Email Exchange on Woke Censorship of Men
RECENT EXCHANGE WITH A FRUSTRATED WHITE MALE WRITER:
Writer: Dear Glenn, I am a Pulitzer Prize winning writer… My latest novel XXX (2017) was represented by XXX Agency, which is no longer viable. It was described as “Guy Lit” by one reviewer, a male-oriented story of alienation in the family and culture. My ambition as a writer is and has always been to bring men to literary fiction.
Equus: Thanks for contacting me at Equus… I am looking for “guy lit”, it is a pet peeve of mine that men no longer read. If men don’t read, then publishers will be reluctant to publish “guy lit”. My own experience, traditionally published and self-published, is that not only is the male market small and shrinking, but that today’s male readers read mostly at a 6th grade level. I would like to fix that.
Same Writer: I’m looking for an independent publisher, knowing my white male voice isn’t getting past the XXX and XXX interns at literary agencies. My novel XXX about police PTSD was disqualifed by several agents because “publishers won’t accept a book about urban crime from a white writer.” … Literary fiction for men, cut from the cloth of Hemingway, Faulkner, Steinbeck, Updike, et al., has all but disappeared. I think you’re onto something.
Equus: I think I will change the byline for Equus to “Books For Men”. That’s more memorable than “Books for Language Lovers”. I am trying to establish a publishing facility for white males who are tired of being delegated to the bottom of the Intersectional Ladder as a new class of ‘Untouchables’.
Same Writer: Thanks, Glenn. Maybe the new slogan should be Books for the Underrepresented & Marginalized!
– – –
If Pulitzer Prize winning writers can’t find an agent any more willing to represent them to NY publishers due to the writer’s ethnicity, what does that say in regard to Mr. Jacob Jans’ statements below?
MY EXCHANGE WITH JACOB JANS OF AUTHORS PUBLISH:
Glenn,
Thank you for the reply. I think we’re at an impasse here, as we seem to see the facts very differently… I do agree that it is harder to get published as a man than in previous years, as the imbalance towards men is indeed gone, but that is very different than saying that men aren’t getting published.
[Equus: Note Mr. Jans’ Woke message again: ‘The past was evil, and because of your identity I am therefore justified in oppressing you today.’ This sounds suspiciously like: ‘Your great-great-great grandpap once had a black slave, therefore we are justified in discriminating against you today, though you know nothing about this ancient history and in no way benefited, but it justifies us in taking your job and your money away from you and keeping it for ourselves.’ That’s called illegal Woke identity politics, which unfortunately permeates publishing today.]
All the best,
Jacob Jans
Authors Publish
Dear Jacob,
Thank you for your prompt reply and for the additional info.
However, I am sorry to say that your message is what I expected to hear from the Woke world of publishing and that you have confirmed my outlook. It is clear that you apply your standard of “Does not align with our guiding principles” only to the usual writers and viewpoints traditionally disfavored by Wokism since Equus is open to publishing works by anyone at all and my policy therefore is no different in that regard than any other publisher that you list. But you are still unhappy with Equus and will not list it and you justify this Woke censorship by talking about pendulums, a form of affirmative action, which is illegal and morally indefensible. People living in the prejudicial Woke bubble never seem to realize that’s where they live. I notice you did not comment on the new trend among New York publishers to no longer publish anything written by a man, sight unseen. [Equus Comment: I should have said ‘anything written of, by, and for white males, sight unseen’.]
Just to show my fairness in this matter, I freely acknowledge that the main reason most publishers don’t publish books for men is that Men Don’t Read. You are correct in noting that the market is elsewhere. I get that. And that fact is certainly not anyone’s fault. So maybe Equus is a quixotic venture from the start. But the publishing Blacklist on male-oriented books, and often on men per se, makes it more difficult.
Thank you again. I wish you the best.
Yours truly,
Glenn Lazar Roberts
From: Authors Publish Magazine
Sent: Friday, November 15, 2024 5:51 PM
To:
Subject: Re: the Blacklist, etc
Glenn,
Thank you for sharing your experience and the frustration that goes with it.
It’s very common to have the kind of perspective you’ve shared here, not in terms of the issue being that you are a man (although others have worried that), but I have heard the same perspective from others that they are just not being published because they are women, disabled, people of color, older, etc. This is a common view even though the specifics are incredibly different.
I understand how distressing and unfair this can feel, especially because it can feel like a very personal kind of discrimination that is both systematic and targeted at you. Of course this would be distressing — and, ironically, this is a distressing and common concern for people who are very much in different groups.
I am not saying that maybe part of the issue you are facing is this factor, or that any of those other specifics listed are not also obstacles depending on the specifics, but the fact remains that most publishers still publish male authors. In some genres, such as romance, it’s rarer, but in most it is still very common.
[Equus Comment: Some white male writers only write Woke books, these are often published. Why won’t NY publishers support white males who write of, by, and for other white males, just as NY publishers freely publish women who write of, by, and for women, and minorities who write of, by, and for their specific minority? Why is it only white males who write for white males or who promote masculinity, that trigger the publishing Blacklist, and not any other group? Why do publishers insist on sorting writers into identity groups anyway?]
Many of the publishers we review are run by men, and according to Lee & Low’s Diversity survey 33% of most publishers are male run (62% are run by women). So while obviously there are a lot of women it involved it is not just run by women. I see lots of publishers still, especially in the SF and thriller genres who still mostly publish male authors and focus on that. I see this over and over again during my publisher reviews. (You can verify this by looking at recent debut book deals announced in Publishers Weekly.)
[Equus Comment: I invite Mr. Jacobs to re-examine the publishers that he promotes. Many of them state on their website that they either ‘encourage the historically underrepresented and marginalized to submit’, which is code for ‘White males need not bother submitting as they will be auto rejected’, or the sites explicitly state ‘We only publish women (or ‘we only publish blacks’, etc.) Yet Mr. Jans promotes such sites in his weekly lists, while refusing to list Equus Publishing.]
Back to my main point, in my experience, while identity can be a component, content, style, the current marketplace, are all bigger factors. Authors are choosing to focus on one aspect that is outside of their control to justify their experience, rather than to focus on the aspects inside of their control. I myself have fallen into this trap before, so I understand the appeal of it, especially when facing rejection again and again, which is always distressing.
That being said, if the focus of the books is on a particular brand of masculinity, that is not currently in favor by most publishers, and not just the fact that the author is male, there are more limited options.
[Equus Comment: This is code for the usual “we don’t publish stories that promote masculinity”, i.e., any story written of, by and for men. Yet they will gladly publish stories that characterize masculinity as ‘toxic’, even if written by a man.]
We’ve reviewed only a few publishers that fit this need of publishers that are “not woke” according to your request (please note that there are many other publishers we review that publish lots of work by men, and some might fall into this category, but these are two that clearly and directly fit there:
authorspublish.com/baen-accepting-manuscript-submissions/
authorspublish.com/skyhorse-publishing/
There are lots of other presses that are now finding there way into this space over the past two years. Sutherland House is one of them, and even though they are based in Canada their Substack might be helpful to you.
We don’t plan on covering Equus, because it does not align with our guiding principles, and it is not something that we personally feel needs more time and attention. This is because, among many other things, we only list publishers open to all writers around the world.
[Equus: Notice how Mr. Jans misrepresents Equus by claiming that Equus is not ‘open to all writers’ when the Equus website states plainly that it is open to anyone. And that Mr. Jans omits that his Authors Publish org promotes publishers each week that exclude whites or males. He is lying in commission and lying in omission.]
On a more personal point, as a man, I’ve observed that women were excluded from publishing for many years, even to the point where they had to pretend to be men just to get published. Personally, I don’t mind if the pendulum swings the other way for a while; and it certainly isn’t be a static situation.
[More Wokeness: ‘But you white males used to have it good, therefore we’re justified in discriminating against you now!’ This is the classic Woke pretext for implementing a policy of censorship and blacklisting white males that one sees entrenched in DEI / Woke institutions across the U.S. today, in violation of their constitutional rights. But Mr. Jans seems impervious to recognizing his own bias.]
Sincerely,
Jacob Jans
Co-Founder
Authors Publish
On 2024-11-15 6:08 p.m., Glenn Roberts wrote:
Hi Author Publish,
Thank you for the many publisher lists you have put out. I greatly appreciate the information and have attempted to follow up on many. However, my experience with the publishers I have contacted has not been positive. Despite the dozens of gushing reviews my self-published books have received over the years, my submissions of my latest novels to over a hundred publishers have all been rejected. This, although I have spent years as a professional editor, provided editing services to other writers, and I have led a long-standing critique circle, and have recently completed my 9th novel.
It is my view that my works are being rejected out of hand not due to the quality of my work, but to the fact that I am a man. Almost every publisher I see is run by women and a great many of these publishers declare up front that they only want to see works by women, or works that feature women, or works that promote women. My novels are by a man, feature men, and promote masculinity. I am also unable to feature my books in local venues as they are not welcome (as I am not) by the women who run these venues because, in their words, they only like to see books that promote feminism.
Of the hundreds of publishers I have seen online through Author Publish, I have yet to encounter a single one that specializes in books of, by, and for men. I search every Authors Publish broadcast looking for a male-oriented category of publishers but I never see any. I did manage to get one of my novels published several years ago – by one of the very few publishing outfits headed by a man! But his outfit does not specialize in men’s works, and he too is shy of publishing anything of, by, and for men.
My question: Do you know of ANY publisher that specializes in books that are written of, by, and for men? Sci-fi, men’s psychology, men’s sociology, anything. Or is every publisher today Woke?
Personally, I have given up finding any such animal. It seems to me that male authors are being Blacklisted by women-run publishers and I have actually been contacted at my new entity Equus Publishing LLC by published male writers complaining to me that they can no longer find even an agent willing to market their books to publishers. The agents say “I’m sorry, but today’s publishers are not publishing men so I can no longer represent you.”
I have setup www.equuspublishing.com in order to fill this vacant niche. Perhaps predictably, every list so far that I have attempted to insert Equus Publishing into so the public can learn of the existence of my Equus Publishing ‘unicorn’, has refused to list my publishing entity! Yet these same lists include ‘publishers’ by women that don’t have working websites or a single book published.
Well, that’s all I wanted to say. And thank you again. Maybe the publishing industry will one day decide to offer something to male readers and seek to include them instead of Blacklisting men.
Glenn Lazar Roberts
Jihad Bubba Ad Completed-Results
The Equus ad has finished running. Compared to FB, X has been efficient, reaching 540,000 people for only $300, or more precisely 540,000 ‘impressions’. That’s a bargain anywhere. I won’t know for a while how many copies of JIHAD BUBBA were actually sold by Amazon, if any, but the website quadrupled traffic for several days.
More people are now aware (hopefully) that Wokeness can be mocked via sci-fi satire, which was my main purpose. I hoped to help correct the notion that serious messages can’t be conveyed with humor, n that no seasoned writers out there are writing books that mock the PC Woke Cult. JIHAD BUBBA mocks diversity, Bidenomics, Zimbabwe, George Floyd, PC police, gays, gun control, pronouns, n the legions of purple-haired teenage girls who run today’s U.S., either literally teenage, or ostensibly grown women but who still have little girl minds.
If you like JIHAD BUBBA, you might want to read my previous 3 books that mock Wokeness. Here are their titles below, all described on this site, n which can be purchased on Amazon. Equus is not (yet) banned by Amazon, tho Equus has been banned by a number of smaller websites.
Adventures of Maggie, the Radiated Lesbian Nun:
Book 1: Judge Crater Takes a Powder
Book 2: Cross-Dressers From Pluto
Book 3: The Warriors
I will be running more book ads soon. I maintain hope that there are at least a few literates lurking among the hordes of meme-drooling Xers who have difficulty reading 3-syllable words.
Running an X ad for Jihad Bubba
This is the first ad I have run with X.
“Hardworking Bubba Gray is obsolete in a future U.S. of Rainbowstan where ‘pre-citizens’ surge the borders, purple-haired teens make all the rules, and smart-alec robots crash their taxis—till one day he goes full ‘jihad’, with hilarious results.”
I had to change my usual description of the book from ‘with unpredictable consequences’ to ‘hilarious results’ in an attempt to avoid the algorithm / moderators. The issue is that any title that has ‘JIHAD’ in it is automatically suspect with every publisher n platform. I consider myself fortunate that XTwit has NOT rejected Jihad Bubba or Equus. So far, at least! Most places refuse outright to accept JIHAD in any book title. See my posts here on EquusPublishing on how Arktos tried to publish Jihad Bubba but was deplatformed by Ingram, which panicked Arktos into canceling me the author to halt the damage–yes, Arktos cancels authors for commercial reasons just like any other publisher eyeing its bottom line! And Arktos was the second publisher. The first wanted to publish JB, but declined due, as always, to the dangerous word ‘JIHAD’ in the title. No one wants their offices firebombed by mad mullahs, including both Arktos n Ingram. (Yours Truly doesn’t have an office so I’m not particularly concerned.)
X ads IMO are much cheaper per impression than FB ads. In fact, I would say the ratio is about 100 to 1. IOW, you get a much larger exposure than you would if you ran your ad with FB. I also found that one can select the target audience more carefully with X. The only genuine issue I see with running an ad for a book on XTwit is that most X members are functionally illiterate. Even tho I wrote JB at about a 7th grade level, it’s my experience that few Americans, n fewer X members, can actually read it. That’s why only visual memes work on X n textual snippets accomplish nothing.
The response for JB has actually been rather good, considering the small price I am paying of $100 per day for 200,000 impressions daily. That’s a bargain anywhere. I don’t know if any books are actually selling (remember XTwits can’t read) but Equus Publishing is definitely being noticed by the right crowd, speaking politically that is since I know I’ll never sell a book to an illiterate.
More collectibles posted
Regarding the many science fiction writers that I have in my collection of hardbacks and paperbacks, I have several of their works that are rare editions. The writers include Edgar Rice Burroughs, H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and many more. See my latest postings of rare books below. My purpose, as mentioned before, is not to flip them by offering them for sale, but to simply let others know what is in my library.
Click pictures to go to the assigned pages with full information.
Conan – Red Nails, by Robert E. Howard, edited by Karl Edward Wagner.
BTW, I once interviewed Glenn Lord at his home back around 1992-3 if memory serves. During our conversation he mentioned that when he acquired the rights to REH’s works no one else had showed any interest in doing this, so I gathered from Glenn Lord’s comments that the rights did not cost him much, if anything. Some years after that, when REH had become much more famous and everyone knew that Glenn Lord possessed all the rights, a publisher contacted him and sent him an unsolicited check for $75,000 just to acquire any rights at all to publish some of REH’s works. Mr. Lord, not having solicited the publisher, and not having promised the publisher anything whatsoever or signed anything, and actually not free at the time to transfer any REH rights, Mr. Lord simply kept the check! Nice work if you can get it, I suppose. I heard this direct from Glenn Lord himself at his home. I had approached him with the idea of his writing a review of one of my own novels, I think my Maalstrom novel, but he explained that he was really too busy to read it. Glenn Lord was very friendly and of good humor and I very much enjoyed my brief visit with him. I never saw him again.
Canaveral Press 1962 edition of ERB’s A Fighting Man of Mars, illus. by Mahlon Blaine.
The Seven That’s
What’s the most times you can repeat the same word consecutively in a sentence and still retain meaning? Here’s a sentence with 7 words in a row.
It remains true for all that that that that that that that refers to is not the same that that that that refers to.
Anyone for any more?
Posted by Josef Essberger February 2008
Can anyone explain this to me? Words are my specialty but this is a hard one!
-Glenn
Credit is to. . .
Collectible Books in my Sci-Fi Collection
For some years now I have been collecting popular n sometimes quite rare editions of popular science fiction books, both paperback n hardback. Writers include Edgar Rice Burroughs, H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, n many more. My purpose is not to flip them by offering them for sale, but to simply make others aware of what is in my library. In theory, I suppose, my entire library could be purchased, but currently I am more interested in buying than selling.
First item:
1970 Double Edition of A Princess of Mars, illus. by Frank Frazetta. Click to see full page.
Laws of Human Society-Edited
Conclusions I have come to after many years of contemplation:
Fundamental Principle #1: Law of Infinite Hypergamy. The higher the percentage of women in power, the more porous a nation’s borders will be, in order to expand women’s potential mating pool of high status males to an infinite asymptote. Corollary to Law of Infinite Hypergamy: vanishing borders are the clearest sign that one lives in a wholly dominant matriarchy.
Fundamental Principle #2: Law of Inverse Value. The more popular something is, the less it is worth. The Electoral Corollary to the Law of Inverse Value: popular elections will always end up promoting the mediocre, the incompetent, or the undistinguished—and usually all three. Second Corollary to Law of Inverse Value: Dunning Kruger Effect: the less a person knows, the more certain he is that he knows it. Third Corollary to Law of Inverse Value: the less a group of people know, the bigger and louder and more disruptive to society their public protest will be.
Fundamental Principle #3: Law of Derived Elections. if you control a nation’s media, you control its elections, therefore where a nation’s information media are privately owned, its election results will be determined by the owners of its media. “Saving Our Democracy” Corollary to the Law of Derived Elections: Preserving an entrenched regime that is protected by a lack of term limits, requires monopolistic control over most media and the suppression of all media which does not conform.
Fundamental Principle #4: Law of Heretical Speech: Under a state religion, all speech that does not glorify the Deity n praise its Priesthood is by definition heretical speech. Electoral Corollary to Law of Heretical Speech: Since elections are a form of speech, all popular elections are by definition heresy under an entrenched state religion and must be either banned beforehand, or falsified if they occur, or the results reversed by “legal” means if the results are inconvenient to the Priesthood.
Fundamental Principle #5: Law of Democratic Trivialities. Regarding anything one writes, most people, who by definition are of only average IQ, will ignore the important points n focus on criticizing any trivialities they can detect. The Media Corollary to the Law of Trivialities: All media will invariably report from a public statement only what is trivial while ignoring or misrepresenting the statement’s essential points.
I believe these principles are incontrovertible. No evidence has yet appeared that could challenge them.
Curious Things
45 is a Colt, and a short playing plastic record, and a Malt Liquor. And that’s the last time I hope to type ‘and’ when ‘n’ is quicker n easier. If dolts don’t get it, that’s their problem. I’m tired of dumbing down everything for people who can’t read above a 4th grade level.
If my books were to suddenly become popular, I would conclude that I had done something terribly wrong because only low-quality books ever become popular while t best books, n certainly t most intelligently written, almost always sell poorly. Just look at Nietzsche. In today’s collapsing intellectual environment, poor sales is a sign of quality n a virtue.
I’m thinking of making a list of books banned by Amazon n Ingram. There are hundreds, if not thousands. I don’t feel ready to tackle such a huge project.
Three very bad books that sell only because the cultic media constantly promotes them: To Kill A Mockingbird; The Great Gatsby; Things Fall Apart. I have read all three carefully. They are simply garbage.
I might write something about my “Thrice Exceptional Life”: an IQ unrecognized by the school system where I was often smarter n more educated than my perpetually offended high school teachers; virtually disabled as an adult, imagine going on job interviews in a wheelchair like I did; flaming red hair. If those three aren’t profound disabilities, then nothing is. Yet I overcame them all n, in a sense, woke up one day to discover that I had become an entirely different person. No longer red haired, no longer disabled, n no longer stuck in an institution suited only for prison, factory work, or the military.
I have noticed that publishers n literary agencies who yell t loudest about how they want to publish “marginalized” people always have zero “marginalized” people on their own staff, which is usually mostly or entirely NY natives. And if you think such entities don’t push for destroying the borders n don’t actively discriminate against white males every chance they get, boy are you out to lunch. Equus Publishing is boycotted n banned by every publisher association out there. Virtually all publishers n literary agencies, large n small, are active promoters of government propaganda, in particular the State Religion of DEI which I call the PC Cult, n which they call Wokeness as if its true nature isn’t Asleepness.
Have you ever asked yourself why there are hundreds of publishers who advertise themselves as devoted to “women’s fiction” but NOT ONE publisher for “men’s fiction”. Why is that? Partly because much fewer men read fiction. But more because of the active suppression of men’s causes in general by the “cultured thugs” who create the narratives coming out of New York City. Never forget: masculinity is outlawed in modern matriarchal America and men are second class citizens. To promote men’s causes is a crime! That’s why Equus is banned everywhere.
More dumb things Americans have said to me:
“I’m not changing what I do for you or for anyone else.” (cops soon corrected his antisocial bad behavior)
“You have cats living under your house.” No, I have pets who live in my house, not under it. Is anyone really this stupid? Apparently.
Google’s Gemini is inventing fake reviews, all negative, n directed against books by political dissenters. I expect this trend to expand until every right-of-center book, or every book written by a person known to be right-of-center, will immediately attract a collection of negative reviews invented by Google. Things To Come.
There is a strange idea that all languages can be translated. Not true. Most cannot be accurately translated into English, or vice versa. Some have no words at all for abstractions n some languages have no name for numbers beyond 3, only “many”. Some languages have no neuter nouns, like Arabic. It is not possible to remove gender from that language. Why is it that Americans in particular seem unable to acknowledge such facts? I know the answer but few are willing to open their ears.
There is an unfortunate trend among poseur intellectuals to attach meaning to the root of a word. For instance, ‘radical’ at its core means ‘root’. But in everyday discourse it is absurd to use the word ‘radical’ as ‘root’. Radical means extreme bordering on illegal n actually has nothing to do with roots. It’s deceptive to drag out this etymological sleight of hand. ‘Intellectuals’ do it only to puff themselves up so they will look important.
Do time machines have rear-view mirrors?
Much more to say but no more time.
Pronouns For Thee and Me
I can’t help but make public my own pronouns. Keeping in mind that others must now address me by these legally enforceable identity-confirming words, I specify the following pronouns: “Hey You!”; “What the hell?”; “Your aunt said what?”; and “Oh, really?” I have more pronouns but they don’t compare to Jihad Bubba’s carefully selected pronouns. You’ll have to read the book to learn what his pronouns are and the legal trouble he got into because of them. If I mention them here, I might get arrested before you have the chance.
Equus specializes in anti-woke satires including:
Judge Crater Takes A Powder (The Radiated Lesbian Nun, Book 1)
Cross-Dressers From Pluto (The Radiated Lesbian Nun, Book 2)
The Warriors (The Radiated Lesbian Nun, Book 3)
Quantum Marlowe (kind of)
You will never laugh as hard as when you read these laugh riots that mock DEI, Wokeness, and Regressives.
The Traditional Publishing Scam
In former times–meaning antedeluvian–I worked for a small press. I reviewed unsolicited manuscripts, called the slush pile, to locate undiscovered gems for publication and I also did some editing. Not once did the small press publish anything that came over the transom. If they wanted to publish something like a vampire novel, for instance, instead of putting something from the slush pile under contract, they would assign the task of writing the desired mss to one of the staff editors and totally ignore the slush pile. The editor, who usually had a publishing history, would then get to work in his or her spare time and crank out a vampire novel. Nice work if you can get it.
This makes me think of the old structure of “authorship” and the exploitive process of a writer getting published.
First, the writer hunkers down and hammers out an outline for a novel. It’s always a novel, by the way. Keep in mind that everyone–and I mean absolutely everyone–eventually writes a novel, usually about their “amazing” life which no one but their mother will ever read. Case in point: an engineer friend of mine, now deceased, wrote a book on pipelines. He put it on Amazon and to his surprise it sold a hundred copies a month for year after year with zero marketing. “This is way easy,” he said to himself and he wrote a novel and posted it on Amazon too. Zilch. Zero sales. Year after year went by with no sales despite herculean efforts on his part to push the book. And it was not even about his “amazing” life. Today over a million books are “published” each year, most of them fiction or autobiographical, or both, most self-published, and the number is increasing every year. And most are never read by anyone once the writer runs out of friends and family.
That bit of info is just to alert the reader as to the realities of fiction publishing. I don’t call it a marketplace because publishing is not a marketplace, but a monopoly. You can always tell a monopoly because monopolies can afford to fire their customers. Amazon bans books by the hundred–that’s because Amazon functions as a monopoly. The biggest distributor, Ingram, also fires its own customers, routinely putting publishers out of business because Ingram is also a monopoly.
New York publishers function as a monopoly also because they work together to screen out “heretical” writers and ensure that they will all publish the same ideological slant to the same targeted audience. New York publishing companies are mostly owned by multinational megacorps with oodles of advertising dollars which they can use across multiple venues to make sure the books the publishers wish to push on the public conform to their biases and ideological preconceptions. Monopolies can afford to act this way because profit is not their chief motive–pushing their ideology is. This is called ESG.
After completing your outline, you will then create a first draft, which you will be advised by some of the great many ancillary businesses that prey on would-be authors to submit your work to a “beta reader”. Professional readers, as the term suggests, charge money for this service. Usually the writer will skip the “professional” part and contact a friend who is known to write a bit on the side, for instance a diary, and dragoon the reluctant friend into plowing through the first draft. It’s hard to say which is better: the friend who doesn’t want to offend you, or the “professional” who will quickly “correct” your draft into the kind of ideological drivel that cash-paying publishers want.
Then comes editing. Again, some will pay cash for a professional first draft initial editor, as if every joe and his dog don’t know how to compose sixth grade English, while the thrifty writers will dragoon another friend for some kind of barter deal.
Once the writer makes the recommended “corrections”, which are certain to remove any spontaneity the manuscript (mss) formerly possessed, our forlorn, and now perhaps poor-lorn writer, will turn his work over to what’s called a developmental editor. They are even more expensive because they actually look at such items as character development, and analyzing the work for the required 25% intro, 50% body, and 25% resolution portions. As if readers give a flying F for such things. But you’ll be told you have to do these.
Next comes the copy editor. If we don’t yet have enough cooks in the kitchen to completely flatten and obliterate any creativity that remains in this crockpot, the copy editor will entangle you in a ridiculous series of nose-heightened “writers’ style manuals” that will dictate where you must put your Oxford commas, and apostrophes, and hyphens while catching misspelled words, as if Word won’t already do that.
And we’re still not done. Next in line is the professional editor who will rapidly transform your once charming story into a dreary, predictable, boring tale devoid of any style at all.
The predators, in fact, will keep coming as long as your bank account holds out: the format editor, more beta readers, more reviews by copy and characterization editors, etc.
Whew. Finally, after all has been lost, it’s time to submit your work to an agent. Don’t ask the silent questions like, for example, is the agent married to a conglomerate publisher, which in effect means the publisher will double-dip into your royalties. These swindles are yet another dirty secret of New York publishing. Agents too operate effectively as a monopoly, in fact are part of the NY publishing monopoly, acting as recruiters for their very selective recruitment of writers in exchange for kickbacks from the orgs they pretend to “negotiate” with.
If your mss is too long, the agent may reject it and reject you. If your mss is very short, meaning no longer than a few scribbles on a page, then your agent might be willing to market it to a magazine. If medium length, the agent might be willing to market it to a select book publisher. But if your mss is in-between in length, then it’s a novella, and the agent will reject it and you because no one publishes novellas anymore because monopolies can publish whatever they like and they don’t like novellas.
But to give agents their due, they actually sometimes are honest and have a difficult job. This is because NY publishers today have not only a litmus test which will automatically exclude a writer’s work, but now excludes writers themselves, sight unseen, and work unread, specifically white males.
Case two in point: Equus Publishing is open to msss (how often is that spelled?) by writers. I receive a steady stream of submissions, sometimes with explanations of why they have come to Equus instead of to an agented NY publisher. A recent writer told me that his agent helped him place several books with NY publishers and they have all sold well, even reviewed by the NY Times Book Review (one of the conglomerate venues I mentioned that NY publishers use to promote their chosen ideologically favored books, much like the Oscars and just as honest). But despite this success, he suddenly has a problem: his agent is firing him. Why? Because the NY publishing monopoly is no longer accepting manuscripts from white males. So she can no longer place any more books by him no matter how creative and brilliant his books are.
So it’s no longer enough to merely comply with the octopus-like PC Cult, but white males are now heretics by definition and can no longer publish, no matter the quality of what they write. If you are a white male, you have been or will soon be fired and your msss rejected, both sight unseen, and no agent will represent you.
Let’s say you do have a sizable dose of melanin, or you feel like a 13 year old girl today although you are in fact a 56 year old man. Thus you qualify to bypass the ideological screening. But if you are still not part of the in-crowd, there will be no $ up front, no marketing, perhaps misspelled words on the cover of your book (that happened to me), and you will have to resign yourself to criss-crossing the country doing all the marketing yourself at your own expense, because advance fees only go to former presidents or select members of the chosen few. The more books you sell, the deeper in debt you will go.
This whole traditional publishing framework works like this because it is driven by advertising. IOW, the reading audience does not buy books, rather books are sold to them. The monopolies and their conglomerates know that because they have the dollars and the advertising venues, they can sell whatever they wish to the public and the public will buy it so long as it’s not written above a sixth grade level. It is not a market, but a cash cow of Manchurian Candidates, a public so conditioned that the moneyed publishers know in advance that the public will buy whatever the publishers choose to sell, backed up by a slew of “reviewers” owned lock-stock by the same conglomerates, therefore would not dare write something negative about the stream of trash that comes from NY publishers.
BUT THEN CAME THE INTERNET and all of the above is crumbling. Now anyone can set up his own website and promote his own books and market using AI, audio , and videos. It is no longer necessary for a writer to submit his work to ANY publisher, including Equus Publishing. Of course, I am still happy to assist talented writers in any way I can, and there is still the issue of de-conditioning the public at large, which is something like deprogramming a religious believer, and making them aware that the best books are no longer being produced by the NY publishing monopoly, but are to be found in small independent outfits like Equus.
Free Equus Newsletter
More news on Substack
