Publishing's Reddit Antics and the Questions Raised
The story became weirder, less silent, and more interesting.
Yesterday, July 16, I posted a link to “Literary Agents Don’t Read: How I Proved It and Why It Matters” to the r/TrueLit subreddit, which I chose for its obscurity and high quality relative to other writing and literature subs. I believed the thread had a good chance of surviving sixty minutes before any brigading, sockpuppets, and personal attacks arrived. I was wrong.
Almost immediately, the following AI-assisted response was posted:
My god what arrogant, self-righteous, pseudo-scientific bullshit. I hardly want to waste the time to write any more than this in response.
What the actual fuck. Random numbers and assumptions, the flat-out assertion that your writing is good and deserves a response, the grandiose and completely unscientific use of terms like "null hypothesis" followed in short order by numbers cut from whole cloth.
Wow.
This sucks really, really bad.
“Numbers cut from whole cloth” is an obvious GPT-ism, and the serious nonserious energy of this comment is something no functioning adult could sustain unless trolling. Did you know that “null hypothesis” is a grandiose term? New things every day.
Reddit shitposts and AI slop aren’t news, obviously. But this user’s comment went from -2 to +15 in about two minutes. That’s not organic. Either he used sockpuppets to mass-upvote himself, or he called in a brigade of users-for-hire (yes, these exist) to support him. This suggests that he wasn’t an ordinary troll, but someone with material interests in the reputation of traditional publishing.
More hostility from obvious sockpuppet accounts—the ones where the writing style changes every time the account changes hands, because these things are bought and sold—arrived, and it grew to dominate the thread. The r/TrueLit mods eventually deleted it, and they were right to do so, given how quickly garbage content took over the discussion.
What have we learned? Quite a lot. It’s been known for some time that the publishing industry has hundreds of sockpuppets and shills on Reddit who invest massive amounts of effort in defending their industry’s reputation. Criticism of publishing is banned as “misinformation.” Most subs—r/publishing, r/writing, r/PubTips—are unusable because of this stuff. Some of these people are known and do work in publishing. Some are authors, usually in the bottom rungs, who must believe that if they defend traditional publishing, their next books will be made lead titles. (Voiceover: They won’t be.) Some of them… I don’t even know. I can’t figure out why someone would defend the reputation of an industry so hellbent on its own decline.
When I sent the mass “antiquery,” I did so out of an intellectual interest in knowing whether literature’s anointed gatekeepers paid any real attention to literary merit, as opposed to short-term marketing and tactical concerns. Would they, if presented with actual literature, actually engage with it? I found extensive evidence of non-readership, and I wrote it up because the results (0 out of 200!) were so decisive even I, a hardened cynic, was surprised by the industry’s almost heroic commitment to apathy. Yet as soon as “Agents Don’t Read” was posted on an obscure subreddit, interns all over New York (or, for a more pathetic possibility, outsiders to the industry believing the efforts would somehow get them inside) worked together to run a brigade effort 60+ accounts thick. Traditional publishing doesn’t care about doing the publishing part well, but it sure does care about its reputation, even in obscure subreddits.
Imagine what it would mean for literature if all the people who cared so much about traditional publishing’s image put their energy, instead, into books.
I’m glad someone finally had the balls and determination to expose this scam. There’s one aspect about the querying system I’d like to bring up, though: it doesn’t thrive despite the authors, but because of them. Just take a quick look at any query critique forum and you’ll see plenty of writers stepping into the agent’s role, and taking pleasure in doing so: I couldn’t connect with the MC, this subplot needs more development, why does X choose Y instead of Z? what does X mean?
The authoritarian design of traditional publishing has writers not only accepting abuse but embracing it. It goes beyond Stockholm syndrome; the Stanford prison experiment has nothing on what I just described above. It took me long enough to see it, but I guess it’s harder when you write from an honest place, one that simply loves the craft. After ten years of rejection and abuse, with two DFW-esque novels rotting on the shelf, I'm done. Traditional publishing is dead; let them promote crap like The Silent Patient or The Housemaid and drown in mediocrity.
This is why I went indie. I may not make much money, but at least I got some books in the hands of some people who like some of it. That feedback process has fueled and guided me to write better over these last 4 years. Continually running into a brick wall isn't progress, it's self-harm.