[I'm assuming that everyone who reads my blog knows that I'm of socialist bent. But, just in case you didn't get, I'm a person of socialist bent. And capitalism -- US capitalism, in particular -- utterly fascinates me.]

Recently, which means millennia ago using standard intertube dating methods, Nathan Bransford wrote a post on literary works vs popular works and how the internet “has opened up all kinds of ways for the crowd to be king.” He says, quite rightly too, that:

I’d bet that more people read Amazon reviews than the New York Times Book Review. More people check Yelp [don't know what "Yelp" is, but I'll go with the flow. --ksa] for restaurant recommendations than a city’s local restaurant critic. People don’t particularly listen to the judges when they vote for their favorites [sic] on American Idol and they certainly don’t listen to movie critics when they decide which movies to see.

And when he continues with:

I understand that everyone has different tastes, but there is no pride in ignorance of literary fiction. Genre writers can learn from literary fiction, just as literary writers can learn from genre fiction. There’s a middle ground

I find myself nodding in agreement. But then he starts to veer into the deceptive soft edges:

For now, in order to have your book published you’re going to have to impress the experts, i.e. the literary agents and editors who demand a certain level of quality in the writing.

Uh, maybe. This is going to be difficult to explain without appearing twitter and bisted, but I’ll try.

The goal of every working person on the planet is to make enough money for a comfortable life. Of course the definition of “a comfortable life” varies from person to person, but I think I’m pretty well right in coming to that conclusion. Literary agents are working people and, what’s more, they’re freelancers. Every cent that they earn comes from their own hard work, with no goofing off.

Now, having been a freelancer myself for many many years, I can tell you that the decisions I made during that time were completely different to the decisions I made/make as a wage slave. When hiring people as a freelancer, if A already had the ability to make money for my business, and B needed coaching then, all other things being equal, I’d hire A. When hiring people as a wage slave manager, I might take a punt on B, depending on where I felt that person’s long-term performance might take the company. It was all down to what the company could absorb, and a big zaibatsu (multinational) has a lot more room to manoeuvre than a small business in terms of cash flow.

Just as it is with writers, agents are their own small businesses, whether going solo or under the umbrella of a larger agency. And this means the bottom dollar has to be on what sells. Deep deep down, I’m sure that a lot of agents will agree with me — if they see a manuscript that their experience tells them will sell like hotcakes, even if it’s not written to an exemplary standard, they’ll acquire it. If they see a manuscript that’s utterly beautiful but concerns a topic they know from hard experience won’t sell, they’ll reject it. It’s like choosing A over B in my previous example — the question to answer is, will it make money for me? Agents make this decision because they have to live. In a capitalist society, it really is as simple as that.

(In socialist societies, you have other problems of supply and demand when it comes to publishing (and don’t even think! censorship, because that argument just don’t fly with me, m’kay?), but one thing socialism didn’t have were brokers having to rely on best-sellers in order to keep food on the table and their rent/mortgage paid. Where you have a living wage paid to everyone, regardless of profession, it frees up the acquisitive mind somewhat.)

I know this may sound rather arrogant, but I consider myself a competent writer. However, at this point in time, I don’t have to depend on my writing in order to be able to eat tonight. So, I can afford to write the kind of stuff that doesn’t sell. Remember my space opera romance, War Games? Yep, Kaz ended up writing an f/f novel when everyone knows it’s m/m that sells. Another completed novel has a convicted terrorist as a heroine. Another is set after the demise of the United States and tries to examine the benefits of collectivism in a post-apocalyptic world. (I’m not a real collectivist myself, but that doesn’t mean I can’t see it working well in certain situations.)

These novels might sell to small presses, but none of them are going to put me in the Dan Brown category of earnings. If I even aspire to be in the Dan Brown category of earners, I’m going to have to change what I write about and, to be honest, I’m starting to do that too. Or at least trying to come up with stories that sell better than a male-dominant hermaphrodite on a space station who’s accused of being a saboteur. That doesn’t mean I jump on every trend that comes along … I just can’t come up with either a steampunk or zombie story to save my life, for example … but it does mean that I start to think about tweaking the ideas that do come to me, with the objective of creating more mass-market appeal.

The point is, given a particular level of quality — competent but not mind-blowing — it’s the ability of that manuscript to sell that’s the bottom-line, make-or-break question. Quality is okay but, as always, money is better.

ADDITIONAL: Literary agent Kristin Nelson alludes to this herself with her recent post on editorial reluctance to purchase:

In fact, editors will even be wonderfully complimentary—really highlighting how much they liked the writing, the concept, the talent of the writer but…

That’s what it means to live in a capitalist society, whether you like it or not. And it’s something every writer should be aware of. Sheer. Talent. Just. Isn’t. Enough.