In keeping with my belief that you should learn more than just #writetips, I’m bringing you a longish article about … well, about agenting, the publishing industry, and how writing a best seller takes equal parts of lucky timing and good writing.
I came across it a couple months ago, probably on Twitter. (The things I do for you!) Published in the online version of n+1 (a magazine of politics, literature, and culture founded in 2004), “How to Be Popular” is an essay by agent Melissa Flashman.
And, as I say, it’s long, but it’s interesting and you should stick with it. There are things to be learned here. Flashman goes over her academic background, including this bit:
I chose [my English lit PhD] program with the hope of becoming an expert on popularity: the popularity of books, mostly novels, though genre hardly mattered. I had the somewhat half-baked idea that I might uncover the secret of why certain books and certain formal concerns are in vogue at a particular moment, from anxieties about signification and point of view in early twentieth-century modernist fiction to vampires in early twenty-first-century popular novels.
If you’re a student of publishing, you’re already hooked, right? (This caught my eye: “Literary fiction is a commercial designation, not an academic one. I’d never heard any of my professors use this term …”)
Almost by accident, Flashman found herself working in publishing.
As an agent’s assistant, much of the fiction I read for work — mostly in the evening and on weekends — was written by graduates of MFA programs, and many of these short stories and novels, with their heightened attention to the details of cultural identity, would have been at home on my syllabi …
And that’s a whole new world, friends.
Then there was fiction that didn’t come from MFA-land but shared its themes. The Kite Runner, as I was quick to point out when it came in on submission …, featured quite a lot of wrestling with identity. I thought I was particularly clever to notice that the story also bore the markings of a classic gothic novel … I may not have completely shed my graduate-student sensibility at this point, but I was turning the pages. Rapidly. The audience for this novel would also be college-educated and identity-savvy, like that of the MFA novels, but it would be different, and bigger: book clubs. This novel was going to be popular in book clubs. I was not alone in my thinking.
Flashman continues to dissect “popular” books, as The Kite Runner surely was (it has sold seven million copies in the United States). And that’s the meat of this article. She concludes, “Ideas, it turns out, can be made popular. And books remain one of the best vehicles for doing so.”
There is much, much more. It’s a fascinating article on how certain ideas seem to reach critical mass and how publishing responds to that. If you’re a writer, there are a lot of interesting ideas here for you to chew on. Dig in.
Tweet: A literary agent discusses what it takes for a book to be popular.
Tweet: How to be popular … in the book world. Maybe.
Tweet: Here’s an article about agenting, publishing, & best sellers.
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