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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.
Okay. I have a lot of thoughts about this, gathered over the years of my own (unsuccessful) attempts to be a published author.
To be clear, my failure is mostly lack of commitment (I have not written that many manuscripts, I have only intermittently tried to shop them around, I still mostly treat it as a hobby). I will assert that I am a good (publishable) writer. My posts here on the Motte may not reflect that, but I don't put much effort into writing here. I've been in critique groups, a few writing workshops (these are mostly worthless) and read all the books on writing (both the "how to write novels" ones and the "how to get published" ones). Feedback and my own (obviously not impartial) assessment is that if I really wrote like an author who is determined to be published and kept trying, I'm good enough to get published. (FWIW I did make it all the way to Baen's final round with one of my manuscripts- I got personalized feedback from the editorial committee telling me why it was an "almost but not quite." If you have researched publishing, you know that getting anything other than a polite "This showed real promise but it is not what we're looking for at this time" is rare.)
So first of all, you are right about the overwhelming bias in literary agencies. Fortunately they mostly advertise their biases, so you already know if they are looking for "diverse voices, especially from marginalized and underrepresented communities blah blah blah" there probably isn't much point in submitting to that agent. Most agencies list each agent's preferences, and usually there is one person (most often the one man) at the agency who specializes in things like science fiction and epic fantasy. If his (or occasionally her) profile doesn't flash all the same LGTBQ flags and "craving stories about found family, non-heterocentric romances," etc., then they just might be the sort who is looking for the next Brandon Sanderson or George R.R. Martin, and you have a shot.
But yeah, I would estimate that about 80% of literary agents today have a shingle that says, not quite in so many words, "If you are a straight white dude writing fiction that would appeal to straight white dudes, don't bother me."
It's always going to be a long shot no matter what. Always has been.
I would strongly recommend against misrepresenting your own identity. (Yeah, I've considered that myself.) It will come out eventually, and then your agent will dump you and you might become the next scandal/cancellation in the literary sphere. Also, you do want to eventually be known under your own name, right? Getting your foot in the door by pretending to be a queer BIPOC neurodivergent she/they will only ever look like you were trying to pull a stunt.
So a lot of people are telling you to skip trad publishing and go indie. This is a more viable option than it used to be. But the thing you have to realize about the real money-makers are that they either got extremely lucky (yes, that includes Larry Correia and John Scalzi and Matt Dinniman- hitting it big with a self-cultivated fanbase isn't just about writing a good book, it's often just about timing and catching a wave) or being a grinder. The real moneymakers on KU are people who churn out a book every month or two, whether it's werewolf romances or LitRPGs or harem fantasies, and while some authors can grind out passably entertaining stories at that speed, none of it is good writing. Their audiences are looking for more-of-the-same-please brain candy, not quality writing. Those authors also, of course, are doing it full time if they've started to make enough to live on.
The elephant in the room with self-publishing that hardly any of the self-publishing advocates really want to address is that you and ten million other people are all trying to do the same thing, and nowadays that includes five million Indians using AI. Kindle Unlimited was always looking for a gem in a sea of muck, and now that is true more than ever. Writing a book and throwing it online and hoping it gets "discovered" and builds an audience organically is an even bigger long shot than getting chosen by a rainbow-haired non-binary polyamorous pagan literary agent for your right-wing Catholic epic fantasy (I know that is not how you described it). So that means you have to do all that social media stuff and marketing yourself and getting "in" with various review and lit circles and hanging out with other aspiring self-pubbed authors who will boost each other and... if this sounds like a shit job to do what you really want to do (write) yeah, and everyone in that sphere will tell you tough shit, that's the game.
If you are serious about wanting to make a living from writing... you know that every single book on writing tells you the same thing ("don't quit your day job or have a supportive working spouse") for a reason, right? Even if you do get published (traditionally or self-published), your odds of making enough money to live on are extremely long. Successful authors, big name authors, authors you know, mostly do not live on their writing alone. If they do, it's because they do lots of other writing besides novels. They hustle for freelancing and editing and teaching gigs, they are constantly selling short stories, they do some journalism, they maybe get a gig writing a superhero comic for Marvel or DC. The number of authors who actually make a living, let alone a decent living, off their novels alone is tiny relative to all published authors. Absolutely, dream about becoming a Rowling or a King or a Sanderson, but don't set that as a realistic life goal.
TBF it's not "right-wing", but "catholic epic fantasy" is close enough to the mark. I knew exactly what I was doing with the scene where the main character consumes the blood and body of an undead demigod.
But yeah, I'm aware that "quit my job" money is a long shot. My mindset is that each book is essentially a lottery ticket. The EV is <1, and it's even lower if I go for trad publishing over self publishing. But my utility curve isn't linear with respect to income here: I see the biggest bumps at, "convince a small number of dedicated people to invest a lot of effort into understanding my book" and "make enough money to quit my job." In-between, there's not a whole lot of difference between making 5 or 10 or 20 thousand dollars.
I AM interested in your experience shopping your books around. Are there any (politics-independent) tricks you picked up querying or submitting to contests?
I don't know anything about how the publishing side of it works, but Catholic fiction is A Thing That Exists and seems generally hungry for volume- Taylor Marshall and Raymond Arroyo have both published stuff in it, and if it's worth their time, it's almost certainly seeking authors that aren't quite so big name already.
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