Middlewomen: Laura McGrath on the 25 People Who Control American Fiction

00:00:31 Andrew Keen: Hello, everybody. At the beginning of the year, we had the literary historian, Gayle Feldman, on the show — not on the phone, talking about the man who made books random, the founder of Random House, Bennett Cerf. She had a book out back then. It was very well reviewed within the literary community. Nothing random. Bennett Cerf and the publishing house he built. It's taken for granted, of course, that publishers shape literature. Then when we want to understand how to get a book published, or why some books get published and why some don't, we think of publishers. But my guest today has another way of thinking of it. Laura McGrath teaches, English literature at Temple University. She's the author of an intriguing new book, took her ten years to write, Middlemen: Literary Agents and the Making of American Fiction. Laura is joining us from, Philadelphia. Is that right? Tell Laura where you are.

00:01:35 Laura McGrath: That's correct. I am just outside of Philadelphia.

00:01:39 Andrew Keen: At Temple University. I know that there are some birds outside your window, so, apologies if there are any bird sounds during this conversation. Laura, should we compare the influence of guys like Bennett Cerf and the kind of middlemen and, indeed, middlewomen that you deal with in your book?

00:01:57 Laura McGrath: I think that's a really fair comparison. Publishing in the early twentieth century that focused on these storied publishers, people like Bennett Cerf, is really a bygone era. Now we have large scale conglomerated publishers where individual editors, might have really excellent taste, but they're not houses that are built around the taste of a few individuals any longer. But for literary agents who are really the key central gatekeepers for publishing, their taste is really central in terms of how they are evaluating manuscripts, signing new clients, and promoting the literature that they believe should be in the world. And so I think that the taste of the literary agent now in the twenty first century, operates in a way that is really similar to the way that the taste of a veteran publisher, someone like, say, Alfred or Blanche Knopf, might have worked at the beginning of the twentieth century.

00:02:50 Andrew Keen: be two reactions to what you just said, and, indeed, you hear this, I'm sure, a lot in the talks you give about the book. On the one hand, people will say, well, this is still a good thing. We have tastemakers, people who are steeped in literature, who are doing the physical thing, the human thing that enables culture. On the other hand, the argument that I'm sure you also hear is that it's a really bad thing, that it's controlled by a group of upper class, powerful New York literary figures, mostly men, mostly white, and that this accounts for the fact that most literature doesn't really reflect, popular opinion or popular culture. And often, it's extremely unfair because, really talented writers don't get a shot. Is that fair, the two classic responses to this increasing centrality of the literary agent in the publishing world?

00:03:47 Laura McGrath: I think the two responses, you know, on the one hand, there's people that care about literature. On the other hand, this is controlled by an elite group. I think that's fair. I do though would like to clarify that about 80% of literary agents are women. The book's title is very tongue in cheek, and it draws on the memoir of the first literary agent in The United States, Paul Revere Reynolds. His son wrote a memoir called The Middleman about his father's life and career. And so I want to clarify that 80% of agents are women, and the profession has historically been that aside, I do dominated by women. But I think, you know, that aside, I do think that's a fair characterization of the debate on both sides of this particular issue. I, for one, am in favor of more gatekeepers existing in the publishing industry, of more people that are not only, evaluating and determining which books are worthy of our time and attention, but also, and I think this is an important dynamic about gatekeeping, are also promoting and advocating for the writers and the books that they believe are worthy, that they believe should have access to a readership. And while I think the critique that you paraphrased here, that often these gatekeepers are an elitist cabal, I think that is, bandied about often. I also think that many agents have taken a very activist stance, in terms of the writers that they seek to promote and the work that they champion. And so I'm I'm grateful, for the work of those particular agents.

00:05:24 Andrew Keen: Yeah. I don't think you'll find much argument with me. Back in 2007, I wrote a book called Cult of the Amateur, which is a defense of gatekeepers, specifically, particularly in the context of the supposed democratizing power of the Internet, which has only been compounded, of course, over the last twenty years. I'm assuming that the kind of literary agents that you write about in your book, and I take your point on them mostly being female rather than male, are very much in contrast with the emergence of social networks of Facebook and Instagram and TikTok, which democratizes, which levels everything.

00:10:12 Laura McGrath: Okay. Cool. Yeah. No. I think it's it's really fair to say that middlemen have become increasingly important as we see really this proliferation of text and proliferation of writing that exists on the Internet and alternative pathways to publication increasingly becoming more attractive to writers. I, for one, think it's great that so many people are finding their way to writing as a hobby, are so interested in finding opportunities to write and to get their writing in front of other people. But, I also know and believe that in this moment of information overload, my attention as a reader is a very precious resource. And so I'm very grateful to have folks like literary agents, particularly of the sort that I interviewed. I interviewed 75 literary agents over the course of ten years, many of whom are really working at the, in the in the top tier of the profession. I am very grateful to have these folks, promoting literary work, championing and surfacing high quality writers, and getting that writing in front of me, and finding ways to protect the scarce resource that is readerly attention.

00:10:16 Andrew Keen: Okay. So why don't you continue the answer on fiction versus nonfiction?

00:10:21 Laura McGrath: Sure. Sure. This book deals almost exclusively with fiction, and it became really clear as I was working on this research that would be a matter of necessity, but that there is absolutely a sequel somewhere in the wings about how the nonfiction industry works. Agents represent both fiction and nonfiction, with very few exception, and that's because agents represent authors. They don't represent books specifically. Right? So if I decided I wanted to write a novel next week, my agent would represent it. That said, agents really specialize. You know, they focus on either fiction or serious nonfiction, or whatever type of nonfiction they're invested in, even if there's a degree of flexibility where they can move back and forth with both. But the world of nonfiction really works very differently, you know, from the type of pitch that an agent makes to the way that they work with an author, when they are developing a proposal to what it is actually that they're selling. You know, Andrew, you're a nonfiction author. Nonfiction is sold on proposal, whereas a novel, typically is sold as a full finished product. And so the world, the ideas, the standards, the systems, it's really very different when you're working with nonfiction than with fiction.

00:11:34 Andrew Keen: Yeah. It was interesting. I was talking to my agent actually about this, and, he said that one of the more absurd things is submitting a fiction proposal, as opposed to the finished product. Are there a lot of agents now who pitch fictional, fiction proposals? Because that seems particularly weird given that the whole point of fiction is not to say what you intend doing, but what you've actually done.

00:12:04 Laura McGrath: Yeah. Certainly not for, brand new authors. Our agents are selling fiction on spec like that. Fiction might be sold off of the strength of a single short story, for instance, but there's still an example of what the book will be that's clearly there for an editor to see and to work with. And as an author develops, as they've gotten several books under their belt, so as they've been working with their editor and probably their agent for a significant amount of time, it becomes easier to sell something that is, maybe less formed. But it's really very rare or very uncommon to be selling fiction unfinished.

00:12:40 Andrew Keen: What about the issue of marketing? I know, again, as a nonfiction writer, the marketing platform's essential. You gotta be able to, be as ubiquitous as you possibly can. Publishers are notoriously bad at marketing books. Do, literary agents in terms of selling American fiction, is marketing important? Should the writer, first time writer or otherwise, have a marketing platform, a substack page, a lot of followers on Instagram or TikTok or x?

00:13:16 Laura McGrath: That is the perennial question. I think for anyone who is thinking about being a writer, you know, it really depends on the book that you're writing. I mean, you acknowledged, you know, nonfiction is a very different sort of platform driven world than fiction might be. One of the things that I found to be really fascinating while I was working on this book is the way that marketing is also, differentiated across different types of writers. So in particular, one of the real burdens that agents who are people of color or who represent people of color face is they often have to pick up the slack of marketing, if they want to see their writers be successful, Knowing that publishers are perhaps not going to be doing as much for writers of color, knowing that it might be harder for publishers who have historically worked really deeply with white audiences, it might be harder for them to reach audiences in different communities. Agents often have to pick up that slack if they don't wanna see their clients, ultimately suffering for a lack of poor marketing. And so I found that to be a really fascinating, distinction, across different types of agents, when it we think about the sort of work that they are expected to do for their clients, and the sort of work that ultimately impacts what's getting read.

00:14:26 Andrew Keen: Laura, does the book middleman, does it identify, the glory days of literary agency, the three martini lunch in the expensive, New York restaurant. I know you focus on some of the best known agents, legendary, in fact. Andrew Wylie, for example, who, everybody knows the famous story of how he stole Martin Amis from Julian Barnes, his wife, or, Candida Donadio, who was, very famous, John Cheever, Philip Roth, Cormac McCarthy's agent. Was this a were these the glory days, Laura?

00:15:14 Laura McGrath: You know, I wrote about Candida Donadio that she did not invent the lunch, but she perfected it. It was certainly the glory days of expense accounts. But one of the things that I've found as someone who spent a whole lot of time in publishing archives is that everyone believes that the glory days are all bygone. And I have I have yet to find any real genuine glory days of publishing. In, the Esquire magazine, fiction issue that I talk about in 1963, they identified the literary establishment, where they put literary agents like Candida Donadio at the very center of the literary establishment. This was hot on the heels of the invention of the book auction. And so this was a moment where agents were really ascendant in the publishing industry. I think though if you wanna talk about the real glory days of the literary agent, we would have to look at the boom years of the Reagan era in the late nineteen eighties where we saw advances really reaching unprecedented heights. We had super agents, people like Mort Janklow, people like Lynn Nesbit, who I write about here, in Middlemen, people like Andrew Wylie who began his agency in the late nineties.

00:16:21 Andrew Keen: Known as the Jackal?

00:16:23 Laura McGrath: Not at that point. Not at that point, but later. Yes. Don't know.

00:16:26 Andrew Keen: So at least we can't blame, neoliberalism and Reagan for, the decline of the agency business. Market works. I mean, in all seriousness, Laura, is there a sort of purely capitalist element to this that these agents, you noted that, you talk about, literate the literary agent who invented the book auction. You write a you have a section in the book on that. Is this a manifestation of a pure kind of capitalism of the market where you've got a product, you put it out there, you send it to a group of people who might be interested, and then you auction it out. So it kind of even if many agents and writers are themselves sometimes skeptical of capitalism tend to be more on the left than the right, does it manifest is it a good argument for capitalism?

00:17:16 Laura McGrath: There might be some agents who function that way, but those are not the agents that I am interested in. The agents that I'm interested in and what I believe is really at the heart of the profession, is the constant negotiation between art and capitalism, that it can never purely be a matter of money alone, but that these agents are known for their taste. They are committed to the literary future. And so for them, it's a matter of making their tastes profitable, finding a way to leverage capitalism in the service of these things that otherwise resist commodification.

00:17:50 Andrew Keen: Going back to, Donadio, she discovered Thomas Pynchon and, of course, Joseph Heller. These weren't big selling writers, though. I mean, do the agents have also, shall we say, the moral dilemma of knowing whether to sell a Jacqueline Suzanne or some other big selling writer who may be not of great literary quality versus the Pinchons and the Hellas and the Philip Roths of the world?

00:18:21 Laura McGrath: I found that agents often divide themselves according to the types of fiction that they represent. So agents might be very committed to representing literary writers, people like Donadio and her list of clients that you mentioned, or they might be really committed to representing folks like Jacqueline Suzanne, to representing folks who are on the more commercial end of the spectrum. And by specializing, whether that's in fiction or nonfiction, commercial fiction or literary fiction, agents become a phrase that I heard a lot in my interviews was native readers in a particular genre. So I did not encounter anyone who says, yeah, I sell romance or I sell romantasy, but I know that it's shit. Like, no one was particularly invested in taking that line, or at least taking that approach in our conversations. That doesn't mean that it's not true, but that it certainly means that no one cops to that. Right? No one's willing to admit that's how their work functions. And instead, there's a real sense of a fusion between personal taste and commercial viability. You know, that said, Candida Donadio also represented, also represented, Mario Puzo, who wrote The Godfather. So she also represented very, very commercial writers that enabled her to make a living, so that you could also continue selling people like Thomas Pynchon and Philip Roth and William Gaddis, who might not necessarily bring in, stable financial returns, who might not help you make rent in New York, but who whose work is worthy and should exist in the world. I think Candida Donadio, like all agents that I encountered as a part of researching this book, was able to evaluate the work on its own terms. Right? Mario Puzo wrote an amazing novel in The Godfather that was designed to be a commercial success. The Crying of Lot 49 was not designed to be a commercial success. And so evaluating those writers on their own terms means seeing the merits in that individual work and selling it accordingly.

00:20:21 Andrew Keen: Godfather, we think of the movie. Although, the Oscar last year was, was given to a movie that was inspired by a Pynchon book. How much has changed in terms of these supposed literary agents now also focusing on other medium, particularly film?

00:20:42 Laura McGrath: That's a great question. I know that a lot of agencies will, take really the model that had long dominated the foreign rights community where they would work with sub agents or work with co agents. So perhaps a boutique literary agency would contract with a Hollywood agency to manage film rights for their clients. But increasingly, we're seeing smaller boutique agencies that are going through their own process of conglomeration and being bought up by or merging with larger Hollywood talent agencies, where books, and not literary because, of course, Hollywood screenwriters are called literary agents in that context as well, but books are becoming just one vertical in a part of a really complex, system of talent management. And so in those contexts, you see the merged back office often facilitates, a higher level of synergy if we can use those sorts of market driven terms, for writers to see their work in adaptation and to really streamline that process. That might be the benefit for a writer who is interested in, that sort of writing, the sort of writing that might lend itself to, say, a major adaptation for going with an agent who works at a place like CAA or WME as opposed to an agent at a smaller boutique agency.

00:21:56 Andrew Keen: Laura, I think one of the things that many nonwriters will be surprised with is the amount of time literary agents spend on the development of the proposal or of the work. Is that new, or was that always a feature? The, the cliche is now that American publishers, because of the pressures on the industry, don't have time to essentially edit their work. And most of the editing work is actually done before the proposal or during the proposal by the agent. Is there some truth to that, and why has that happened?

00:22:31 Laura McGrath: Well, I do think that, a lot of these claims about the demise of editorial are a bit exaggerated. But it is also true that editors have, an increased demand on their time that is spent on things that are not line editing, that is not developmental editing, that's not working, deeply in a manuscript, but include, the other components of their job for producing and for, promoting a book. And so agents often have to pick up that slack. If they want to help a writer, and in particular, if they want to help a writer be acquired well, that book needs to be as close to finished as possible when they sell it. So agents are anticipating what it is that editors are looking for and what it is that they will do for a manuscript, and are going through really significant revision processes with writers before they even send a book out. They wanna do everything that they possibly can to make it easy for an editor to say yes to a book, and that means making it as close to perfect as possible. But that is, as you mentioned, Andrew, a historically specific situation. Candida Donadio would never have touched one of her writer's sentences. Like, that just wasn't her work. And I spoke to many agents who, have been around after these, you know, storied careers who still insist that's not my job. My job is not is not editing a client. That is what an editor is for. But it was really in the bloodbath of the nineteen nineties as we see move into the sort of last, more recent stage of conglomeration where editors found that in order to move up, at their editorial homes, they needed to move out where they could no longer be promoted in house because conglomeration was shrinking the options available and shrinking the opportunities for promotion. Many editors were not able to move to, other publishing houses, and so they became agents. They found that the work that they had learned, the work that they had honed during their time at publishing houses lent itself really well to becoming an agent. They could work really closely with clients. They got to develop manuscripts. So they took the sort of editorial work that they had been doing in publishing houses and brought it into agenting. And as such, the profession changed as a result as they began training their assistants in how to edit and work with manuscripts, and their assistants began training assistants. It really brought that editorial focus into literary agency really in the nineteen nineties.

00:24:44 Andrew Keen: Is this something, Laura, that we should be celebrating? I sometimes wonder both as a writer and someone who interviews a lot of writers on this show that many American books, have the quality of American cars. They feel or they read or they drive as if they've been designed by committee, that they're lacking individuality. One of the things that troubles me about agents is that they shape the book or the proposal in a way that they think they can sell into publishing, which is very hard. I mean, everybody knows that it's incredibly tough and increasingly tough to sell it in a business that's struggling. But it are we in this process, for better or worse, eliminating individual voice? And these books and these projects increasingly lack personality, seem as if they've been designed by committee.

00:25:40 Laura McGrath: I think there certainly are projects that seem like they've been designed by committee. I have read several books, and by read, I mean, have given up a couple chapters in on so many books that feel like they have been, you know, market tested to within an inch of their lives. And those books typically, for me, at least as a reader, exist on the more commercial end of the spectrum. So I do think that there's a difference between the ways that agents are working with commercial fiction versus literary fiction. I also think this is the same argument that was leveled at MFA programs, a decade ago when we were talking about the role that the MFA had on the development,

00:26:11 Andrew Keen: in my view, is also true.

00:26:14 Laura McGrath: Not necessarily an individual voice, but an MFA program voice. Right? And look, there are certainly going to be agents who are doing that sort of work just as there are MFA programs that are creating that sort of homogenizing effect. But I found, and where I think agents who are really taste makers are finding their opportunities to shape fiction. A really truly excellent agent is not interested in market testing a book, is not interested in designing it by committee, but is interested in helping the writer make it the best possible book that it can be on its own terms and helping the writer, become the best writer that she can be within her own goals and parameters and on her own terms. And the ability to do that, right, to not only fix a book but to fit with a client and to fit with that client's vision for her career or her vision for that book, that's really what is, at stake, what an agent offers representation and signs with a new writer. There are so many agents and there are a billion writers that is a scientifically accurate A billion. A billion. Aspiring writers

00:27:18 Andrew Keen: who think of themselves as writers not real. I mean, they're certainly not professional writing.

00:27:22 Laura McGrath: And if all that mattered was the ability to write a book or the ability to write a good plot or the ability to write some good dialogue or the ability to have ambition, then we'd be completely awash in books that are probably not that great. But what also really matters is a fit between a writer and an agent. And that's where these really excellent and really historic partnerships can develop. Right? That's what Candida Donadio saw, for instance, in Joseph Heller after he had been rejected by almost everyone else. Yeah. We did. That's I

00:27:50 Andrew Keen: mean, imagine rejecting Joseph Heller. You spent ten years on this, Laura. So you talked you as you said, you talked to 75 leading agents. You talked to a lot of publishers. One of the things I've always been curious about and you know there's a lot of crossover between agents and publishers, particularly, many agents are ex publishers. Maybe some people would say unkindly failed publishers. But how do they think of each other? The agent always seems to be doing the heavy lifting for the publisher. Did you in your conversations, many of which, of course, were off record, did you did you could you generalize about how these two communities think of one another?

00:28:36 Laura McGrath: There was real animosity when agents came on the scene in the eighteen nineties, with publisher William Henry Heinemann calling them parasites. But by the nineteen eighties, Roger Straus was calling them friends at court. And so agents and editors really need one another. Editors need agents to scout talent for them, to find promising writers, and to develop them accordingly. And they also need agents to bring them writers that will be a good fit, to bring them the writers that they want to work with that are aligned with their own skills and talents and with their lists. Agents and editors will, you know, at times, play good cop, bad cop with a writer. There will be times when the agents and the editor are aligned. There'll be times when the agent and the writer are aligned. And there will be times when the writer and the editor are aligned. Right? Like, it is a triangle or a three pronged stool or whatever metaphor you wanna work with here. But by and large, I think editors and agents are, in agreement that they serve different but significant functions in the life of the book and in the life of the author, and it behooves all of them to work well together. That animosity does not exist by and large as a whole in the profession, that it used to when agents first came on the scene.

00:29:50 Andrew Keen: I wonder whether the economics of this also work. I mean, of course, publishers are paid. They don't work on commission. Maybe some do, but most don't. Whereas agents work on commission. They get their 15%. But until they sell the book, they make nothing. Is that a viable business model for the twenty first century, Laura? I sometimes wonder whether agents are simply charged for their services and become consultants.

00:30:20 Laura McGrath: You know, I can't say whether or not it's a viable business strategy broadly. You can go ask McKinsey and Bain about that. I'm sure they will say it's not. But I do believe that for the working relationship and the literary relationship to persist, that needs to continue, that agents do not get paid until their clients get paid. That is a time honored tradition in the profession and one that I hope never changes, I do not believe should change. That's how you know that someone is not, just trying to take you for a walk. Right? If you are a writer, that's how you know that you are not just saying goodbye to your money and that your dreams are not being taken advantage of, but that you're actually trusting someone, to align their interest and to yoke their financial success to yours. That's what that's what develops the solid Yeah.

00:31:04 Andrew Keen: I take your point. But as a writer as well, you could make the argument that if you're not paying the agent, then you can't demand that much. And sometimes, I know many writers who feel that for one reason or other, sometimes maybe fairly, maybe sometimes unfairly, that the agent isn't really doing anything for them. Sometimes maybe they are. Sometimes they're not. But if you're actually paying the agent, then you can be much more demanding.

00:31:29 Laura McGrath: Yeah. I mean, these are fundamentally relationships, and people are gonna people. Right? I think that's that's fair, and that might be the case in some circumstances. But even if you're not paying the agent, you have a product as the writer. The agent works for you. That's that's fundamentally how this contractual relationship works. So, you know, I hear that criticism. I'm sure that is an unfortunate situation for a whole lot of writers, but that's not the way it's designed. And that's not, I don't think, a fault of the structure of the relationship.

00:32:00 Andrew Keen: As you know, maybe there is some viability when it comes to the agents business model. What about what you discovered in middlemen about publishers? Are agents happy with the publishing industry broadly? Many agents I talk to think that the industry is in profound crisis. I mean, not necessarily in 2026, but in the long term, it just doesn't work because publishers don't really provide that much apart from publishing a book, physically publishing a book, which increasingly can be done by agents or writers?

00:32:36 Laura McGrath: I don't think that there's a time in the history of publishing where people who work in publishing have not thought it was in crisis. There's, like, never been a point where everyone said, you know, [unclear] is doing great, or this is really great. We're we're really getting hands into the right the books into the hands of the right readers. I think that there are problems. I think that agents identified lots of them, particularly, for thinking about, representing writers of color or writers who are otherwise minoritized. There's a lot of structural bias, and a lot of deep problems that persist, that predate to anyone who's currently working here, but that everyone has to currently deal with the legacy of. And those are problems that I think are bigger than agents, that are bigger than editors. What I find so useful about thinking about literary agents is that they are the very center of this chain. And so by looking at the work that they do, we can see how an entire structure and system is held together, which also means that we can see the problems with that structure, and begin to, I think, diagnose how, one individual writer or a group of individual writers might try to respond.

00:33:44 Andrew Keen: Two more quick questions. Laura, I know you gotta run. Has the pendulum swung? I talk to a lot of writers, white male writers who will tell me, well, I can't get published anymore because I'm a white man. Is there any truth to that?

00:34:00 Laura McGrath: No. No. I think that's silly.

00:34:03 Andrew Keen: You think or you know it's silly?

00:34:06 Laura McGrath: I think I think it's silly. I think that, the number of books that are published each week, is staggering. It is it is overwhelming how many books are published each and every year. It is overwhelming how many books do and do not receive attention. And I think that, being able to see some success, particularly on the part of writers of color, does not diminish the work that white men are doing. I think that complaint is, one that circulates every ten years. It usually circulates after there has been a great boom in support for writers of color. And so I think we are in another level, another round of this cycle, and I think we'll probably see another one in a decade or so.

00:34:47 Andrew Keen: Well, there you have it, white men. If you can't get published, it's because you're not very good writers. Finally, you have an excellent Substack, which is, of course, an alternative platform in some ways to books, called textCrunch, which, is ironic. This show began on TechCrunch, the big, platform man in San Francisco. And your pieces deal with all sorts of interesting issues about short story booms. But you also asked, do we still need agents? And, of course, in the age of AI, there will be people who will argue that the algorithm does a much better job than the agent of the although, of course, I still haven't come across an algorithm that can, take somebody out for a three martini lunch in New York. What do you think, AI is going to do, Laura, to the agency business? Is it gonna have any impact at all on middlemen? Are we gonna talk about middle AIs in the future?

00:35:46 Laura McGrath: Oh, I certainly hope not. I was at the US Book Show last week, and I heard a really great talk, where, and I cannot remember, which CEO said this, but they were drawing the distinction between AI, functioning in operations and AI functioning in creative. And they said, you know, in our in our company and again, I cannot remember which one. They said we're open to AI functions and operations, but we're not open to AI and creative. And I could see a literary agency that wanted to take that path. Right? To say our slush piles are huge and overflowing. We could use some assistance in this context, but we will not outsource the work of, writing, the work of editing, the work of translation, the work of cover design. We will not or outsource any of these creative functions to AI. I could see that middle ground. But I certainly hope that a profession that is based on taste will not sacrifice the fundamental human endeavor, of exercising that taste. You know, an AI algorithm is based on priors. Right? It's based on Bayesian statistics. And so the window of possibility becomes narrower and narrower and narrower as we make suggestions. We start to see, our algorithms replicating themselves. Right? That's why my Instagram account looks like the same thing every single day. And that is not the work of what literary agents are doing. I hope that literature does not take that path because I want books that are going to surprise me and that are going to frustrate me and they're going to thrill me that I didn't see coming. And I think that is why people are in the publishing business. I think that is certainly why literary agents are in the publishing business. And it's my sincere hope. And I think the sincere hope of, all of the agents that I've spoken to who are worth their salt, that AI will not take over the work of human gatekeeping and human taste making.

00:37:31 Andrew Keen: Well, that's a relief. Laura McGrath's new book, Middlemen: Literary Agents and the Making of American Fiction. It's already out in The US. It's gonna be out next week or in a couple of weeks in The UK. And I can't finish, Laura, without very, very briefly asking you for your advice to people looking for an agent. Any anecdotal wisdom? You've spent ten years writing and researching this book, talking to many agents. What would you advise people who are in the business of finding a literary agent?

00:38:02 Laura McGrath: I would say that there is a whole lot of advice online. There is a huge thriving publishing advice industry, and that might be helpful. It might not, but you will not regret any time that you spend working on your pages and working on your writing and developing your craft. There is no magic number for the size of a platform or the size of Instagram or Substack or TikTok followers you have. But the life that you will develop, that you will spend developing your craft as a writer, that is something that can't be quantified, but also something that you will not regret. So I would I would encourage writers to be primarily writers.

00:38:37 Andrew Keen: Maybe there's a business opportunity for new agents who will find agents for writers. Anyway, Laura McGrath, congratulations on the new book. Middlemen: Literary Agents and the Making of American Fiction, particularly important book for American writers and for historians of American literature. Thank you so much.

00:38:56 Laura McGrath: Thank you very much, Andrew. I appreciate it.