“How FAR are you willing to go?” asks a man I’m ostensibly vetting to be my new agent, though what’s increasingly clear is he’s the one vetting me. “You’re going to have to write a tell-all, spill every insider detail. Do you have that kind of BIG story? If not, no one will care.”
“The problem is you don’t have a large enough platform,” explains another big-name-in-publishing. “To sell a book in this climate, you need a viral essay, or 100,000 Instagram followers or, ideally, both.”
“You know what you need to do?” suggests a third agent from his Manhattan office, sirens blaring in the background. “You need to redesign your career, become like [name of famous feminist investigative journalist], get yourself a Times Magazine cover story — I could sell a book off of that.”
After the fateful night with my former agent, I spend the rest of the summer of 2019 trying to find a new one. Tapping every corner of my network, I set up blind phone dates with powerful New York publishing people, calls I know I’m lucky to get. I’d bounce on the lines like a hopeful/earnest road-side balloon man, only to — minutes into the conversations — flatten and deflate.
Each agent I spoke with pulled zero punches in telling the same brass-tax story about my second-book prospects. The picture they painted was grim: My platform was unimpressive, my following close to nil. A big publisher had already taken a chance on me. It was unlikely any would want to again.
The quality of my writing didn’t matter. In fact, it never came up. The agents were in the business of selling. They were doing me a solid here, brainstorming in real-time how to make my (apparently) lackluster brand palatable, shine it up, shake off the stink. “I mean, you can always send me pages when you have them,” the agents concluded, their tones conveying a level of enthusiasm you’d muster for a plate of old beans.
They’d outlined the unlikely solutions to the challenge of my stalled career, ambitious paths I was no longer interested in journeying, most involving performing an identity, preening across social media platforms, becoming a person I was not. I met with agent upon agent who treated me like a past-its-prime product that required full-scale revamping and, even then, they explained, success was doubtful, far from guaranteed. I was demoralized, thought I should probably give up on writing for good. I started looking into master’s programs for social work, considered becoming a death doula. Am I too old to teach yoga, I wondered. Then I met with Nicole.
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