. And despite the fact that as a catholic I'm already pretty redpilled culturally in spite of my neoliberal principles-- wow is the performative support for alphabet + "marginalized" (read: nonmale, nonwhite) identities off the charts. It's genuinely pretty disheartening.
Now I could, in principle, present myself as exactly the kind of person these agents want: a brown author with a story set in a non-euroamerican inspired fantasy and female gender-non-conforming main character. (She actually conforms pretty well to the gender norms of her own culture, but I made a concerted effort to have all my cultures be strange and bizarre.). I even address a "socially relevant cause" (immigration) as a secondary theme. But the idea of contorting myself into their box disgusts me. And besides that, my treatment of the theme draws intentional parallels between immigration and imperialism, and poses the question of tradeoffs: security vs prosperity, the right to preserve your culture vs. the need to enforce uniform standards of good behavior, the interests of the immigrants vs. the interests of the locals, etcetera. And also the main character is genuinely racist. I don't think that'll go over well with the kind of people who "care deeply about supporting marginalized voices" and specify, "NO MORE BORING CIS WHITE GUYS" in all caps.
Despite that, I'm still going to go through the submission process. I'm not going to cope about sour grapes-- most probably, if I can't get an agent, it'll be because my manuscript just isn't good enough. Or, even if it is, it might just not be marketable enough, for reasons completely unrelated to politics. I was this close to listing "made in abyss" as a comp title; my level of politics-neutral degeneracy is high enough that I'll be genuinely surprised to earn out an industry-standard $10,000 advance.
But still-- if anyone can point me to resources for finding agents who aren't NPCs, I'd appreciate that. I'm also thinking about direct submissions to conservative-leaning mid size presses but worry those will just pose the equivalent-but-reflected problem.
Your best bet is to go indie. If you absolutely must attempt traditional publishing, skip the agents and try submitting directly to Baen.
But, seriously, go indie.
Trad publishing would be hard enough if you were willing to play the idpol game, because you'd be competing with all the other people who are also willing to play the idpol game, and trad publishing is a tournament market where a few well-connected authors make it big and everyone else waits tables. But the fact that you are not willing to play makes it hopeless.
You are like a student applying to Harvard on the strength of his SAT and AP scores, unwilling to do extracurriculars or networking because that's not what education should be about, refusing to disclose his URM status and without a legacy family member to vouch for him; it's not going to work.
I see from the sibling comments that you don't want to publish serially. That's not ideal (you are leaving money on the table), but not quite a dealbreaker; while serial publishing on Royal Road or similar supported through Patreon is the usual way to fund a work in progress, once it is finished the standard practice is to delete the free copy and put it on Kindle Unlimited, so you can just jump straight to that.
And I also see that your goal is to make enough money to quit your job. As you correctly note, if an online novel gets popular enough it will eventually be acquired by a trad publisher anyway. If not, it is very unlikely that it would have ever gotten traditionally published in the first place, or that it would have paid back its advance if it had. None of those self-published guys you see at your local's writer groups would have made it big if they had tried trad publishing instead of online publishing; they would have just failed.
If you are serious about this, you have to commit one way or the other. Make a desperate all out effort to get traditionally published, including ticking the idpol boxes, and understand that you will most likely fail anyway. Or put all your effort into being an indie author, including adapting your writing to the serial format, and understand that you will most likely end up as a midlister doing his own marketing and outreach and never making as much money as you are currently making in a well-renumerated job.
And if neither of those are acceptable to you, just quit now, before you waste any more time on this.
I strongly agree with this, especially for someone with the cultural attitudes of the median motizan. The gatekeepers to the existing paths to success are largely all held by people who are actively looking for NOT YOU and view keeping you out as an active good, and while alternatives such as Baen exist they are but one port and that is just a different tournament model of which of the legions of authors applying to them get picked.
Kindle Unlimited and other self published routes have a bad rap in a lot of places because the lack of gatekeepers means the quality can be pretty low, but there are a lot of people who have been a success who would not have been able to make it otherwise. You probably don't want to do this because it seems low status and sends a signal that your book isn't good enough for traditional publishing, but try to be Larry Correia. He self published his first book, marketing it primarily by sharing it on the gun enthusiast forums he participated it, and now is very successful in the trad publishing world (largely through Baen, but still) on the basis of that success. If you self publish and make a follow up post with the link here I will pre-commit to at least giving it a look.
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