With a successful and high-profile debut, a novelist can launch his career, making a name for himself and building a readership that will follow him through to the next novel (and, if all goes well, several more). The debut’s role in the life of an agent is less obvious but no less significant. Every new agent just starting out faces the same problem: how to build a list. And, just as certainly, every new agent will confront a frustrating paradox: She needs to build a list in order to establish her reputation, but without an established reputation, she can’t build a list. Reflecting on her early years in the business, one agent recalled her difficulty: “I was competing against the other agents in my own agency. When an author goes to that website, they’re like, ‘Who do I want to submit to? There’s either this nobody who hasn’t sold anything or these established agents.’” The debut phenomenon has emerged as a response to this problem as well, establishing the agent and serving as the foundation for a list to come.
Early sales are especially important for young agents, both financially and symbolically. Alex, one well-established, midcareer agent at a boutique agency, explained, “When [my boss, an industry legend] promoted me, he said, ‘You know, the first ten books you sell are going to be the most important in your career.’” And he was correct. Almost twenty years later, Alex could still recall how much he made in commission from his first five sales: “It’s crazy how I can remember this...$30,000, $80,000, $60,000, $15,000, $40,000.” (By contrast, he said, “I couldn’t tell you what I was paid for the last ten things I sold.”) But Alex acknowledged that the importance of these sales was only partly due to the financial benefit. In fact, they were far more significant for establishing his reputation. Just as the debut novel sets the tone for the rest of the author’s career, the agent’s first sales shape the list that she will acquire. An agent develops a reputation for liking and selling a certain type of author or book, and so similar authors with similar titles begin to pitch her. Friends recommend their friends and teachers recommend their students; one book begets a dozen more, and lists begin to resemble coteries, as in Sterling Lord’s Beats, Lynn Nesbit’s New Journalists, or Binky Urban’s Brat Pack. The agent’s first sales are her debut, too.
Agents at all career stages represent debut authors, but young literary agents represent more debut writers than do well-established literary agents. “Brian,” a well-established senior agent, explained that he takes on “very little,” amounting to “one debut fiction writer every two years,” for practical purposes: “You can’t endlessly take on clients without shedding clients.” The biggest debut novels tend to be sold by agents like Brian—very well-established and well-respected, with a cadre of award-winning and best-selling novelists on his list, throwing his significant industry clout behind a newcomer. But the majority of debuts are represented by newer (often, younger) agents without any clients to shed, hoping that they, too, might make their name through a profitable and prestigious debut.
Such was the case with Chris Parris-Lamb, the agent who sold the big debut novel of 2011, The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach. Harbach first sent the novel to Elyse Cheney, who had built her reputation (in fiction) ten years earlier, with Dave Eggers’s debut, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, a memoir. Cheney passed, as did several agents after her. Eventually, Harbach found his way to Parris-Lamb, then twenty-seven. After an “old-fashioned auction” involving “eight bidders, seven imprints” culminated in a $665,000 deal, word of the novel—and the agent who’d brokered the sale—began to spread. Parris-Lamb’s name became as closely associated with The Art of Fielding as Harbach’s, thanks to glowing profiles and Keith Gessen’s play-by-play for Vanity Fair, “The Book on Publishing.” He “shot to prominence,” hailed as “the next great new agent” and “the book industry’s best,” featured on Crain’s New York Business’s “40 Under 40” in 2015 alongside the founders of Reddit and Glossier and the photographer behind Humans of New York. The buzzy profiles will tell you that he “built a career” out of Fielding. It is an exceptional story, not representative, but it reveals the limits of the possible for the young literary agent.
Debuts are attractive to new agents not only because senior agents’ attentions are elsewhere and not only out of desperation to build a list, but because the odds are in their favor. In short: It is easier for a publisher to acquire a debut than ever before. The debut’s rising fortunes are an outgrowth of data-driven acquisition practices enabled by Nielsen (now Circana) BookScan, introduced in 2001 as the first service to aggregate point-of-sale data, and capturing an estimated 75 percent of book sales. Many in the publishing industry pushed back against BookScan’s adoption from the beginning, arguing that the increased reliance on sales data would lead to a depression of literary quality in favor of commercial blockbusters alone, and these fears were not entirely unfounded. Now that the platform’s use has become industry standard, agents and editors no longer rely on gut instinct alone.
While few conclusions can be drawn about readership based on point-of-sale data alone, BookScan nearly accurately represents an author’s sales record—what’s come to be known as the author’s track. “I hate that word,” a veteran agent named Lucille spat, “I hate it.” The emphasis on an author’s track has fundamentally changed every aspect of the publishing industry. With BookScan data, publishers greenlight books based not on their love of a project alone, but on an author’s proven success in the marketplace (or lack thereof). One agent explained, “You have a writer…who writes amazing books, but his publisher hasn’t found a way of putting him in the hands of enough readers. And then they said, ‘We just can’t do anything more.’ And you send up his next book, all of the publishers say, ‘But we can look on BookScan and see how bad his sales track record is. We just can’t. I love this book. I love this book. I love this book! But we can’t do it.’” Long gone are the days when publishers would “publish authors, not books,” or when an agent’s power of persuasion could keep a midlist author in print.
A well-established agent named Danielle, owner of a boutique agency with a prestigious list, described the situation at length: Author A and Author B have each written three books. Author A’s books each sold 20,000 copies (“Which is a good number, but it’s not a sexy number”), for a total of 60,000 copies. Author B’s first book sold 5,000 copies; her second sold 15,000; her third 25,000, grossing a total 45,000 copies for three books. When publishers compare these two authors, they pay less attention to the fact that Author A sold more books than Author B. Instead, they see that Author B is on an upward trajectory, whereas Author A’s track is flat. Author A did not increase her readership over the course of three novels. She is a known quantity and—so the logic goes—is unlikely to be anything other than a midlist staple based on her past performance. She is at a severe risk of being dropped by her publisher. By contrast, each new book has led to a significant increase in Author B’s readership. If his upward trajectory continues, he could become a major author; any book could be a big book, his “breakout” book. He will get a book deal.
This scenario wasn’t hypothetical or uncommon for Danielle. Though she deals with the situation often (and every established agent I spoke with shared a similar experience), she had recently told her own Author A that her publisher had passed on her next book. “We sat holding hands and crying. She knew I cared as much as she did. But not as much; my name isn’t on the book. It’s really quite personal.” As she recounted the memory of this disappointment, her voice caught, and she turned away to compose herself. “She was devastated, and I was devastated.… We all [agent, author, and editor] went into this with an equal sort of—I thought—genuine enthusiasm.… It just broke me.” While Danielle takes such disappointments personally, she allowed that her perspective is limited. “It’s not my money I’m putting behind them; this is obviously from the point of view of the agent. Who isn’t paying the advance.”
The reliance on an author’s track to determine acquisitions has not only shaken publishers’ long-term commitments to modestly selling writers; it has also made it easier to justify the acquisition of a debut novel. Indeed, even the most powerful agents have seen the tides turn in favor of debuts in recent years, lamenting that the rise in debuts threatened their existing clients who are not major best-sellers. Sam—earlier in her career than Danielle, with younger authors—acknowledges such heartbreaks but tries to think systemically:
As much as I would like to sit here and say, “Oh, publishers are too concerned with their bottom line! No one’s willing to stick by writers over the long term! Don’t they know that Rebecca Makkai didn’t write The Great Believers [2018] until like her third book, or Claire Messud didn’t have The Emperor’s Children [2006] until, like, her fourth book?” I get it. All else being equal, that third novel held up against a debut novel that you also love? This bright shiny young thing that is all promise with no downside yet? That is easier to sell.
Bright shiny young thing. The emphasis on the author’s track, paradoxically, makes debut writers especially desirable. In one sense, a debut author with no track to commend her is severely disadvantaged in this system. Every writer begins with a track record of zero; unless the writer has a sizable following online or has made a name for herself working in another genre (or industry), the publisher takes a considerable risk when publishing a first-time novelist. Yet, in another sense, a debut novelist without a track record has nothing but potential. Their track can only go up.
Just how promising is a young author? Publishers put a fine point on it, in the form of the advance. Publishing operates according to few rules, but several truisms have gained acceptance. The main rule of thumb for agents, as John B. Thompson, author of Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century, has shown, is that publishers will work harder to sell a book if they’ve paid a large advance. It is, Thompson reports via Andrew Wylie, an “iron law.” Aside from their personal financial benefit—15 percent commission—agents push for high advances for their clients in the belief that it will have a cascading effect: With a significant amount of money invested in a book, publishers are incentivized to see that that book sells enough copies to break even (called “earning out,” something that happens only rarely). Press releases, author interviews, book tours, the festival circuit—all publicity generated in service of recouping the money that they’ve already paid. A major advance attracts attention from within the industry, encouraging film and TV scouts to take notice or foreign publishers to bid on the rights. Still, a big advance is an exception, not a rule. Testimony from the August 2022 Antitrust Trial following Penguin Random House’s attempted acquisition of Simon & Schuster revealed that only about 1,200 authors win advances over $250,000 each year, out of tens of thousands. For a debut author to win a large advance is a coup.
The advance is also symbolically significant, representing a publisher’s belief in a debut author’s potential. Lucille explained, “Publishers...will pay much more money, disproportionate, to a book if it’s a debut and there’s no background and it’s tabula rasa. There’s nothing in the way of the promise of what this first brilliant novel will do; it’s unblemished history, because there is none. And they can spend seven figures in the hope [that] it’s a hot new debut.” Large advances, especially those secured after multi-bidder auctions, are often the first piece of publicity to emerge around a debut. (Advances for well-known, established novelists—Jennifer Egan, Jonathan Franzen, Haruki Murakami, say—do not typically make publishing news.) They are the first signal to the publishing industry that a book and an author could be big. The bigger the advance for a debut, the more promising and brilliant the publishers find the (young) author.
The advance played a major role in the success of Homegoing (2016), the debut novel by Yaa Gyasi. It was less Gyasi’s novel—a generation-spanning story about the legacies of slavery in Ghana and the United States—than the advance that captured the attention of industry professionals. Publishers Weekly summarized the situation just ahead of the London Book Fair: “Earlier this week there was concern among industry insiders about the dearth of major projects circulating in the run-up to the London Book Fair. The question people were asking: ‘Where are all the big books?’ Now, with the fair just days away...the chatter has turned to silence as a number of major sales have closed in the U.S., among them the acquisition of a debut novel, by a twenty-five-year-old, for a rumored seven figures.” A twenty-five-year-old must surely be brilliant if publishers would pay her such a stunning sum of money. The sale set a machine into motion: The advance generated significant anticipation within the industry, which led to increased attention; each step of the information chain helped to promote Gyasi’s debut well before it was released.
Because advances communicate what sort of debut novel a publisher believes is a good bet—and what sort of debut novelist a publisher finds promising—they have become especially contentious, evidence of the publishing industry’s longstanding and well-documented racism. In June of 2019, L. L. McKinney took to social media to illuminate the discrepancies in advances, using the hashtag #PublishingPaidMe. The focus of the conversation quickly shifted to debut novels when Chip Cheek, a white man, tweeted that he had received $800,000 for his debut novel, Cape May (2019). #PublishingPaidMe revealed that writers of color receive significantly lower advances than white writers. Jesmyn Ward, for instance, struggled to publish her debut novel, Where the Line Bleeds (2008), even though she boasted solid institutional credentials as a former Stegner fellow with an MFA from the University of Michigan. Ward declined to disclose the advance for her debut; her second novel, Salvage the Bones (2011), which won the National Book Award, received an advance of only $20,000. Ward would not receive a six-figure advance until Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017)—a novel that would win her a second National Book Award. If advances are any indication, nonwhite writers are significantly less promising as debutantes than their white counterparts. Absent any data, publishers are willing to take risks and bet big on white writers; the same assurance has not been extended to people of color.
Advances are symbolically significant, in part because there is very little reliable data to refute or substantiate claims about their efficacy. They appear stable, yet they are mysterious, influenced by any number of factors, the product of highly subjective valuations. While a large advance might be symbolically meaningful for a debut novelist, it is no guarantee—and often it is quite risky. A large advance ramps up expectations for a book to perform. If those expectations are not met, even if the debut is successful by most accounts, the novelist may struggle to find a publisher for the second book. As one publisher put it, in a New York magazine article outlining the risks and rewards of “the new literary lottery”: “The writer has got two or three years to make the money back. If he doesn’t, that big advance might be the last nickel he ever earns in the book business.” Indeed, whatever their advance, approximately 60 percent of debut novelists do not publish a second book. This low rate of second-book publication highlights the stakes of the debut. A large advance may distinguish a writer, if she earns out; or it may be a black eye, a signal that she’s no longer worth the risk, leaving the writer to join the 60 percent of debut novelists who do not publish again.
From Middlemen: Literary Agents and the Making of American Fiction. Copyright © 2026 by Laura B. McGrath. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press.
Laura B. McGrath is an assistant professor of English at Temple University and the author of Middlemen: Literary Agents and the Making of American Fiction (Princeton University Press, 2026). Her writing has appeared in the Atlantic, the Nation, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.
