Nothing annoys me more than fictional book deals right now.

I’m watching Brothers & Sisters from the beginning on Netflix (even though it’s terrible) because I’ve never seen it and because it’s available and because it’s the kind of show you don’t really have to pay attention to while you watch. You can have your glass of wine and think about what you have to do tomorrow and every so often check back in with the action on the screen without missing much. Usually some character’s complaining about a fight they had with another character to still a different character, so you get the gist of the argument one way or another. 

And one of their arguments in season 3 is about a book that Kitty wrote, except it wasn’t a book, it was a few emails she sent to a friend who happened to be a literary agent, and that agent kind of smooshed those emails into chapters (okay) and then Kitty went to New York to “pick a publisher” (sure) because all the publishers in New York wanted her emails that had been smooshed into chapters.

This reminded me of a plot line on Private Practice (that I watch this show is no longer my Private Shame, I guess) where Violet wrote an 800-page (EIGHT HUNDRED PAGES, this was stated explicitly in dialogue) manuscript that she gave to her friend who happened to be an editor at Hyperion (okay) who loved it and wanted to “fast-track” the book (sure) because everyone could learn from Violet’s struggles as a therapist who had her baby cut out of her stomach by a psychotic patient (see above: Private Shame).

But what happens when you’re trying to get a book deal in real life is that you don’t happen to have an agent or editor friend to whom you send a rambling mess of pages. You miraculously survive the slush pile after a cold submission and get an agent, and then you spend seven years writing and working on book projects that don’t sell while working at your rent-paying day job, your miraculously-acquired agent sticking by you as projects fail, sticking by you long enough for you to finally manage to write a novel that Major Publishers are interested in. Their editors are loving it, editors who are taking it to their fiction departments and editorial boards. Internal meetings are being held. You’re told foreign scouts are contacting your agent. There’s buzz.

And then you’re told that you have to stop the submission process cold.

That you have to go back and do some rewriting, because editors at Major Publishers aren’t allowed to make offers on books they want if those books need, well, editing. That even though they’ve all absolutely flipped about the concept, they’d like to see some changes to the middle of the book. Less of one character, more of another. 

And I’m told this is the way book deals are increasingly made because the climate of the publishing industry is downright hostile at the moment. You submit the book to a handful of select editors and hope one of them buys it. If they don’t, you take their feedback and pull the novel back for some rewrites. Then you go out for round two, to new editors. I’m told that this is actually what you want to have happen. Well, actually, you just want someone to buy it. But apparently this is the next best thing, given that it’s almost impossible to sell fiction right now. You might have heard that no one reads books anymore.

This is reality - no emails cobbled into a book that sounds like it was actually written by the agent, Kitty. No manuscript that is printed out and kept in multiple boxes, Violet. No breaks, no benefits of the doubt, no contracts falling out of the sky. Just doing yet another round of rewrites, chasing after something that increasingly feels like it’s only available to people on TV.