first time caller long time listener. this is all reasonable/reasoned and fine but i truly cannot fathom the appetite on this website for arguing about MFAs. if people just sat down and read and wrote in the time they spent yelling/attending to yelling re MFA vs DGAF on the internet they would not need writing school
For whatever it’s worth to the despairing reader who feels it’s already too hard to break in, I did it by self-publishing first (well… after years of not being able to break in any other way), building up an audience that way, and then—just when I was completely satisfied with my writing career and loving the indie life, with no intention of messing around with publishers ever again—the publishers started coming to me and making me offers that were hard to refuse. So I don’t think the difficulty of breaking in should hold anyone back. As you noted in your excellent punk rock article, this is the DIY era, and I believe it will only get more DIYish as technology rapidly advances, so DIY and see what happens. Maybe it’ll turn out to be the path into “real” (ugh) publishing after all.
Seems like the sweet spot is a hybrid approach. From what I hear, there's very little difference in terms of effort on the author's end between trad and self, so at least with self you get a better ROI and then hoping you get the attention of trad for brick-and-mortar distribution, but working it out to where you keep your ebook rights.
I agree—self-publishing some and tradpub for some is a smart approach. And I’m trying to branch out into other methods, too. My goal is to build up an audience here so I can serialize some fiction for subscribers and then sell print rights to that work to publishers.
That’s a really smart approach. I am trying to make connections here. I don’t think I’ll get much of an audience on here that will turn into book buyers, but we’ll see. It’s a lot of work. Do you plan to write the whole fiction, then break it out into serial chunks or wing it as you go?
Yeah, I definitely have to write the whole thing first and then release it chapter by chapter. I often change my mind halfway through a ms and have to go back and alter things, so I'll need to get the entire piece finished and dev edited before I let anybody else read it.
Your fourth footnote warms my heart..I went to an MFA program, and I remember deciding to bring in a speculative literary fiction work to workshop and feeling a little nervous about it before, but then all my classmates were like "Witches! Hell yes!" Then later I was connected to someone who was interested in the program who wrote speculative and had similar nerves, and I was able to tell her how open people were to it, even if it wasn't what they were writing.
One place I would say a 'course' has really effected a change is in fantasy. In particular, I'm talking of Brandon Sanderson's free online lectures from where he taught at BYU. I swear if you go to r/fantasy these days (granted, I haven't been since I mostly quit Reddit at the beginning of the year), you see everyone arguing against anything they deem 'soft magic' and how much they hate it. This stems directly from "Sanderson's First Rule", which basically states magic needs to be like science (or, rather, like D&D/Vancian magic), and it comes from both authors and readers alike, who claim that 'soft magic' leads to 'deus ex machina', without often understanding the term, or that it's a story-telling flaw (if it's not intentional!) rather than one blamable on 'magic'. And this has had a huge impact on the kinds of stories that get written, and, I think, the rise of LitRPG in general. There are still some more fantastical fantasy novels getting published (*Piranesi* springs to mind immediately), but it's rarer simply because people are no longer *writing* them, as they've been convinced fantasy must follow Sanderson's rules. And it goes beyond the 'First Rule' as well, that's just a convenient and common example.
Certainly, there's more to it than just Sanderson publishing these rules (.i. there was a comment on another post of yours I replied to about the influence of video games), but it's become really dominant, at least in my perspective, since he published those lectures as many people like to watch them and they're often recommended to be taken as gospel in fantasy writing. I definitely think they've played a big part, doubly so as they come up *often* in discussion, always using the 'Sanderson's First Rule' title for it. As a caveat, I don't read much fantasy anymore (nor as much fiction as I'd like, sadly), simply because I don't want to wade through the amount of slop I see in the genre (poor editing, written like a video game novelisation, no trusting the reader, etc.) so perhaps there's started to be some pushback against this. If anyone has any good modern fantasy recommendations (it's mostly all I read until about 2017, to my shame now) that don't fall into this over-analytical way preached by Sanderson, I'd love to hear them. I want my fantasy to be literary but also to feel, well, fantastical! If I wanted science, I'd read sci-fi.
Yeah, I got slammed in a selfpub novella contest because the reviewer preferred hard magic systems to what I write—I do soft magic systems and given the poor response to the first book I released in a new trilogy…sigh. The earlier series in that same world did well, but…since then Sanderson has become much more popular which I think is a significant factor. So instead of beating myself to pieces trying to release all three volumes of the trilogy this year, I’m switching to a neoWestern multiverse with time travel and a healthy dollop of Lovecraftian horror. Might as well have fun with it.
In other words, the issue has hit selfpub fantasy as well as tradpub.
The fantastical and literary! If you're a Piranesi fan, you might like Helen Oyeyemi, Kelly Link, Nghi Vo, N.K. Jemisin, and possibly the Locked Tomb series--it's fantasy but has touches of sci-fi also
It's just because it's so hard to break into publishing that these myths about I think. My first novel was traditionally published after me spending six years trying to place it. My second novel is about to finish it's second year of travelling around publishing houses. I'm considering self-publishing, but am out off by the slop flooding the market. Anyway, thanks for this. Lots to think about 🤓
The MFA discourse feels like a revenant of the 1990s, when minimalist realism was having a moment and people who didn't like it complained that too much contemporary literary fiction resembled Raymond Carver or their idea of a "New Yorker story." That seems to be when the "cookie cutter" complaint first arose, and sometimes people just pick up on that idea and pass it on even when they don't actually have first-hand knowledge of MFAs and what they and their students are like. We've got to admit that the sentiment that publishing is a rigged game that promotes second-rate work for extraneous reasons is pretty common among people who are or have found it hard to get published. This is one of the rationales for that belief they've received and because they want to believe it, they repeat it despite not really knowing what they're talking about.
Yeah I think a weird thing underlying the idea that publishing puts out inferior work isn’t that it is wrong (it’s true!) but that… we should expect it to be different. Mediocre work is what sells in any industry. It’s not like the masses prefer innovative cinema to MCU movies or cutting edge art to kitsch. There’s no reason to invent a literature specific boogeyman to explain why people have bad and bland tastes.
I do think that earlier discourse on minimalist realism was a response a more powerful print media that anointed that style as the ne plus ultra of literary fiction. A lot of MFA students wrote like Gordon Lish workshoppers because that's what they saw selling to publishers and magazines and praised in the NYTBR. Those outlets don't have the same cultural power now.
True, there are far fewer tastemakers who can really anoint a style or make a trend happen. Although also I think people forget the context of that minimalist dirty realism movement, which is that it felt fresh at the time because it was different than the popular postmodernism and more maximalist writing that came before. Like in the 60s and 70s the New Yorker was publishing surreal postmodernists like Donald Barthelme (a personal favorite of mine). Dirty realism felt fresh then, but got stale by the 90s and the pendulum swung back to more whimsical and maximalist stuff like McSweeney's and DFW. Then the pendulum swung again in the 10s to genre-bending work and also autofiction. I think some people who came of age in the 80s/90s have this mistaken belief that Raymond Carver style dirty realism is THE literary fiction genre instead of just one trend among many. Similar to the way many younger people now think the identity trauma novel is the only type of literary fiction, rathe than just a current trend.
I got so nervous that your Clarion footnote was going to refer to the occasional "Clarion is ableist/classist!" discourse that occasionally rears its head. So I was relieved instead to find that…you just had to clarify what it was since a lot of people don't know.
(While I can point to a marked shift in my writing ability since attending Clarion, I can also concur that the networking component is significant)
Ha, well I’m afraid I’ve missed that discourse. I didn’t mean to imply anything negative about Clarion (everyone I know who went has good things to say). Just saying it doesn’t seem very different from an MFA in terms of what it “gets” you in the respective fields.
Yeah, I get what you were saying now! And I largely agree — people often ask me about why I don't do an MFA, and the answer is, I don't know what it would offer me that Clarion did not (other than a terminal degree that I could teach with, if that's what I wanted to do)
I appreciate the insight into this screaming hen house of MFA programs ruining books that seems to stain my Substack feed. I was brave enough to read at the end about the Slopocalypes (great term, I personally enjoyed using Swamp of Slop) and know that I am probably one of those self-published author whose work will be drowned out by LLM scams. I just take some futile pride that I don't buy or publish through Amazon since they allow such reckless exploitation (not shocking by one molecule) to carry on in this corner of their capitalism empire. Thank you, once again, for sharing such information that gives me a glimmer of hope as I struggle through the wilderness of publication for my writing.
Great post as always, Lincoln. I like how you parse the various parts of the publishing industry here to dispel the myth that MFA programs determine everything. At the risk of initiating round 2001, would it be fair to say that a feedback loop better describes the MFA/(literary)Publishing nexus than an influence model? You make a good point about publishing influencing MFA programs, but at least for literary fiction, don't MFA programs influence publishing in turn by providing new material that starts the cycle again? And in that instance aren't well-known MFA professors still the gatekeepers in "vetting" this new material by making recs to agents and editors?
I say this in part because it still seems to me that the underlying problem here remains one of access. As you say, the fact that working in publishing is now one of the main alternatives to the MFA program doesn't really indicate a lowering of the barriers. It just means that the locus of the gatekeeping has shifted. I know that's implied in your comment, so I'm mostly confirming what you say. Fwiw, if I were talking to someone who wanted to be a literary translator (not a great career option right now, but still), I would say that by far the best way to break in is to work in a publishing house that puts out literature in translation, since this gives you access to both editors and authors. Many of the big names of my generation did it that way. That said, it's a bit demoralizing to think that the only way in is through the industry itself, which is why Substack and small literary mags still seem like the most promising avenue for those who don't already have a foot in the door?
I think it is certainly fair to say there is a feedback loop although I do think it is less prominent today than in the past for all the general reasons that literary fiction is declining (lack of review space that matters more to lit fic than other genres, fractured media, etc.). I'd probably guess the biggest influence is in the prestige part of the literary world, like literary awards. The National Book Award and such are judged by authors who in many cases have MFAs, so those tastes help shape the prestige. Editors want to get that prestige in the same way movie studios want the glory of winning Oscars. Those awards seem to matter less and less for sales, but I'm sure still influence publishers (esp. at the prestige literary imprints). I think that has more influence than professors acting as gatekeepers to agents. Although maybe I just wasn't let in those gates as my professors did not connect me to agents.
I do think these conversations--in general, not your comment--ignore the impact of readers even in the literary space. For example, lots of Substackers complain about the identity trauma novel and Ocean Vuong is a favorite target. I do not like OV's work. But it SELLS. And it sells way more than can be accounted for by MFA programs. Google says over a 1 million copies of the first novel. That's huge for a literary fiction novel. So, when people say that the identity trauma novel is popular because of MFA programs I think the answer might be more that Vuong and similar authors sold bonkers and publishers tried to chase that. You know what I mean?
Similarly, a lot of the novels about young people meandering about having sex and thinking melancholy thoughts might come more from the success of Sally Rooney (and similar authors) than preferences of MFA professors.
Definitely agree that access is a huge issue. And only worsening with AI. No clue how that gets fixed.
I guess part of what's hard to untangle is how much MFA programs influence their professors and students' tastes and how much is self-selection by writers who enjoy those kind of books.
Yes, all that makes sense to me. And in general I'm persuaded by your arguments about how fragmentation has changed the publishing ecology. I also appreciate the emphasis on readers. I agree that there's such a thing as a genuinely popular book and that we shouldn't forget that!
I thought something smart about the original MFA vs NYC article (which people mostly seemed to get mad about because of the title) was how it correctly noted there were two largely separate literary cultures. The MFA world and the NYC publishing world. That still seems pretty true to me, even though authors cross from one into the other or stand in both. But, the world of lit mags and small press collections is fairly separate from the world of big publishing in a lot of ways.
Totally. I'm writing the intro to a Spanish translation of McGurl's The Program Era right now, so I'm revisiting that whole debate. I agree that the MFA vs NYC article holds up well. I actually think one could make the argument that NYC has slightly gained on MFA over the past decade or so, in line with what you say in your post.
Yeah thinking of McGurl, one thing I probably should have added is a lot of this has likely changed in the internet age. When I posted about this on twitter, a former editor said back in the day agents and editors would make "pilgrimages" to the big MFA programs, but not really anymore. It makes sense I guess that in a pre-internet era, MFAs would be a useful vetting system. But now you can probably just look at someone's substack or search for their pubs in a few clicks.
Wait, what? If 4M books were published in 2025 and 3.5M of those were self-published, trad only published 500k books? And I thought being new to social media was screaming into the void, I'm screwed if I want to go either route: either self-pub is over saturated, not helped at all by the AI crap, but if trad is so selective on what they publish you're one of millions trying to get only a fraction of that published.
Yes, according to the article trad publishing put out 600k books. But I should note here that this is ALL of trad publishing. Not just big 5 presses but also university presses and tiny lit presses and everything from Soduku puzzle books to cookbooks. Anything with an ISBN. The number of e.g. new novels published by Big 5 publishers last year is a very small part of that. Though still a lot!
I really enjoyed your story and noticed your work on Webnovel! As a graphic designer, I’m curious: what’s been your biggest challenge with the book so far? Also, I’d love to hook you up with a free 3D mockup of your cover to help it stand out!
first time caller long time listener. this is all reasonable/reasoned and fine but i truly cannot fathom the appetite on this website for arguing about MFAs. if people just sat down and read and wrote in the time they spent yelling/attending to yelling re MFA vs DGAF on the internet they would not need writing school
For whatever it’s worth to the despairing reader who feels it’s already too hard to break in, I did it by self-publishing first (well… after years of not being able to break in any other way), building up an audience that way, and then—just when I was completely satisfied with my writing career and loving the indie life, with no intention of messing around with publishers ever again—the publishers started coming to me and making me offers that were hard to refuse. So I don’t think the difficulty of breaking in should hold anyone back. As you noted in your excellent punk rock article, this is the DIY era, and I believe it will only get more DIYish as technology rapidly advances, so DIY and see what happens. Maybe it’ll turn out to be the path into “real” (ugh) publishing after all.
Seems like the sweet spot is a hybrid approach. From what I hear, there's very little difference in terms of effort on the author's end between trad and self, so at least with self you get a better ROI and then hoping you get the attention of trad for brick-and-mortar distribution, but working it out to where you keep your ebook rights.
I agree—self-publishing some and tradpub for some is a smart approach. And I’m trying to branch out into other methods, too. My goal is to build up an audience here so I can serialize some fiction for subscribers and then sell print rights to that work to publishers.
That’s a really smart approach. I am trying to make connections here. I don’t think I’ll get much of an audience on here that will turn into book buyers, but we’ll see. It’s a lot of work. Do you plan to write the whole fiction, then break it out into serial chunks or wing it as you go?
Yeah, I definitely have to write the whole thing first and then release it chapter by chapter. I often change my mind halfway through a ms and have to go back and alter things, so I'll need to get the entire piece finished and dev edited before I let anybody else read it.
Your fourth footnote warms my heart..I went to an MFA program, and I remember deciding to bring in a speculative literary fiction work to workshop and feeling a little nervous about it before, but then all my classmates were like "Witches! Hell yes!" Then later I was connected to someone who was interested in the program who wrote speculative and had similar nerves, and I was able to tell her how open people were to it, even if it wasn't what they were writing.
One place I would say a 'course' has really effected a change is in fantasy. In particular, I'm talking of Brandon Sanderson's free online lectures from where he taught at BYU. I swear if you go to r/fantasy these days (granted, I haven't been since I mostly quit Reddit at the beginning of the year), you see everyone arguing against anything they deem 'soft magic' and how much they hate it. This stems directly from "Sanderson's First Rule", which basically states magic needs to be like science (or, rather, like D&D/Vancian magic), and it comes from both authors and readers alike, who claim that 'soft magic' leads to 'deus ex machina', without often understanding the term, or that it's a story-telling flaw (if it's not intentional!) rather than one blamable on 'magic'. And this has had a huge impact on the kinds of stories that get written, and, I think, the rise of LitRPG in general. There are still some more fantastical fantasy novels getting published (*Piranesi* springs to mind immediately), but it's rarer simply because people are no longer *writing* them, as they've been convinced fantasy must follow Sanderson's rules. And it goes beyond the 'First Rule' as well, that's just a convenient and common example.
Certainly, there's more to it than just Sanderson publishing these rules (.i. there was a comment on another post of yours I replied to about the influence of video games), but it's become really dominant, at least in my perspective, since he published those lectures as many people like to watch them and they're often recommended to be taken as gospel in fantasy writing. I definitely think they've played a big part, doubly so as they come up *often* in discussion, always using the 'Sanderson's First Rule' title for it. As a caveat, I don't read much fantasy anymore (nor as much fiction as I'd like, sadly), simply because I don't want to wade through the amount of slop I see in the genre (poor editing, written like a video game novelisation, no trusting the reader, etc.) so perhaps there's started to be some pushback against this. If anyone has any good modern fantasy recommendations (it's mostly all I read until about 2017, to my shame now) that don't fall into this over-analytical way preached by Sanderson, I'd love to hear them. I want my fantasy to be literary but also to feel, well, fantastical! If I wanted science, I'd read sci-fi.
Yeah, I got slammed in a selfpub novella contest because the reviewer preferred hard magic systems to what I write—I do soft magic systems and given the poor response to the first book I released in a new trilogy…sigh. The earlier series in that same world did well, but…since then Sanderson has become much more popular which I think is a significant factor. So instead of beating myself to pieces trying to release all three volumes of the trilogy this year, I’m switching to a neoWestern multiverse with time travel and a healthy dollop of Lovecraftian horror. Might as well have fun with it.
In other words, the issue has hit selfpub fantasy as well as tradpub.
The fantastical and literary! If you're a Piranesi fan, you might like Helen Oyeyemi, Kelly Link, Nghi Vo, N.K. Jemisin, and possibly the Locked Tomb series--it's fantasy but has touches of sci-fi also
I can't recall, in all my years, working with anyone who I was aware possessed an MFA. Of course, maybe they were just very quiet about it.
It's just because it's so hard to break into publishing that these myths about I think. My first novel was traditionally published after me spending six years trying to place it. My second novel is about to finish it's second year of travelling around publishing houses. I'm considering self-publishing, but am out off by the slop flooding the market. Anyway, thanks for this. Lots to think about 🤓
The MFA discourse feels like a revenant of the 1990s, when minimalist realism was having a moment and people who didn't like it complained that too much contemporary literary fiction resembled Raymond Carver or their idea of a "New Yorker story." That seems to be when the "cookie cutter" complaint first arose, and sometimes people just pick up on that idea and pass it on even when they don't actually have first-hand knowledge of MFAs and what they and their students are like. We've got to admit that the sentiment that publishing is a rigged game that promotes second-rate work for extraneous reasons is pretty common among people who are or have found it hard to get published. This is one of the rationales for that belief they've received and because they want to believe it, they repeat it despite not really knowing what they're talking about.
Yeah I think a weird thing underlying the idea that publishing puts out inferior work isn’t that it is wrong (it’s true!) but that… we should expect it to be different. Mediocre work is what sells in any industry. It’s not like the masses prefer innovative cinema to MCU movies or cutting edge art to kitsch. There’s no reason to invent a literature specific boogeyman to explain why people have bad and bland tastes.
I do think that earlier discourse on minimalist realism was a response a more powerful print media that anointed that style as the ne plus ultra of literary fiction. A lot of MFA students wrote like Gordon Lish workshoppers because that's what they saw selling to publishers and magazines and praised in the NYTBR. Those outlets don't have the same cultural power now.
True, there are far fewer tastemakers who can really anoint a style or make a trend happen. Although also I think people forget the context of that minimalist dirty realism movement, which is that it felt fresh at the time because it was different than the popular postmodernism and more maximalist writing that came before. Like in the 60s and 70s the New Yorker was publishing surreal postmodernists like Donald Barthelme (a personal favorite of mine). Dirty realism felt fresh then, but got stale by the 90s and the pendulum swung back to more whimsical and maximalist stuff like McSweeney's and DFW. Then the pendulum swung again in the 10s to genre-bending work and also autofiction. I think some people who came of age in the 80s/90s have this mistaken belief that Raymond Carver style dirty realism is THE literary fiction genre instead of just one trend among many. Similar to the way many younger people now think the identity trauma novel is the only type of literary fiction, rathe than just a current trend.
I got so nervous that your Clarion footnote was going to refer to the occasional "Clarion is ableist/classist!" discourse that occasionally rears its head. So I was relieved instead to find that…you just had to clarify what it was since a lot of people don't know.
(While I can point to a marked shift in my writing ability since attending Clarion, I can also concur that the networking component is significant)
Ha, well I’m afraid I’ve missed that discourse. I didn’t mean to imply anything negative about Clarion (everyone I know who went has good things to say). Just saying it doesn’t seem very different from an MFA in terms of what it “gets” you in the respective fields.
Yeah, I get what you were saying now! And I largely agree — people often ask me about why I don't do an MFA, and the answer is, I don't know what it would offer me that Clarion did not (other than a terminal degree that I could teach with, if that's what I wanted to do)
I appreciate the insight into this screaming hen house of MFA programs ruining books that seems to stain my Substack feed. I was brave enough to read at the end about the Slopocalypes (great term, I personally enjoyed using Swamp of Slop) and know that I am probably one of those self-published author whose work will be drowned out by LLM scams. I just take some futile pride that I don't buy or publish through Amazon since they allow such reckless exploitation (not shocking by one molecule) to carry on in this corner of their capitalism empire. Thank you, once again, for sharing such information that gives me a glimmer of hope as I struggle through the wilderness of publication for my writing.
A writer who intends to publish must hobnob with the industry. The MFA is possibly the easiest.
Great post as always, Lincoln. I like how you parse the various parts of the publishing industry here to dispel the myth that MFA programs determine everything. At the risk of initiating round 2001, would it be fair to say that a feedback loop better describes the MFA/(literary)Publishing nexus than an influence model? You make a good point about publishing influencing MFA programs, but at least for literary fiction, don't MFA programs influence publishing in turn by providing new material that starts the cycle again? And in that instance aren't well-known MFA professors still the gatekeepers in "vetting" this new material by making recs to agents and editors?
I say this in part because it still seems to me that the underlying problem here remains one of access. As you say, the fact that working in publishing is now one of the main alternatives to the MFA program doesn't really indicate a lowering of the barriers. It just means that the locus of the gatekeeping has shifted. I know that's implied in your comment, so I'm mostly confirming what you say. Fwiw, if I were talking to someone who wanted to be a literary translator (not a great career option right now, but still), I would say that by far the best way to break in is to work in a publishing house that puts out literature in translation, since this gives you access to both editors and authors. Many of the big names of my generation did it that way. That said, it's a bit demoralizing to think that the only way in is through the industry itself, which is why Substack and small literary mags still seem like the most promising avenue for those who don't already have a foot in the door?
I think it is certainly fair to say there is a feedback loop although I do think it is less prominent today than in the past for all the general reasons that literary fiction is declining (lack of review space that matters more to lit fic than other genres, fractured media, etc.). I'd probably guess the biggest influence is in the prestige part of the literary world, like literary awards. The National Book Award and such are judged by authors who in many cases have MFAs, so those tastes help shape the prestige. Editors want to get that prestige in the same way movie studios want the glory of winning Oscars. Those awards seem to matter less and less for sales, but I'm sure still influence publishers (esp. at the prestige literary imprints). I think that has more influence than professors acting as gatekeepers to agents. Although maybe I just wasn't let in those gates as my professors did not connect me to agents.
I do think these conversations--in general, not your comment--ignore the impact of readers even in the literary space. For example, lots of Substackers complain about the identity trauma novel and Ocean Vuong is a favorite target. I do not like OV's work. But it SELLS. And it sells way more than can be accounted for by MFA programs. Google says over a 1 million copies of the first novel. That's huge for a literary fiction novel. So, when people say that the identity trauma novel is popular because of MFA programs I think the answer might be more that Vuong and similar authors sold bonkers and publishers tried to chase that. You know what I mean?
Similarly, a lot of the novels about young people meandering about having sex and thinking melancholy thoughts might come more from the success of Sally Rooney (and similar authors) than preferences of MFA professors.
Definitely agree that access is a huge issue. And only worsening with AI. No clue how that gets fixed.
I guess part of what's hard to untangle is how much MFA programs influence their professors and students' tastes and how much is self-selection by writers who enjoy those kind of books.
Yes, all that makes sense to me. And in general I'm persuaded by your arguments about how fragmentation has changed the publishing ecology. I also appreciate the emphasis on readers. I agree that there's such a thing as a genuinely popular book and that we shouldn't forget that!
I thought something smart about the original MFA vs NYC article (which people mostly seemed to get mad about because of the title) was how it correctly noted there were two largely separate literary cultures. The MFA world and the NYC publishing world. That still seems pretty true to me, even though authors cross from one into the other or stand in both. But, the world of lit mags and small press collections is fairly separate from the world of big publishing in a lot of ways.
Totally. I'm writing the intro to a Spanish translation of McGurl's The Program Era right now, so I'm revisiting that whole debate. I agree that the MFA vs NYC article holds up well. I actually think one could make the argument that NYC has slightly gained on MFA over the past decade or so, in line with what you say in your post.
Yeah thinking of McGurl, one thing I probably should have added is a lot of this has likely changed in the internet age. When I posted about this on twitter, a former editor said back in the day agents and editors would make "pilgrimages" to the big MFA programs, but not really anymore. It makes sense I guess that in a pre-internet era, MFAs would be a useful vetting system. But now you can probably just look at someone's substack or search for their pubs in a few clicks.
Wait, what? If 4M books were published in 2025 and 3.5M of those were self-published, trad only published 500k books? And I thought being new to social media was screaming into the void, I'm screwed if I want to go either route: either self-pub is over saturated, not helped at all by the AI crap, but if trad is so selective on what they publish you're one of millions trying to get only a fraction of that published.
Yes, according to the article trad publishing put out 600k books. But I should note here that this is ALL of trad publishing. Not just big 5 presses but also university presses and tiny lit presses and everything from Soduku puzzle books to cookbooks. Anything with an ISBN. The number of e.g. new novels published by Big 5 publishers last year is a very small part of that. Though still a lot!
I really enjoyed your story and noticed your work on Webnovel! As a graphic designer, I’m curious: what’s been your biggest challenge with the book so far? Also, I’d love to hook you up with a free 3D mockup of your cover to help it stand out!