Literary Agents are destroying everything!!!

[charmian]

Via OTF_wank: The Talent Killers: How Literary Agents are Destroying Literature and What Publishers Can Do to Stop Them. Or, a lot of BAAAAWWWWW and WEEEOOOO.

The evil, evil literary agents are obsessed with books that people will pay money for, and avoid books that they don't think people will want to buy. Shocking...

However, I think the ones really to blame are..... readers! Readers are the reason they're publishing so much vampire fiction and fantasy novels and mystery-thrillers.

This comment is also very perceptive: it's the bookstores which don't make it possible for an author to slowly build up an audience, because they return books so relentlessly.

Comments

[charmian]

It is of the tl;dr, but fairly amusing. Nathan Bransford is also in the comments attempting to talk sense to the OP, but not really getting through. She seems to believe that agents have imposed themselves on the poor innocent editors, and NB is trying to explain that the publishing companies themselves created the current system. XD

[kali]

Look, he is the enemy; or perhaps he is one of the non-corrupted few who feels obligated to stand with his fellows, but he does not know the depths of their depravity! so one cannot take him at his word.

I guess what should happen is, she tries to submit her work directly to the publishers, and see how far she gets with that.  Surely they will see her genius!

[charmian]

The slush pile, I think, is where it's going....

[kali]

I still have not bothered to read the original post (though I am sure I have the gist of it), but at some point I think NB (now a celebrity!  To myself, since it only matters when I become aware of it!) called in some reinforcements in the form of editors/publishers in order to inject some value into the whole thing, so overall this nonsense has been a good deal, I think. XD