I recently entered a discussion
group online and had my ass handed to me. It has turned out to be a wonderful
experience. Thank you, Sylvia McKillop Davey for the thumping you gave me over
my ignorance of available statistics. Thank you, Ula Elliott for not actually
losing your temper over what was mistakenly, and unintentionally, a shallow
thing for me to write. Thank you, Lesley Krier Tither, for allowing me to be
hoisted by my own petard. Thank you, Michaela Eaton for helping me find the
article again so I could discover what I missed.
I became a member of a discussion
group and entered a discussion about the presumed bias in the publishing
industry against women and their literary work. The bastions of the traditional
publishing world are, it appeared from the articles discussed, rife with unfair
practices. To demonstrate, a woman ran an experiment. She sent query letters to
fifty agents about a manuscript she had written, asking for representation. She
received, in return, a paltry amount of interest. She then resubmitted her work
and queries to these same agents but changed her name to indicate she was a man.
She received a great many interested responses; as many as any author could
hope for. The conclusion drawn from the article was that women were being
treated unfairly. I commented that maybe she wrote like a man, the work
resounded like a man’s, and had received an adequate level of interest in her
work as an author with a man’s name. What’s the problem? I added. Now I know
what I stepped in and it’s up to me to clean up my own shoes.
I believe that my apparently shallow
comments to this issue came from, in part, my reaction to the presumption that
most, if not all, literary agents, and the attending publishers and reviewers,
are biased against women and their work. I took great offense at this implied conclusion.
My uncle was a literary agent and I have never known a more serious, wise, and
humble man in my life. I remember sitting in his office with him once. He
picked up a query letter from an author and read it to me. The author had
written a book about the wonders of the British Royal Family. My uncle was not
impressed and neither was I but behind the veil of his disappointment was
something else that resembled pain. He didn’t like the fact that he would have
to turn down this author but his job demanded it. He knew, because he had been
a literary agent for a long time, that this work was not a marketable property.
His judgement declared it regardless that this particular author was a woman.
To imply that his judgement was flawed in a way that could be described as
biased against women is utterly ridiculous and offensive. And it pained him to
turn away from this query letter because he understood very well the creative effort
an author must exhibit, the passion required, and the just-plain-hard work. He
may have understood then that a bias like this existed and, if this is true,
I’m certain he was fully aware of it and detested it. I never knew who his
clients were. He kept their privacy sacred. I do know that he made at least one
trip to Stockholm as a guest of one of them. His judgement about a piece of
writing as far as its merit and marketability could never be questioned. Not in
my mind.
I am also quite convinced that if
he were alive today and read the articles I refer to, visited the discussion as
I have, it would pain him even more because of the damage a bias like this was
inflicting. My own ignorance of this issue was simply born out of my own
experience, or lack thereof, of what is out there. I didn’t sense that women’s
writing was underrepresented. I looked at all the books on Goodreads and saw a
profusion of books written by women. I know that many authors I enjoy are women
and that is part of what I enjoy – a woman’s literary voice. Donna Tartt just
won a Pulitzer for her book The Goldfinch.
Alice Munro recently received a Nobel Prize for her work. I even recently
finished a wonderful novel by Anne Patchett – The Patron Saint of Liars – so I was ignorant of the issue that my
discussion group was concerned with. I haven’t found any real evidence of their
complaint yet, however. All I’ve found is suspicious facts. Very suspicious
facts. Perhaps there won’t be any real evidence of this bias no matter how
deeply I dig into it. After all, who in their right mind would openly declare
that women and literary work produced by women were inferior? That would be,
simply put, STUPID (re: V.S. Napaul’s comments that his work is better than
Jane Austen’s) If my friends’ arguments and concerns are real (which I suspect
heavily that they are) I understand the pain my uncle would feel over it and in
this way I know him even more deeply than I ever did as his nephew. In an
industry that is experiencing competition from massive online booksellers, an
overwhelming profusion of writers producing work that they wish published, and
a turning away by the readers that create all of this industry, I am flummoxed.
I cannot understand how a group of focused, educated, supposedly moral people (men
and women) who populate the industry of publishing can ignore the facts right
in front of them. If they did, wouldn’t they do something about it? Wouldn’t they
do everything they could to reinvigorate their business, not following the
traditional way of doing things with the hope of surviving, but leading with
the certainty of thriving? If the conclusion is true and the publishing
industry is biased and trying desperately to hold on to what may have been accepted
practice in years gone by, that would be just crazy, right? Crazy or not, I
have the clear suspicion that it might be true.
I am a recently published author
myself. When I wrote my collection of short stories, one of my recurring fears
was that my uncle, if I approached him as an agent, would have to turn down the
manuscript. If you are under the suspicion that, were he still alive, I would
be enjoying some form of entitlement because he was my uncle and a literary
agent, you are greatly mistaken. The truth would be exactly the opposite. I
chose instead, to self-publish my effort, albeit two years after he passed. I
have therefore given up all the possibilities of enjoying what writers believe
is still possible: book signings organized by an agent, nice hotel rooms paid
for by publishers, and possible notoriety simply from the marketing efforts of
a well-oiled industry. In short, fame. Potentially, Rock-Star level fame. The
kind enjoyed by J.K. Rowling, or the author of that ludicrous novel 50 Shades of Gray (Both are women,
interestingly). I gave up the pursuit of this whether it actually is in the
cards for me or not. I do my own marketing. I hired a firm to do the cover art,
font stylings of the text, and most of the distribution, everything that a
self-published author has access to in this day and age. I did it, both because
of what I feared my uncle might be right about, and have to tell me with an
agonizing pain in his heart because I was also his nephew, and from my own
independent nature (I am not, by experience or temperament, a team player). If
women who write, fiction or otherwise, feel they cannot be adequately
represented and can give up on what an agent notoriously (and falsely) might
promise to them and their careers, they can let their work be read, judged for
what it is, and succeed based upon what we all (men and women) truly want to be
judged by: The merit of our work.
I know my uncle would feel
pleasure, not pain, over my efforts to write and my success with it whatever
that turns out to be. He encouraged me often to write something, without
promising anything, and my only regret is that I will never sit in his office
as his nephew again nor will I be able to show him that I actually, finally,
wrote something.
I will always be immensely grateful for his true kindness at
whatever stage of life he found me.
G. M. Potter, Emigrant, MT.
Postscript: The day before posting this opinion, I was
removed from the discussion group. I am no longer a member. In conversations
with the moderator of this group, via private message, I had been assured that
I would be able to get this message to the three other members who had helped
me. The moderator wanted to read the post beforehand and I provided her with
that. Seems like I hit a nerve and she didn’t like what I had to say.
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