The Extreme Subjectivity of Book Acquisitions

What we can learn about which voices get elevated by considering two titans of the literary world, literary agent Andrew Wylie and the great Toni Morrison

Thank you for subscribing to and reading my Substack. I’ve been loving this platform since I joined a few months ago, and this week is my thirteenth post! For those of you who don’t know me, I started my career in book publishing almost 24 years ago when I was 23 years old. I’m now the publisher of two hybrid imprints, She Writes Press and SparkPress. I chose the name “Writerly Things” for my newsletter because I have a wide range of interests within the literary space. First and foremost, I’m a publisher. I’m also a former acquisitions editor (13 years), an independent coach and editor, a memoir teacher, a TEDx speaker, and a podcast host who interviews authors on my weekly podcast, Write-minded. I’ve always felt lucky to work in such a dynamic industry that I love and which frustrates me in equal measure. It’s an ever-changing space that impacts all of us, whether we’re readers, writers, or authors. This is the context for my current content kick, though you will find on this newsletter posts about the psychology of writing, memoir, and writerly inspiration as well.

This week’s post is inspired and informed by the work I used to do as an acquiring editor, which was the lens through which I read two recent articles, one an interview with famed literary agent Andrew Wylie, the other a profile piece about the beloved Toni Morrison who worked for years as an acquiring editor for Random House. What a striking experience to read about these two titans back-to-back who couldn’t be more different from one another in terms of their lives and their approach to representation (Wylie) and acquisitions (Morrison).

Generally speaking, agents and book editors have an enviable job—to select and curate their lists, and to find and publish writers and authors who have something meaningful to impart—messages, stories, guidance, life experience. It’s serious work with consequential impacts. It’s also absurdly subjective.

Wylie, who represents authors like Salman Rushdie, Saul Bellow, and Nabokov, to name a few, gave as arrogant an interview as they come. It’s revealing insofar as there are many older white men like Wylie whose worldview hinges on a hierarchy that places them at the very top, where they look down their noses at the unworthy masses. This incisive quote from him came in response to an assertion that publishing houses have to publish “crap” in order to publish the good stuff, and does he agree:

Let’s say you’re inviting some people to your house for dinner. Do you want everyone to arrive? Or do you want a select number of intelligent people who are amusing and understand what you’re talking about? The latter, I think. There are some people I don’t want to have join the dinner. They deserve to live, but they don’t need to come to my house for supper.

An attempt to be funny? Really hard to tell.

Morrison’s worldview, by contrast, was shaped by the uphill battle she faced as a Black woman in a male- and white-dominated industry. According to the article, “she pointedly acquired Black writers for what was an extremely white list.” She championed Black Panther Huey Newton, Angela Davis, Muham­mad Ali, Jordan, Gayl Jones, and many others.

Despite their incredibly different approaches, Wylie and Morrison—and anyone in such a curatorial position—bring to the table their sensibilities, their own lived experience, their own tastes to the work of acquiring. Wylie considers himself a collector of geniuses, and maybe he is. Morrison is heralded as a woman ahead of her time, a force for elevating stories and perspectives that were being left out of the conversation in the so-white publishing ecosystem.

In 1981, Morrison said about her profession, “Editors are now judged by the profitability of what they acquire rather than by what they acquire, or the way they acquire it. Acceptance of the givenness of the marketplace keeps us in ignorance.”

This is as true today as it was forty years ago, and it will continue to be true because publishing houses are driven by what they think will be profitable. The sure bets, of course, are books by already-famous authors and celebrities. For the unknown author, any notion that your story or the writing alone will be enough for an agent or an editor to take you on is naïve. What drives acquisitions is not some formula or algorithm or equation, but rather a mixed bag of tastes and trends and whims. Because of this, some of the most deserving writers will never get a book deal.  

During my time at Seal Press (now owned by Hachette), I was praised for my curatorial taste. My boss’s boss called me a “rainmaker” because I brought in winning book after winning book. What was true was that I had the right taste for Seal’s readership at that time, a readership that looked a lot like me—white, middle-class upbringing, educated, feminist.

I learned a lot about readership as an editor. Mostly I learned that the books I thought would do or sell the best didn’t necessarily outperform other titles. I learned that the best writing did not equate to the highest sales. I learned that authors’ energy and personality and drive played as big a role in their success as anything we did as their publisher. I also learned that publishing is not keen to change the way it does things.

Each agent and editor is like a fisherwoman, waiting for the right catch. Wylie, in his pursuit of geniuses, looks for something singular in the writers he represents. Morrison was elevating voices she felt people needed to read, needed to know about. At Seal, I was fishing for those projects that had uniquely feminist lenses, and whose stories would inform and/or change women’s lives. Those in these roles know what they want to keep when they see their catches, and they throw the rest back. As such, writers who really really want to get caught by an agent or an editor must stay committed to what the industry expects of authors. They need to make themselves appealing in all the ways agents and editors need them to be appealing. And, the journey will be about getting caught and thrown back until you finally get caught by that person who sees in your project all the value and possibility you know it contains.

And if, in the end, you never get caught by someone who’s willing to take that leap of faith with you, consider your options. The one significant area in which book publishing is different today than it was in 1981 when Morrison delivered that powerful keynote is that authors have agency and choice. Gatekeepers matter, yes, but they no longer hold the only set of keys.