I do think this business of anticipating what 'the public' will and won't accept is very often damaging for everyone involved: in a case like this, the authors don't get represented, the agent loses the chance at what could have been a very successful manuscript, likewise the publishers if the writers can't find another agent with a different set of preconceptions, and the reading public has their reading pre-selected for them and doesn't get a chance to figure out for itself what it likes.
It seems to me like there are (at least) two basic pieces of the problem. The first is that very often, it seems to me, the actual popularity of something depends on the weirdest vagaries, not the big issues that people cite as reasons to accept or decline. I've seen terribly conservative and bigoted people love something that represents viewpoints they abhor because it's a movie with an actor they like, or because it's a novel set in their home town, or because there's a housewife character who's wonderfully funny, never mind that she's not the protagonist. They say, 'There's a gay guy in it, but I really like it anyway, because--' and come up with a reason that an agent couldn't have predicted if they'd made lists of possible selling points for a week. And then they recommend it to their friends.
It sort of makes sense to me. The people who have to gamble on successes need some metric, something more than their personal taste or whim. They can't begin to predict the myriad small things that come together to make something successful or not, so they use the big line items instead, because at least they're something.
The second thing, though, is that another term for the big issues is 'sweeping generalizations', and another word for that is, 'preconceptions.' They don't often seem to be...er, in the jargon of my field, evidence-based practices. Why assume that young SFF readers (and adult readers of YA fiction, of whom there are many, of course) will be put off by having a gay POV character? It seems more like a tenet of faith than anything else - not just an example of playing to the most conservative denominator, but of playing to an /imagined/ conservative baseline.
'Frustrating' doesn't really cover it, even if stretched.
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Date: 2011-09-13 02:08 pm (UTC)It seems to me like there are (at least) two basic pieces of the problem. The first is that very often, it seems to me, the actual popularity of something depends on the weirdest vagaries, not the big issues that people cite as reasons to accept or decline. I've seen terribly conservative and bigoted people love something that represents viewpoints they abhor because it's a movie with an actor they like, or because it's a novel set in their home town, or because there's a housewife character who's wonderfully funny, never mind that she's not the protagonist. They say, 'There's a gay guy in it, but I really like it anyway, because--' and come up with a reason that an agent couldn't have predicted if they'd made lists of possible selling points for a week. And then they recommend it to their friends.
It sort of makes sense to me. The people who have to gamble on successes need some metric, something more than their personal taste or whim. They can't begin to predict the myriad small things that come together to make something successful or not, so they use the big line items instead, because at least they're something.
The second thing, though, is that another term for the big issues is 'sweeping generalizations', and another word for that is, 'preconceptions.' They don't often seem to be...er, in the jargon of my field, evidence-based practices. Why assume that young SFF readers (and adult readers of YA fiction, of whom there are many, of course) will be put off by having a gay POV character? It seems more like a tenet of faith than anything else - not just an example of playing to the most conservative denominator, but of playing to an /imagined/ conservative baseline.
'Frustrating' doesn't really cover it, even if stretched.