MIDDLEMEN

Inside the book world.

Literary historian McGrath brings sociological methodology to an examination of a particular literary subculture: agents, the intermediary between an author and publisher. Drawing on archival sources, input from more than 75 agents (including several of the most influential in the field, trade, and industry publications, biographies, and memoirs, McGrath offers insights into the strategies, values, and relationships that shape an agent’s work. How, she asks, does an agent sell books by an unknown writer? Find promising clients among the many who want to get published? Weigh her taste against commercial viability? Advocate for writers of color, in a system that values whiteness? Most important, how does the agent shape who, what, when, and how a work gets published? McGrath focuses on several facets of the publishing business, including the marketing of a debut novel, the significance of short story publication, the challenges faced by agents of color, and the selling of books internationally. Her investigations uncovered some surprises: Although an author’s track record is significant in publishers’ decisions to buy future work, she found that the debut novel has become a dominant force in the literary marketplace, making “youth and inexperience” assets rather than liabilities. Short story publication “functions as an audition” for a writer, helping agents to identify potential novelists. In publishing writers of color, the insularity of publishing’s social networks—the field of agents is 80 percent women and largely white—tends to prop up “existing power structures,” favoring plots showing Black people or immigrants assimilated into or neutralized by white culture; similarly, in selling foreign rights, the tastes and preferences of the “literary center” dictate what gets presented to global markets. The agent, McGrath argues persuasively, serves as an “unacknowledged legislator of the literary field.”

A fresh, well-researched debut.