The Tastemakers Have Become Trend Chasers
Why everything sucks now
Literary agents used to be called “tastemakers”.
An agent with great taste could find someone who wrote something amazing and would move heaven and earth to promote it. If the world wasn’t ready for it, no problem. The agent would shove it down the world’s throat anyway. Over time, the world would be grateful for it.
The reason why everything sucks now is because the people who are supposed to be tastemakers have turned into trend chasers. They have so much access to data to the point that it’s melting their brains and preventing them from using their natural human judgment.
When I refer to ‘data’ I’m not just talking about formal sales figures, although that definitely plays a role. The real culprit here is the same thing that’s completely decimating other aspects of society: social media.
Literary agents are PLUGGED IN to social media to their own detriment. Instead of using their own taste to decide which authors to represent, honed over years/decades of reading and living, they’re looking at what’s trending on TikTok and trying to duplicate it.
The problem?
TikTok (and other social media platforms) are full of regular people. And regular people not only have no clue what’s good or bad, they often don’t even know what they actually want.
On some level, anyone who thinks deeply about the world understands this intuitively.
It’s why Steve Jobs famously refused to rely on data when designing new products, saying: “People don’t know what they want until you show it to them. That’s why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.”
And that approach led to him creating multi-billion dollar product lines that are still popular today.
If the leaders of Corporate America intuitively know and accept the simple fact that the masses don’t know what they want, why are people in the creative industries so incapable of understanding it?
Using data and social media metrics to decide what book to publish or to decide which movies to greenlight leads to the classic Making-a-Photocopy-of-a-Photocopy-Problem. The slop (not solely referring to AI here, human creations can be slop as well) feeds on the previous slop and begets further slop. Slop on top of slop on top of slop.
My advice to literary agents is: figure out what moves you. Then figure out how to explain it to the publishers and the readers in terms they can understand. Don’t worry about what unhinged people on social media will say. Don’t obsess over avoiding controversy. Just read and feel. In that way, you’ll find greatness. Who knows, maybe even the mythical next Great American Novel (we’re definitely overdue).
All great works of art are the product of one person’s undistilled and undiluted vision.
The more hands there are in the oven, the worse the result becomes.
Attempts at pandering and making something designed to please the maximum number of people leads to mediocre garbage, forgettable at best or actively terrible at worst.
No one knows exactly where creativity comes from.
But there is one thing that’s absolutely certain: Creative genius exists within the confines of individual human skulls. You can’t outsource it to a network, social media, or data analysis firms. Let one solitary creative do his thing, and the results will blow you away.
That doesn’t mean everyone will be happy.
Quite the opposite.
The best works of art are POLARIZING.
People either love them or hate them.
For every person who breaks down in tears at the sight of a Rothko painting there’s another who scoffs and wonders what the big deal is about those splotches of color.
One person watches The Godfather with a sense of awe. Another can’t stop yawning at how slow it is.
Some people read For Whom the Bell Tolls and are mesmerized at Hemingway’s ability to type words on a page in 1940 that somehow manage to create such a vivid mental movie in your mind as you read them 86 years later, in a world that’s so different from the one that existed when those words were written that it might as well be a different universe. Others just think the faux-Spanish spelling is weird.
If you dig into the history of anything great, you’ll always find that a Leap of Faith was involved.
The Universe doesn’t reward data-crunching and audience analysis. It doesn’t reward people who are afraid of negative comments online. It rewards people who see something that no one else does and decide to go for it.
If you enjoy my writing you can also read my novel Your Life Does Not Exist, available in both physical and ebook editions.