Show Me The Money

So you've poured your heart and soul, your sweat and blood into a novel. It's your baby, your creation, the fruit of your fevered imagination. Next step, find a literary agent who will love and cherish your little darling and send it along on the rocky road to publishing. Snap out of your dream, my friend, and check out the Peter Miller interview with Jenna Glatzer.

Unless I missed something, there's not a word in there about art. Of course, the word might have gotten tangled in the mass of money references. What does Peter Miller look for, as a successful literary agent? Not your work of literary excellence, to be sure, unless it also happens to be an item that will make a great stinking heap of cash. But this is your life's work, the one novel that is perfect and the only one that you are capable of creating - no thanks, Mr. Miller will say to you.

He wants prolific writers who pen best sellers with strong film potential. He's in the business for the money, and he's perfectly honest and up-front about it. Fair play to Peter Miller for stating, in stark terms, what drives an agent's choices when reading through the slush pile. Why should he spend his valuable time pushing something literary when he could expend the same amount of hours and have something to show for it at the end?

It's all just a business. Businesses exist to make money. No room for art, for creativity, not when it gets in the way of the bottom line. Over at Everyone Who's Anyone, Gerard Jones loves to rant about the money-grubbing Nazis who control what we see, hear and read. While he might sound whacked, what he says is proved by the words of Peter Miller, the Literary Lion, who prowls the slush pile for cash potential, and who gives a flying fuck about art?