The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

After Two Blog Posts, She Was Contacted by Five Literary Agents and . . .

Posted on | August 8, 2010 | 57 Comments

. . . now has less traffic per month than I get in an average week, and yet is deemed so popular that she’s scheduled to appear later this month on The Today Show. Novelist Theodore Beale is also pissed:

I happen to notice that my own little blog appears to have had 208,595 visitors last month, in addition to another 46,376 monthly Feedburner subscribers. According to Blogger, I have written 8,376 posts, which if my math is correct suggests that I should have been contacted by an estimated 177,969 literary agents by now. And yet, despite having published five novels, three graphic novels, and two non-fiction books, I have never, ever been contacted by one. Or, come to think of it, by the Today Show either. How highly peculiar!

Since the late 1950s at least, authors have been divided into four categories:

  1. Those who are already famous enough that merely putting their name and photo on the cover of a book would guarantee commercial success;
  2. Those who, while currently not famous, are sufficiently telegenic that they might get booked on national TV;
  3. Those whose work could conceivably be made into a blockbuster movie; and
  4. Those who are treated like scum.

Once television became the dominant venue for selling books, certain further consequences were predictable, including the Justin Bieber memoir. And while much of the publishing world has surrendered to the “Oprah Syndrome” (whereby publishers try to pick books and authors based on their prospects of catching Oprah Winfrey’s attention), conservative book publishing is nowadays controlled by the Fox Syndrome, based on the likelihood of the author getting booked on “The O’Reilly Factor” or getting mentioned by Glenn Beck.

Speaking of Glenn Beck, for example, let me ask readers who’ve got their copy of Donkey Cons (2006) handy to turn to page 149 and look at the last paragraph on the page:

The welfare explosion of the 1960s was the brainchild of a group of Columbia University professors, including Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward and crusading  New York anti-poverty lawyer Edward Sparer. They saw welfare as a means to shatter “patterns of servile conformity” among the poor, transforming them into a force for revolution.

Nowadays, Beck can’t step to the chalkboard without invoking the “Cloward-Piven Strategy,” which was first discussed on his show by my ACORN-busting friend Matthew Vadum:

Vadum’s first writing on the Cloward-Piven Strategy, so far as I’m aware, was in October 2008. You’ll see in the video clip that Beck quotes David Horowitz, who had written extensively about the Cloward-Piven Strategy, as had Horowitz’s colleague Richard Poe in 2005. However, the source I cited in writing on Cloward and Piven in Donkey Cons was Fred Siegel’s excellent 1997 book on urban policy, The Future Once Happened Here.

What I’m trying to get across here is that the Cloward-Piven Strategy was a well-documented phenomenon of left-wing ideology for decades. Yet Beck’s got a TV show and the rest of us don’t, so that’s the way that particular cookie crumbles in the modern world. There’s no point bitching about it.

As Ronald Reagan said, “You can accomplish much if you don’t care who gets the credit.” Or the book contracts or TV shows.

Life is not fair. Embrace the suck.

UPDATE: Instapundit embraces the suck. I should probably now advise you to buy An Army of Davids.

Category: Blogging, Books

Comments

57 Responses to “After Two Blog Posts, She Was Contacted by Five Literary Agents and . . .”

  1. Joe
    August 8th, 2010 @ 10:58 pm

    Ms. Dolgoff is probably a perfectly witty, nice, smart person. I would not know, I never met her or heard of her before. But she seems attractive. But she is obviously edgy because she has not one, but two tattoos (yet still accessable because they are not on her face or of anything particularly offensive). She fits the preconceived idea of the “next new thing” and she easily palatable to New York media types. I am not surprised people are banging on her door. This is called being in the right place at the right time.

  2. Slayer
    August 8th, 2010 @ 11:18 pm

    Stacy is being chased by the media because they love a useful idiot. Any chance to promote someone ‘on the Right’ who hates the Right is top priority.
    Surprisingly, I had actually forgotten about the silly little scrunt. I hope I don’t have to see her face all over the place for another 15 minutes again – she’s as dumb as they come.

  3. Mike G
    August 8th, 2010 @ 11:18 pm

    Well, yeah. Women read books and more than that, women editors buy books they think women will read. This kind of NY-centric trend following book is exactly what they buy, and most of the time it underperforms like a politician’s memoir, so the sooner people who aren’t Stephanie Dolgoff or her agent or her editor are able to control their publishing destiny, the better it will be for anything that isn’t a book like hers.

  4. T.L. Davis
    August 8th, 2010 @ 11:38 pm

    Two novels, three ghostwritten novels, two short stories, a play, a short film, a non-fiction book and several magazine articles and I’ve never been contacted by a literary agent either. I guess I’m too white and conservative for that shit.

  5. Estragon
    August 8th, 2010 @ 11:57 pm

    It’s just another tactic in the ongoing effort to persuade women who have wasted their youth away in single promiscuity that there are many more suffering just as they are, which is what most of them really want to hear.

    She surely may have been “hot” at one point, but any reasonably attractive well-dressed man could have had her for the price of a couple of Cosmopolitans and a few lines of coke. Now she has to convince herself her life has meaning.

    I do sympathize with her plight.

  6. Robert Stacy McCain
    August 9th, 2010 @ 12:00 am

    Women read books and more than that, women editors buy books they think women will read.

    Back in the late 1990s there was a vogue of “feminist memoirs” by ’60s hippie-type women who, evidently, had all gone to the Iowa Writers Workshop and wrote in a sort of annoyingly recognizable style. And it was so predictable:

    — Chapter One: My Oppressive Bourgeois Surburban Childhood
    — Chapter Two: I Go to College, Protest the War, Get Pregnant by My Draft-Dodger Boyfriend, Have an Abortion
    — Chapter Three: HEAR ME ROAR!

    Lather, Rinse, Repeat. And I swear I read basically the same book by six or seven different women authors, circa 1997-99, before I realized what was going on: College “Women’s Studies” classes had created a sort of baseline demand for crap like this, and there were also a circuit of feminist workshops and conferences where these women gave speeches and sold their lousy books.

  7. Some Hack
    August 9th, 2010 @ 12:04 am

    If it makes y’all feel any better, the book itself is looking weak. I know it’s pre-release, and lame-stream media, but if after a NY Times mention you’re still sitting at an Amazon sales rank of 3k+, you’re… pretty much not gonna sell.

    Even w/ a Today boost, which I suppose someone watches, wait a few months, and I’m sure you’ll see the work offered at a “bargain price”–heavily remaindered, won’t earn back.

    /Fer that matter, lamenting your drearily comfortable upper-middle-class existence, and wanting to revisit your SATC salad days doesn’t quite work when millions of folks are wanting to revisit their gainfully-employed, mortgage-not-underwater, not among the 40-million-Americans-on-foodstamps days.

  8. dave
    August 9th, 2010 @ 12:10 am

    Usually when a person says there’s no use crying about it, they already have.

  9. DSnark
    August 9th, 2010 @ 12:19 am

    Maybe your dad should run for Prez, then you could act to embarrass yourself and him. Oh, that and be teh pretty. That might help, too.

  10. T.L. Davis
    August 9th, 2010 @ 12:39 am

    Stacy, I promise that I didn’t write any of those books during my ghostwriting days, but it does seem like they all had the same one.

  11. Tom
    August 9th, 2010 @ 1:19 am

    “Stacy is being chased by the media because they love a useful idiot. Any chance to promote someone ‘on the Right’ who hates the Right is top priority. Surprisingly, I had actually forgotten about the silly little scrunt. I hope I don’t have to see her face all over the place for another 15 minutes again – she’s as dumb as they come.”

    Huh? Stacy who? What is your comment about? Which silly little useless-idiot scrunt is being “chased by the media”?

  12. whiskey
    August 9th, 2010 @ 2:01 am

    Publishing is a female (and gay) ghetto, and predictably leaving out half the population leads to … half the sales. Which is why traditional publishers go nuts for more of the same.

    More Twilight type books “Lonely Werewolf Girl” (about a fashionista werewolf, I kid you not), more crummy Eat Pray Love Purge books, more stuff about how “I was Formerly Hot!” etc.

    When your entire existence is based on consuming: the right shoes, girlfriends, guys in your life, accessories, politics, celebrities … all that is left is more consumption.

    The silver lining is that the marketplace ignoring men, for the most part, has left them other things than empty consumption. Women tragically are not so lucky. It takes considerable will to resist a life of empty consumption.

  13. Tim Chambers
    August 9th, 2010 @ 2:46 am

    I don’t know how this bait and switch showed up in my blog search tagged as literary fiction but it did and I am pissed.

    If you actually look up what Piven and Cloward said said instead of spreading the lies attributed to them by others, you would see that the words you added in bold cannot be attributed to them. They conceived of welfare as a means of social control, a way of forestalling revolution instead of provoking it. It was under Nixon that welfare as we knew it, or AFDC, finally got through Congress with a coalition of Republicans and racist Dixiecrats, not “liberals” supporting it. Its unintended consequence was to discourage marriage and break up two parent households and led to a huge increase in poverty.

  14. FenelonSpoke
    August 9th, 2010 @ 5:12 am

    It sounds like editors decide who is going to be popular and then promote them.

    I have never heard of the woman and have no interest in reading her book. Considering that the book I am reading now (again) is “The Way of a Pilgrim” written in the 19th century, and the book I read before that was “Home” by the fiction writer Marilynne Robinson who deservedly got the Pulitzer Prize for her luminous novel, “Gilead”
    about a dying minister from Iowa, I am not part the market the are targeting. I couldn’t care less about who was or is hot.

  15. FenelonSpoke
    August 9th, 2010 @ 9:02 am

    I don’t know, whiskey. I know a number of guys who have been into empty consumption-cars, younger women, alcohol. The empty consumption is not gender based, I think.

  16. SteveM
    August 9th, 2010 @ 9:06 am

    “she was a born-and-bred New York cool girl: raised on the Upper West Side, high school at Bronx Science, college at Wesleyan, followed by glittery jobs at women’s magazines, including Self, Glamour and YM.”

    These are the most important criteria for getting ahead in today’s world. She appears on the Today show on the basis that the producers know her. She gets a puff piece in the NYT on the basis that the editors know her. This is the liberal world in microcosm – it’s all about knowing the right people.

  17. SteveM
    August 9th, 2010 @ 9:11 am

    “She fits the preconceived idea of the “next new thing” and she easily palatable to New York media types.”

    She IS a New York media type. I guess that would tend to make her palatable to her fellow New York media types.

  18. Karen Sullivan
    August 9th, 2010 @ 9:12 am

    Wherefore the sniping at Glenn Beck? He’s performing a public service with his successful show. He’s not claiming to have discovered Cloward-Piven, he’s trying to broadcast the strategy to inform the republic.

    Let’s applaud everyone who penetrates the fog of progressive b.s. and all stick together, OK?

  19. Tom
    August 9th, 2010 @ 9:50 am

    SteveM has it right: This woman already swims in the New York media/publishing waters. It’s not some big surprise that she’s getting attention from her fellow swimmers.

    Also: Still want to know who the heck “Slayer” was referring to in comment #2. Very confusing!

  20. richard mcenroe
    August 9th, 2010 @ 9:55 am

    ” I know a number of guys who have been into empty consumption-cars, younger women, alcohol.”

    Trust me, they don’t read.

  21. Rae
    August 9th, 2010 @ 10:24 am

    I’m reading the responses to the article (highest rated) and NO ONE likes this article, calling it inane and wasteful. The person who said that publishing is a female and gay ghetto may be right, and NYT is clueless. It only deals with Manhattan readers; NYT got the same response over its article on young workers in the Obama Administration.

  22. Rae
    August 9th, 2010 @ 10:28 am

    These are the most important criteria for getting ahead in today’s world. She appears on the Today show on the basis that the producers know her. She gets a puff piece in the NYT on the basis that the editors know her. This is the liberal world in microcosm – it’s all about knowing the right people.

    There’s a perfect word for that…”inbred”

  23. Robert Stacy McCain
    August 9th, 2010 @ 10:54 am

    She appears on the Today show on the basis that the producers know her. She gets a puff piece in the NYT on the basis that the editors know her. This is the liberal world in microcosm – it’s all about knowing the right people.

    Which is to say, to a greater extent than most people realize, the New York-based publishing industry is an extension of the playground ethic of third-grade girls: It’s all about who’s pretty and popular.

    Wherefore the sniping at Glenn Beck? He’s performing a public service with his successful show.

    Karen, I’m not sniping. I was using Beck — and his recent adoption of the Cloward-Piven meme — to illustrate the extent to which TV acts as the “decider” in the publishing world. One of the first things you learn, if you study copyright law, is that you cannot copyright an idea. So the fact that I co-authored a 2006 book that cited the influence Cloward and Piven (in the same chapter, BTW, where I discussed pervasive corruption in Chicago) gives me no distinction or glory as compared to others who have examined the same phenomenon before or since. What counts in terms of getting credit — and this is the point I was making — is who is on TV.

    A lot of people don’t understand, because they have never had a reason to study and analyze, the extent to which television utterly dominates our culture, including such things as as the popularity of books. Furthermore, as I have pointed out elsewhere, Fox News’ niche-market strategy that attracts conservative viewers has resulted in conservatives putting all their eggs in the Fox basket, so to speak. As a conservative in the business of political news who has authored a book and who has many friends who are also authors, I know the extent to which publishers nowadays evaluate contracts on a single consideration: “Does the author appear regularly on Fox News? Or is the topic of the book such that Beck’s or O’Reilly’s or Hannity’s producers would be eager to have the author on their shows?”

    To employ another example of examining the same phenomenon, let me say that I also have many friends who are working for Republican congressional candidates this year, and all of these operatives would crawl through broken glass to get their candidate 5 minutes on Hannity’s Fox show.

    As I said, that’s just how the cookie crumbles in the modern media world and there’s no point bitching about it. To return to the original point, then, writers who aren’t on TV (and who thus are treated like scum by publishers) might as well complain about gravity as to complain about the unfortunate facts of their situation. Rather than become embittered by your disadvantages, “embrace the suck” — accept the reality — and learn to maximize your available opportunities.

    I’m sorry if I did not make that point sufficiently clear in the post.

  24. Sgt. Mom
    August 9th, 2010 @ 11:53 am

    Embrace the suck and go indy – write your own books, blog about them, network with other bloggers and authors, promote them locally, by participating in local festivals and book club meetings. Yeah, it would be great to get Hannity or Beck or someone to mention your book, but in the meantime don’t sit around wishing that lightening would strike.
    There’s a whole big world out there, outside of the New Yawk lit’ry scene.

  25. Red
    August 9th, 2010 @ 12:50 pm

    Time to write another book Stacy 😉

  26. Mikey NTH
    August 9th, 2010 @ 12:56 pm

    “They saw welfare as a means to shatter “patterns of servile conformity” among the poor, transforming them into a force for revolution.”

    Boy, did they ever get that wrong! Revolutionaries have to have some self-discipline; putting people on welfare just results in drugged out drunk petty thieves who watch daytime television.

    You know, I don’t think Cloward and Piven were as clever as they thought they were.

  27. Bob Belvedere
    August 9th, 2010 @ 7:25 pm

    1) Red and Sgt. Mom are right, Stacy: write a book. We all will promote the hell out of it and Michelle Malkin will be favorable, I’m sure.

    2) Stacy wrote:
    – Chapter Two: I Go to College, Protest the War, Get Pregnant by My Draft-Dodger Boyfriend, Have an Abortion

    You left out: Have torrid one nighter with the Campus NOW Director which made me understand my needs more.

  28. Taxpayer
    August 10th, 2010 @ 1:43 pm

    I dunno, Mr. McCain, sounds more like sour grapes….but if the world were rational, you’d be the one with herds of lit agents chasing you, and little miss booby would be crying into her ice cream.

  29. dustbury.com » You just can’t rouse good rabble these days
    August 10th, 2010 @ 5:40 pm

    […] A quote from Donkey Cons, by Lynn Vincent and Robert Stacy McCain, reproduced on McCain’s Web … The welfare explosion of the 1960s was the brainchild of a group of Columbia University professors, including Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward and crusading New York anti-poverty lawyer Edward Sparer. They saw welfare as a means to shatter “patterns of servile conformity” among the poor, transforming them into a force for revolution. […]