What Literary Agents Read Online
How do we measure the zeitgeist and where do we find our next clients? A guest post from Neon's newest team member, literary agent Eloy Bleifuss Prados.
NOTE FROM ANNA: I’m working from Paris through the end of May. My sister just had a baby over here. Yay!
I’ll be back with my own newsletters next week, but in the mean time, here’s a new one from Eloy Bleifuss Prados, my brand-new colleague at Neon.
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At conferences, authors often ask me some version of this question: “Where do you get your news?”(Or “What periodicals do you subscribe to?”) I get the sense that they (understandably!) want to figure out where agents like me go looking for new clients and project ideas. They want to know my media diet, as it’s called.
A nutritious, diverse media diet is an essential part of any agent's career, particularly at times when they’re building their client list. It’s how we find new voices and get a feel for new trends.
It's also harder than ever to consume a media diet that isn’t crap. There’s plenty to eat out there, but it’s mostly the clickbait equivalent of Diet Coke and…I don’t know, vapors. Journalists are getting laid off en masse; media companies are consolidating into hideous conglomerates; and a handful of social media platforms hold massive sway over what type of content finds an audience online.
I’ve found that when algorithms drive my attention toward any kind of longform writing at all, it's generally by authors who are already well-known (and well-represented) megastars. Combine that with a glut of new literary agents entering this sector of the industry from recently-consolidated publishing houses, and as a young agent, you're dealing with a lot of competition for whatever low-hanging fruit remains.
I don’t despair: I know that the internet still teems with smart writing, good art, and promising new people and ideas. It's just that such things take a little more effort to find than they did even five years ago.
Let me walk you through how I do that.
I Don’t Do It On the Platform Formerly Known as Twitter.
With this platform more and more resembling a haunted airport casino, I’ve increasingly had to be more intentional about what media I’m consuming and where. This often entails skipping over social media and going straight to certain publications and creators I know and trust.
Lately I’ve been thinking about this tweet from New Yorker contributor Kyle Chayka that asks, “what are the URLs you still find yourself typing into your browser and going to directly?” The question—and the piece it eventually produced—holds an important lesson for me: to find new work online, I pretend it’s 2003 again and don’t trust social media to be my wingman at all. Instead, I generally go straight to my favorite sites’ homepages.
As Chayka writes, “Surrounded by dreck, the digital citizen is discovering that the best way to find what she used to get from social platforms is to type a URL into a browser bar and visit an individual site.”
What homepages do I visit?
I peek at The New York Times home page several times a day. It’s a kind of an itch at this point. Did some earth-shattering breaking news happen during the minutes when I was composing an email? No? OK, got it.
Usually, I do my best to stay clear of anything written by the New York Times editorial board or their paid weekly columnists. There are some smart opinion writers on the Times payroll, but I find that a certain group of, oh I don’t know, 4 to 7 regular commentators get far more attention than they deserve.
Instead, I read the metro pages, the longform magazine pieces in the Sunday magazine, the Styles, the Business, and the Arts sections. You can always find something interesting: Solar storms shut down some tractors. King Charles III unveiled a “striking” portrait. Asexual starfish are older than we think. Cool.
As an agent, I’m not just thinking about the stories I gravitate toward per se; I’m thinking about why I’m gravitating toward them and what they have in common. For example: these three New York Times stories above all speak in one way or another to the fragility of human life, the sublimity of nature, and the sheer amount of weirdness that’s out there in the world today. I recognize all of these themes percolating the media zeitgeist—good areas of exploration for me and my clients.
I don’t have a physical New Yorker subscription anymore, but I do still visit the site when there’s a big story I’m seeing other people online talking about. For example, I’ve promised myself that as a reward for finishing this Substack I’m going to spend an hour reading Rachel Aviv’s story on Lucy Letby, which I’ve heard is heartbreaking and infuriating. You know. As a treat. And to remind myself that readers really gravitate toward stories of justice, institutional failure, and deep moral ambiguities in longform writing right now.
I’ve seen talk about New York Magazine’s skill at publishing a personal essay or feature every other week that sets some section of the internet afire. While I’m not going to deny the sorcerers there have produced certain pieces which call for immediate dissection in the group chat, if you think The Cut publishes the most bonkers, uncomfortably revealing personal essays, then I need to direct you to The Guardian.
Yes, they report on important stories from around the world, but the real gem of the British newspaper is their Experience column, in which they invite a new person with a, um, unique story, to contribute a personal essay about their, you know… whole deal.
“I’ve eaten pizza everyday for six years.” “I got sucked into a whirlpool.” “I let a baby bird nest in my hair for 84 days.” “I paddled a giant pumpkin down a river for 11 hours.” Pack it up, New York Magazine: you will never be able to compete with the British for A+ “It Happened to Me” media.
OK. Enough. I’ve already talked about three publications that begin with “The New York-.”
I’ll have you know I wasn’t always an effete coastal elite. I was once an effete Midwestern boy, so I like to keep tabs on my local hometown papers: The Chicago Tribune, The Chicago Sun Times, and my beloved alt-weekly the Chicago Reader. These papers keep me current on city politics and the local creative scene.
For instance, this week I caught up on the news of an out-of-state billionaire paying a museum $125M to rename a local museum after him, along with a touching tribute to Chicago-based musician and producer Steve Albini. Remember local news! Give them love, give them clicks, give them money.
I read a lot of criticism. Time is finite. I cannot read every book, attend every play, watch every film. What I can do is read what some very smart, witty minds have to say about a cultural object, which helps me see how that object is resonating in the zeitgeist—and understand where that object might fit in a pattern of trends to come. To this end, I subscribe to The New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, and Bookforum. I also recommend The Baffler, The Paris Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Margins. All of these publishers regularly post excellent works of criticism, as well as fine new fiction, essays, poems, and original reporting.
I need to take a moment to shout out the excellent website 4 Columns, which, every Friday, posts four new pieces from four different critics weighing in on recent books, film, theater, dance, and more. Do you know what I love just as much as good criticism? Bad SEO. 4 Columns’ SEO has historically been bad in a way that feels intentional and refreshing—as in, it’s nowhere near the top hit that comes up when you google “4 columns.” (The top hits are about Excel spreadsheets and refurbishing your home’s architectural features.) The site’s google obscurity has always made it feel a little more special, like it was a treasure that took a bit of digging to find.
So imagine my disappointment when, in the course of writing this newsletter I searched “four columns” and… look what we have here! www.4columns.org has moved to the top of the Google search results. How upsetting.
A couple of birthdays ago, I asked my dad for a subscription to Scientific American. It was a great idea. I loved learning about stuff like magma. The subscription has since lapsed and now I don’t know what’s the latest with magma. Next birthday, I’m going to ask dad for a new subscription so I can find out.
I Love Aggregation Newsletters.
I always want to read what other smart people are reading. That’s why I have such love for newsletters which collect interesting articles from around the internet. It feels like having my own butler uncover a delightful cheese plate in my inbox every day.
I’m not going to bore you with every aggregation newsletter I’ve signed up for at one point or another. At a certain point I lost track. Instead, let me share a few of my favorites: