Publishing, Social Class, and the Inefficiency That Ruins Lives

A friend of mine got traditionally published, and it ruined her life. I won’t offer much detail, as it’s not my story to tell, but it’s the usual. She queried and signed with an agent, took the best book deal she was able to get, rewrote the book to fit the marketing department’s demands, and trusted “the professionals” in publishing to, well, publish. She quit her day job to keep up with the demands of her agent and editor, her sales were mediocre due to the house’s negligence, and she was dropped by both after two books. This happens all the time. If you’re not born into connections, and if you somehow still beat the odds and get read at all, it’s the norm; if you live in the parts of the country that literary agents and acquisitions editors have been brought up to hate, it’s what you can expect.

So I want to talk about this. Why do many novelists, despite the correct admonitions of their financial advisors, quit their day jobs? It’s seldom explicitly demanded; agents and editors don’t usually ask, since they live in a world where day jobs simply don’t exist. Instead, they set time demands on traditionally published authors, especially in the bottom tiers, that are incompatible with full-time work. It’s not the writing that does this, but the endless self-promotion. Three to five hours per day of social-media use is expected during the slow periods between launches; leading up to one, eight to ten is what agents and editors like to see. You have to do this in addition to meeting your writing deadlines, and you simply cannot meet the visibility, availability, and sales requirements to which traditionally published authors in fiction¹ are held if you have a real job.

What’s most infuriating about all this is the inefficiency. If you’re an institutional darling, publishers will eagerly call in favors to arrange “earned” coverage worth thousands of sales in an afternoon, no authorial effort required. It’s everyone else who has to grind on social media and cold call for blurbs and minor podcast appearances, getting ignored most of the time. If you get a deal at all, you will have to spend 100 hours on social media to save your editor the 15 minutes it takes to call in a favor. Why? Because, as far as traditional publishing is concerned, you are a piece of shit and you should be thankful to have been let in the door at all. The people they care about get the publicity benefits that actually work. The rest get copy-pasted emails on how to set up social-media accounts.

This is not just operational inefficiency; on the contrary, there’s real engineering in it, and to understand this, we have to look into social class—what it is, how it works, and why it explains everything there is to know about traditional publishing.

Social class is not just about money; the distinction is important, because publishing salaries are low, and the industry often cites the paltry wages it pays as a virtue signal that obscures who these firms actually work for. Social class is mostly determined at birth; the people in the ruling class do not rule because they are wealthy, but are wealthy because they possess the social access necessary to rule. A broke upper-class person won’t be broke for long, because they have better ways of making money—less demeaning, more reliable, more efficient—than the rest of us.

No one born into money has ever written a query letter; they have better options, and recognize doing so as a waste of time.

I’ve known and worked with people across the socioeconomic spectrum. I’ve had people with nine-figure net worths come to me for writing and software advice; I also have friends who grew up in families where seven siblings had to share two meals. I’ve seen what poverty does to people. I’m also fully acquainted with the cognitive distortions that occur in the upper tiers of wealth and status. The first question you might want to ask me is: Are rich people’s lives really better? The answer is… it’s complicated.

Hedonic adaptation sets in rapidly. Weeks. Days. Hours, often. Social climbers are often driven by a belief that they’ll find “better” people “up there,” and the fact is that they will not; they find transactional relationships and superpredators. Poverty certainly makes people miserable, especially when compounded by debt, demanding labor, and housing instability, but does being rich—truly rich—make people happier? I’d say that the difference between $2,000,000 per year and $200,000 per year comes down to one thing, and, depending on who you are and what you want, it’s nothing or it’s everything. Efficiency. Whatever you have, a rich person has a more efficient version. This doesn’t mean it’s better; sometimes it is, and sometimes it’s not. It might even be worse in subtle ways, but it’s faster and easier to use.

Rich people do not write résumés. People call other people, favors are traded or promised in the future, and executive positions become available. One view of this is that privilege bypasses the interview process. A more sour take would be that a person born into this class is interviewing all the time. Social and work life blend for the upper class; a separation between the two is an inefficiency they do not tolerate. The upshot is that they do not waste their twenties “proving themselves” to corporate organizations² because their family names, by the standard of business, have already proven them.

These people do not fly the long way around the world to save $1,500 on airfare, or live in walk-up apartments. They loathe inefficiency. But the insidious cost of optimized efficiency and convenience is soullessness. You might play cards or drink with the locals in a hostel, but this will never happen in a five-star hotel, because five-star hotels are designed to prevent all potentially unwanted interactions from taking place, and all interactions are potentially unwanted. Upper-class parties are functional spaces, to be used for their purposes and then left; everyone pretends to be having a good time, but only the irresponsibly intoxicated are. Your waiters are never seen; your driver never talks to you. The world moves around you so you are never taxed or challenged. The world becomes a hotel, a liminal space, a comfortable place between places where everything is meaningless but it’s too psychologically jarring to leave.

A lot of people don’t believe this, but most rich people, when they must fly commercial, choose business class, not first; first is for people on points who believe they’re gaming the system but have usually been gamed by it. First class is infantilizing. Business is neutral; you can sleep. Economy is uncomfortable. In all three cabins, it’s a crushingly soulless experience. Sleeping through it, if you can, is the best play. Our society’s rich love soulless efficiency for two reasons: (1) it is instantly legible by class-literate people, and (2) it is a local maximum. Introducing inefficiency to what is soulless doesn’t infuse soul; it just makes it trashy.

In today’s office culture, the most vicious way to humiliate someone is not to assign them an ugly task, but to make them do it in a visibly inefficient way.

Tom Wambsgans of Succession says that being rich is like having superpowers. I think that’s basically right. When you’re visibly wealthy, people anticipate your needs, implement your ideas, and move obstacles that you’re not even aware of. The catch is that they’re extremely boring superpowers. They might still be worth having. The boring “vibe working” that rich people get paid $5,000,000 per year to do, for example, still beats most jobs. And the powers are boring because the user is boring, and the user is boring because retaining wealth over generations always requires some element of social survival, and anyone who relies on the opinions of boring people, even distantly, becomes one of them.

Rich people, for the most part, don’t really notice or mind the boring efficiency of their lives. It doesn’t give them existential dread, nor does it give them joy. They certainly would not trade, though; the world is full of ugly, pointless, insulting inefficiencies that money easily eliminates.

If you’re not rich, but don’t want to find out that you’re poor, never write a book.

Publishing wants you to think that, because the salaries are so low, being an agent or an editor is a working-class job, but the truth is that nobody without family resources survives long enough to advance into a decision-making role, because “culture fit.” The junior editor or publicist cites her $35,000 salary as evidence of her devotion to books, but lives for free in her parents’ Upper West Side brownstone. Service to the upper class is traditional publishing’s real purpose, because it’s a reputation management business. It is not there to produce literature; it is there to make the rich and well-connected appear intellectual and literary.

This industry, of course, cannot afford for its real purpose to be exposed. It must create the appearance of diversity and openness, while it can never afford to actually do meritocracy, because exposing the public to a real writer would diminish the status of its clientele. Barriers must be constructed. The query system is an infamous example, and it works: it is inefficient by design, it operates according to submission “guidelines” (which are really orders) that are deliberately byzantine, and it distracts the petitioning peasants, who are never going to get read, with a side quest so they will blame themselves instead of a hostile system. It’s a cool-off device; by wasting their time, it keeps insiders’ competitors busy with work that is not writing, and it bleeds off any conviction that they have something to say. When you write query letters, you feel like shit; when you feel like shit, you don’t cause problems for the people in charge.

Agents and editors know, in terms of finding readers and building audiences, what works. They also know that 95+ percent of authors are never going to be given what works, because they weren’t born into it. There are efficient ways to sell books; they’re just not available to you and me. So, instead, authors in publishing’s underclass are forced to grind out copies on social media. The inefficiency publishers force you to endure is intentional; it keeps you from bothering them. And their hope is that, over time, you will get the message.

1. Nonfiction is more compatible with external careers, because often the author’s career is the source of the credibility on which the book pitch relies—if publishers want doctors’ memoirs, they’ll have to work with doctors… and very few doctors will give their careers up for traditional publishing.

2. There are some wealthy people who do want to prove themselves—who truly want to be treated like everyone else, at least in their first careers—but they go into the military, academia, or religious study, because the skills these endeavors require are timeless, and therefore respected. The parochial, servile skills of subordinate business work they recognize, correctly, as a waste of time to learn; they rapidly go out of date.