This week we discuss the gender imbalance in publishing (good thing? bad thing?) and pitching via comps (where audacity is not just allowed, but encouraged). Our panel discussion features actor, writer, and screenwriter, Barbara Radecki, our executive editor Diane Terrana, and the publisher of Cormorant Books, Marc Côté. After the panel, new agent Kathryn Willms shares her thoughts on pitching editors via comps.
This week we discuss the gender imbalance in publishing (good thing? bad thing?) and pitching via comps (where audacity is not just allowed, but encouraged). Our panel discussion features actor, writer, and screenwriter, Barbara Radecki, our executive editor Diane Terrana, and the publisher of Cormorant Books, Marc Côté. After the panel, new agent Kathryn Willms shares her thoughts on pitching editors via comps.
Welcome to Agent Provocateur, Episode Five. I'm Sam Hiyate, founder and CEO of The Rights Factory. This week, we have an opinion piece by Kathryn Willms on the ubiquitous comping that goes on in our industry...
Kathryn Willms:Well, I can only assume everyone's writing books about catfishing each other, and how corporate America always wins.
Sam Hiyate:But first, an extended panel on the changing role of men in publishing and why there are so few YA books for boys, and are they in fact related? Today's panel starts with men in publishing and then moves to boys and books. Between 75 to 78% of acquiring editors are women-- add marketing and publicity, and that number is actually higher. Also between 75 to 78% of books published are female-authored. In our business, we definitely see a resistance to buying books by men about men on the adult fiction side, and memoir. First question, is this a good thing? So for our panel today, we've got some of our usual suspects and some new people. First up, we have Diane Terrana, my co-host and executive editor of The Rights Factory.
Diane Terrana:Hi everybody.
Sam Hiyate:We also have Barbara Radecki, who is an actor turned writer-- she's the screenwriter of Modern Persuasion with Alicia Witt. And she's the author of two YA novels, The Darkhouse, and Messenger 93.
Barbara Radecki:Hey there, thanks for having me.
Sam Hiyate:And finally we have, Marc Cote, who is the publisher of Cormorant Books in Toronto, and generally a very wise and funny guy.
Marc Cote:Hello, everyone.
Sam Hiyate:Okay. So I'm going to start with the first question. Looking at this kind of gender imbalance, is this a good thing? I'm going to start with Diane Terrana.
Diane Terrana:Okay. So I think it's a bad thing. And I've said so publicly for a few years now, in spite of getting bad looks and hisses and boos from friends. But I don't think it's a good thing that we don't have basically equal numbers of men and women in publishing. I think the fact that we can't sell men in books is directly related to that. And do I think that's a bad thing that we don't have stories by men about men? Absolutely. Although some of my friends will literally clap and grin when I bring that subject up. My female friends. A New York agent just recently penned a piece mocking a male author who had complained about misandry in the publishing industry. And her response was basically to call him"a poor little man," and to tell him to learn how to write. But, Sam and I have put out some gorgeous books by men about men and we get just nothing but passes. And sometimes they're frank. Sometimes they will actually say, we're not looking for male-driven stories right now. And why is that a bad thing?
Sam Hiyate:Or male memoirs don't sell.
Diane Terrana:Oh my god, male memoirs, no. But why is that a bad thing? Well, it's a bad thing because we share the world. We women share the world with you men and all women have men that they love, or most women do-- a grandfather, a father, an uncle, a brother, a husband, a partner, sons for god's sakes-- people we wish well in the world. And for me, being out there and doing your best in the world means to have representation in literature. So Marc Cote, who is the brave man who h as agreed to join this panel, in a recent Guardian article, none of the male publishers would give their names. They only agreed to be quoted anonymously about this topic. Marc, you're a male publisher. How does it look from where you're sitting?
Marc Cote:Okay. Well, there are a whole ton of factors here. And I'll begin by saying, as an acquiring editor and somebody who's been doing this now for 25 years, I have never thought of only acquiring books that reflected my sense of the world or reflected me or my kind of people. In fact, I have actively sought books that were different from me and saw the world and express the world in a terrifically different way. So I don't think that all editors are going to acquire manuscripts that reflect themselves. And it even comes down to prizes. A number of years ago, there was a big discussion about how male-dominated juries only gave awards to males, male writers. So I did a little bit of a survey on the Governor General's Literary Awards and the Giller Prize. And it turned out that up until, oh gosh, 2014, every time there were more women on a jury than men, the prize was invariably given to a man.
Diane Terrana:Oh, wow.
Marc Cote:And that includes people like Alice Munro and Margaret Atwood, giving awards to Vincent Lam or Michael Ondaatje or et cetera-- Joseph Boyden. So I don't think that that's a serious problem. I do think, however, that whenever you have publishing houses dominated significantly by one gender or in truth, one race or one religion, you are going to have built-in biases, no matter what. And that's something-- you want a publishing house that reflects the population it's out there to serve. And you know, what good is a publishing house of any stature that is really, really narrow. Unless of course it was set up for that purpose. So publishing houses like Mawenzi House, they should do exactly what they're doing. But literary publishing houses like Cormorant, our mandate is to publish widely. And we try to do that. The other problem though, and this is a publisher speaking to an agent-- books written by men and books about men tend not to get reviewed. The authors tend not to be interviewed or profiled. You are-- we are literally pushing a rock up a hill and with very poor interviews with very poor coverage, guess what-- very poor sales.
Sam Hiyate:So are you saying this could be part of some kind of self-fulfilling prophecy?
Marc Cote:In a way there is an aspect to it. I think there is that aspect to it, Sam. I think as well-- I studied literature in university and I'm going to say the periods of the greatest literature that mankind, humankind, has produced are periods of change. And the great literature comes from the agents of change. And it can be argued right now that in general, women are the agents of change more than men are.
Sam Hiyate:That's a good point, for sure.
Marc Cote:That's where the pendulum is going to swing. We're going to listen to those voices that are calling for changes in the same way that, you know, 400 years later, 500 years later, we're still listening to Shakespeare.
Sam Hiyate:I'm gonna switch over cause I see Barbara nodding and also she's the one that rewrote Jane Austen for film. So Barbara, what do you think about all this?
Barbara Radecki:I have so many things I want to say to all of this. Actually, when I was sort of preparing for this talk today, I actually wrote down that we are in an era of great questioning, meaning, great change. And I actually absolutely agree with Marc's point about, you know, there is a new voice coming up right now and if that voice is predominantly women and hopefully now more racially diverse, I believe this is a fundamentally important and good thing. But I will also say that, of course I love male writers and you know, male writers are some of my best friends, so it's not that I don't wish male writers ill or that I wish them ill, it's that I want to see what happens when we enter this new era and will the nature of storytelling-- the fabric of storytelling, fundamentally change. If we have a great era of female voices and voices of color being represented, maybe in a pendulum swinging imbalanced kind of way, what will happen out of that time? That doesn't mean that men won't be able to write and publish and be read, even widely. I mean, it's almost hard to believe that men, male writers are not being read widely when I look at bestseller lists and when I look at lists even of what children are reading. So it's a little bit hard for me to believe that, but I also do want to go back a little bit to the point about women nominating male writers more often when they were on juries. Well, when I first got published, when The Darkhouse first got published, I joined social media and found a thread almost immediately about in the writing industry, about the fact that women editors-- who are to Diane's point very predominantly part of the industry-- that they were more likely to publish a male writer than they were to publish a female writer. And so-- this is five years ago-- so if there's an imbalance, that's happened in like the last two or three years. Okay. We're very, very early in the pendulum curve. The other thing then, I mean, you're, Diane and Sam, you're both, agents. So you would know this maybe even better. But the other thread I found was just a year ago, where on average-- there was a thread going around about asking people, asking writers what their advances were. And inevitably the male writers-- the white male writers-- were getting up to 10 times more than the average. Average white male writer versus average female writer versus a writer of color. So, it's almost hard to accept that we're in this time of male writers being suppressed.
Marc Cote:I can't let that one go because I'm going to say this. I'm going to say, those are self- reporting numbers and you know, it's like when publishers get together. I used to say there was a formula for figuring out the truth of when somebody said,"Oh yeah, that first novel we published sold 82,000 copies." And I used to say multiply by two and divide by five and you get the real number.
Barbara Radecki:Fair enough. Fair enough.
Marc Cote:So I think one of the problems is the white guys are feeling a little bit downtrodden or perhaps feeling they're losing their privileges. So they're going to inflate the size of their advances.
Diane Terrana:The other thing is, if I can just jump on Marc's point, as long as I've worked at the Rights Factory, this is a trend that I've seen. Certainly not just in the last two or three years, with having trouble getting men's books out there, getting any interest in them.
Barbara Radecki:Okay. So I have a question, then. Is it because that's what the market is dictating? Are there fewer male readers than there are female readers-- especially of the kind of books you're talking about.
Sam Hiyate:This is actually such an interesting question because when I'm working with writers, there is in fact, one particular ex-client-- I can say ex-client now-- who kind of had the same story, told a couple of times, of an older male figure with a younger female character-- kind of bad romances. And he had published two of these and he kept saying,"I want to do another one." I'm like,"Dude, you have done two of these. It's done. And not just you, Phillip Roth, like all these writers that came before you, all the way back, probably to Aristophanes., You know, I mean, it's there, it's done. It's part of culture. Let's focus on something else. So I think as agents, we have that responsibility to tell somebody something, if it's going to help their career and not kind of rehash the same old stuff.
Diane Terrana:Totally. And to go back and answer one of Barbara's questions, like 80% of readers are female, and that is the truth.
Sam Hiyate:Of fiction. Literary fiction, especially.
Diane Terrana:Of literary fiction, sorry, are females and so that does affect everything. But that brings me beautifully-- thank you Barbara Radecki, to the second half of this panel-- something I feel most passionately about as a former high school teacher: boys in books. A study came out, some academic papers came out from England a couple of years ago with the revelation that boys don't read well. Well, if that was a revelation to anybody, I can't imagine to whom. Every teacher in the world knew that. Almost everybody who ever went to school with a boy should have known that. The girls in the class were always the big readers. And the problem is this academic, these papers this psychologist in England. As he pointed out, reading leads to literacy, reading leads to success in school, success in school leads to all kinds of good things in the world. So what are we doing, he asked, to help the boys read. Well, he found that in his studies that boys had the same complaint over the entire UK. The books, they don't like the books. They could name five books or six books. Ten, if you count the Harry Potter books and a couple of others that they like to read. And that is a problem. Why aren't we as a society investing into-- forget how much money we're making, as a society, this sort of goes beyond that-- investing in our boys, giving them books, they like to read. The truth is, boys.don't like the same books girls like, except for very rare exceptions, like Harry Potter. And you know, when I was a girl, I was a great reader. And when I was out of the Nancy Drews in the library, I was happy to go to the Hardy Boys. But I would've preferred Nancy Drews because I prefer to read about girls. Boys need books with boys in them as main characters. And just-- I'm going to finish this off with an anecdote from the When Words Collide Festival two years ago-- when I was being a bit of a glib idiot, I was on a panel about boys in books, and I made the comment, well, if boys would read more. I was also feeling a bit upset because I'd had to quit writing a book about a boy, based on my son's battle with cancer. After I was told, nobody cares about one, cancer; two, boys. So I was in a bit of a mood. And I said, if boys would read more, publishers would publish more books for them. And an author, a male author on the panel said,"You know, can I just take issue with that?" He said, boys need books that they want to read. And he grew up in a small mining town in Northern Alberta. And there was one book in the library that the boys wanted to read: Call of the Wild. And you could, he said, you could never get it, because the waiting list was so long. And, I knew this as a general truth to be true, and I repented immediately for being glib about it. But I'm going to throw out to you, Barbara, first. What do we think about how to get boys involved in books? So they improve their literacy and their lives improve?
Barbara Radecki:I certainly agree that literacy improves lives. We know that being literate, reading, is one of the best ways to increase empathy, which is another reason why I think it's so important that boys also read with female leads and books that are, unabashedly written by women, in order to potentially increase that empathy in order to potentially change, you know, do all books that boys like have to be about fighting or violence or--
Diane Terrana:But no. The Call of the Wild is not.
Barbara Radecki:Fair enough.
Diane Terrana:It is about empathy.
Barbara Radecki:Yeah. I'm actually thinking more about the kinds of stories that we know to be popular with boys, in a stereotypical way, right now being like graphic novels and superhero stories and that kind of thing. I mean, I think boys are still consuming that materials. So the question is: what is the kind of material that's going to be interesting to a boy, that has a different kind of direction to it. So, I mean, I agree. I think it would be whatever we can come up with. If we have to plan today of what boys are going to pick up and read and find interesting, I'm all for it.
Diane Terrana:And Marc, you have a YA acquisitions editor, who's also male. What's the Cormorant record like on publishing books for boys?
Marc Cote:That's a very interesting question because we don't actually set out to publish books for boys or for girls. There have been discussions about the fact that the vast number of our books-- our YA books-- are written by women and they feature female protagonists, but our best-selling YA book is not a female protagonist, it's a male protagonist. And it was written by a woman and it's selling like hotcakes. And we just learned today, The Marrow Thieves by Shari Dimaline, is in Time Magazine's top 100 YA books of all time.
Diane Terrana:Wow. So impressive.
Barbara Radecki:Amazing.
Sam Hiyate:Awesome.
Marc Cote:And I'll also say we make a point of trying to come up with books that are of interest, that are well-written. So for example, The Darkhouse: it's a mystery, and you can read that book without actually worrying about-- I mean, it does matter that the narrator is a woman, a young girl-- that matters, but it's not an essential part of the book in that way. It's a ripping good story.
Barbara Radecki:Thanks.
Marc Cote:I think that helps to keep people reading, but the reality is boys don't physically, intellectually, or psychologically mature, until they hit 16, 17.
Sam Hiyate:Or like in my case, maybe 25.
Marc Cote:Right. But here's the thing. So what we need are a combination of factors. We need books of serious interest to boys. Boys like mysteries, boys like humor. Let's get those books out, let's get those books, read-- Andrew, and other people-- and get them in the hands of the boys. We need the review media to get on board with this. And I will say now, the major review media, particularly in the United States is starting to say, we need more boy-centered books. They're pushing for that. And they're going to give priority to those books. So that's going to switch. That will affect librarians, teacher, librarians, and teachers, and they will make the effort. But some of this is like-- you know, recently, just this last week, the Olympics, the Canadian women athletes did best in Tokyo, far better than the men. But that's the result of about 20 years of the Canadian government, putting money into training women athletes because they had been ignored for so long. And what we have to do is over the course of the next 20 years, figure out the balance. So we're doing everybody equally. And that's where I think we're going to be, particularly in the case of boys-- boys, and reading. Because I think they're reachable, but they will never be totally accessible, simply because of the physical, emotional, and psychological delay in maturation, which is biological, not much we can do about it.
Sam Hiyate:So here's a question. So I can't remember where I read this, but I think that J K Rowling made Harry Potter a boy because she wanted to embrace the male audience. She knew that if it was a girl character, that the boys might not read it. But I feel then, when The Hunger Games came out, the boys read The Hunger Games because I guess, cause Katniss is a killer. Katniss wasn't traditional-- there's a gender switch. Katniss became somebody that the boys could say, I love Katniss. And I could, put myself in her. So there's this thing that happened. I think in culture, for teen boys, with The Hunger Games, that wasn't there before, where they could embrace a female character. And I talked to somebody else about that-- that we were going to have this talk and they said, this was a female writer who said that when she grew up, that they all had to read in, I think m iddle g rade or maybe high school, a book called Hatchet. And it was about a boy who had a hatchet who had to survive. And I'd never heard of this story, but they said all the boys loved it, but the girls were so bored with t his story.
Marc Cote:Well, when I was in high school, I think it was grade eight. We all had to read The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton. Right. We all read that. And S.E. Hinton was Sally. No one talked about the fact that it was a woman writer. It was just a great story.
Barbara Radecki:Well, just like JK Rowling had to use the initials because they felt more boys would read her. And, that also rounds back to why do we have to hide the identity of female writers in order to lure boys in? That's something that, you know, I think needs to shift. Although I, again, how does one enforce these kinds of shifts? Boys are going to read and should read. But they're also going to read what they want to read, right? So we can't, we can't legislate it.
Marc Cote:No, no, we can't legislate it, but we can encourage it. Right? All of us, all of us have stories of some teacher at some point in our lines, putting a book in our hands and following up. All of us. And that teacher, whatever the book was, they made a huge difference.
Sam Hiyate:Okay. I think anybody have any final thoughts? Cause I feel like we said a lot here. I feel a little tired just listening to all this, but...
Diane Terrana:Well, I just want to thank everyone for an absolutely stupendous discussion.
Barbara Radecki:Oh, thank you so much for having me. I feel like I'm going to be thinking of all kinds of things I want to say after we part ways.
Marc Cote:I agree with Barbara. This panel could have gone on for another hour.
Barbara Radecki:Yeah.
Sam Hiyate:Thanks Marc. Thank you so much, guys. We'll see you next time.
Diane Terrana:Thank you so much.
Sam Hiyate:Bye. Bye. Pitching 101. Usually, to persuade an editor to read a new story, it's easier if you comp it to a similar story that was massive-- or is it? New agent Kathryn Willms discusses comps and her first offer.
Kathryn Willms:Hi, I'm Kathryn Willms and I'm an associate agent at The Rights Factory. Today. I'm doing an opinion piece. Nope. Let's pitch it as a pitiful cry into the void. Like if the man in Edvard Munch's, The Scream was replaced by a whiny baby or Katniss slept in and Primrose Everdeen went to the hunger games. That's right, we're talking comps. I'm a relatively new agent. In fact, I've just had my first offer on my first ever submission, which is awesome. And I've been thinking about comps because of a discussion I had with that author. In her proposal, she had described the book as a cross between two other famous pieces of art. I kept taking out that comparison and then she kept putting it back in. Her comps were good ones. Yet my inclination was to lose them. Which got me thinking: What is it about comps that rubs me the wrong way? Two thoughts come to mind. One, if you pitch a book by describing it as a combination of two other things, inevitably, invariably, I will not know what one of those things are. Some examples: pitched as Dexter(yes) and Pushing Daisies(nope). Pitches: True Grit(sure) meets Sarah Waters(who?) So now not only do I feel stupid, I have to read an author's whole oeuvre or watch a television series. Second: comps are finicky. Every author knows not to comp their book using Harry Potter, but it's also poor practice to use an obscure comp. One author used a comp, and I was like,"Hey, I need to read this book." And then I did. And it was too good. Her sample couldn't match up. But here's the thing-- from authors to publicists, to agents, to editors, to booksellers the publishing industry loves comps. They could be handy as shorthand for anything from plot to mood, to genre, to audience. So I decided to suck it up, go on Publishers Marketplace and learn more. Here's what I found out. Two super common comps: Get Out and You've Got Mail. Get Out, of course, used fittingly as a comp for books on brain transplants. Just kidding. Probably something to do with the insidious nature of racism. And You've Got Mail. Well, I can only assume everyone's writing books about catfishing each other and how corporate America always wins. Given the last 18 months. Sure. That makes sense. Also, audacity is allowed, nay encouraged. Here's some quotes from deals-- pitched as part Ted Lasso, part Wednesday Adams and full of roadkill research. Color me intrigued. Or pitched: a s The Graduate meets Catcher in the Rye by way of S chitt's Creek with a lesbian twist, with Mrs. Robinson meeting Holden Caulfield. Hunh? Or, pitched as a female Shawshank Redemption with vampires-- what is even happening? So I was a bout ready to w rite off comps, but here's the problem. My author, the one who got the offer, she was right. We pitched that book using Fiddler on the Roof and Schindler's List. The editor loved it and it worked. So maybe there is something to comps after all. I'll let you know. In the meantime, I'm off to watch F iddler on the Roof. I'm Kathryn from TRF. Thanks for listening.
Sam Hiyate:Well, that's our show folks. Thanks to all our guests and our producer, Andrew Kaufman. Most of all, thank you for listening. If you like us, please share the love and post a review on whatever podcast channel you're listening to us on. And also subscribe on substack. Next week is our last show of season one, featuring issues around writing narrative nonfiction and the dangerous ideas that they might engender. Take care.