My Struggle (to Publication)

Reflections on a strange literary road

On May 11th, I’ll celebrate the launch of my new novel, Colossus. I’ll be in conversation with the great Shadi Hamid at P&T Knitwear in Manhattan. Tickets are going very fast—we’re getting closer to capacity—and if you want to come party with us, please secure your seat now. We’ll have a great time. Colossus has been called a “challenging portrait of a thoroughly modern man.” Come out May 11th and see what all the fuss is about.

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Recently, it occurred to me that, by the close of this year, I will have published a book with almost every single kind of publisher. This is either a reflection of the modern condition or my own mad career. There’s been the major conglomerate (Random House), the very large non-prestige publisher (Amazon’s Lake Union), the midsized indie (Verso), the much smaller indie (OR Books), the small imprint that belongs to a much larger company (Arcade), and the tiniest of indies (Tough Poets Press). I’ve dealt with major corporations and de facto one-man bands. I don’t know if that qualifies me for doling out any sort of advice, but I thought I might reflect, a few weeks out from the publication of my next novel, on how I got here.

From the time I was eighteen, I wanted to publish novels. I continue to exalt the novel, though I obviously publish plenty of nonfiction for both money and pleasure. Nonfiction, in every way, pays the bills. If I could find a way to have my novels pay my rent, I would. For now—and maybe always—they will be the labor of love. They are art objects, offerings of the soul.

In my early twenties, like a lot of ambitious young writers, I wanted to be a star. I dreamed of being anointed. I dreamed of landing on the front page of the New York Times Book Review, when that still mattered a great deal. I wanted to be profiled in major newspapers and magazines. This was not, ultimately, why I wrote—I wrote because I loved it, because I was obsessed—but I thought it should be the proper reward for the work I put in and the talent I possessed. Why not me? To be a major novelist seemed like the very best kind of life. As hungry and preening as I might have been, I did, at least, keep working at my craft, even when validation didn’t materialize. I was able to publish a few short stories—I remember how thrilled I was to see my first, at age nineteen, in an online journal that’s long vanished from the internet—but a vast majority of my submissions were rejected. In college, I wrote my first novel, and it never left my hard drive. I started another—not to be finished—that also never left my hard drive. It only survives as a short story published in my college newspaper. In 2013 and 2014, I finished a novel called Devlin DuNair about a baseball prodigy who is elected mayor of New York City and later assassinated. The assassin is female, which I thought outré because the shooting of the famous tends to be, historically, a deranged man’s job. I haven’t read the novel in a decade, so I can’t tell you if it’s any good, though I imagine there’s stretches of strong writing, the spark of something better. After many queries to many agents that went unanswered, one replied; he was a man in his thirties that I’ll call C., and he worked for a boutique agency in Manhattan. He told me he very much liked the novel and wanted to represent me.

It was a rainy spring day in 2014. I was twenty-four, wearing a tie, standing in a wood-paneled office somewhere in the West Village. C. worked with a senior agent, and we all got to meet. This was, at that point, one of the more exciting moments of my life. Here it was—a dream about to come true. The novel would be sold, I’d be reviewed across America, and the critics might even compare me to much more famous and successful writers, writers I could, with enough luck, even surpass. C. told me the novel, as good as it was, needed edits. That was fine with me. We emailed back and forth for months. He decided to bring on an outside editor for another read. More time went by, and he seemed less satisfied, not more. In October 2014, C. told me my “writing is so sophisticated that your first draft made me believe that you were capable of adding a driving force to the narrative.” But, it turned out, I apparently “became lost in the minute changes and not focused enough on the macro changes. I think you need to do a lot of reading, figure out what the plot of Devlin Dunair is, and do a chapter outline based on that plot.”

I tried. C. never thought the manuscript was quite good enough to go on submission. He dropped me sometime after that, and I was left without an agent. By then, I was writing another novel—I’m restless that way, and if I’m not writing, I feel a tad lost—and treating it as my new meal ticket. City of Simcha was about a religious cult, somewhat similar to the Hasidic Jews, that takes over New York City. In the spring of 2015, another agent, on the recommendation of a writer friend, expressed interest. Let’s call him W. I was invited to W.’s offices in Midtown. The agency was much bigger than C.’s and it remains, to this day, one of the heavier hitters. Again, I wore a tie. W. was young, just a few years older than me, but his position in the industry was more assured. He wanted to represent me. Second time, I thought, must be the charm. I remember W. asked me if I was ready for the controversy this book could bring. Would I be comfortable, he asked, defending it during an angry Q&A at the Upper West Side Barnes & Noble? I answered, quietly, yes. Internally, my answer was fuck yes. Publicity, attention, a firestorm—what a life! Hadn’t Roth shot to fame this way? I hadn’t written City of Simcha with that in mind, but if I spurred some outrage, so be it. It would mean, simply, people cared.

My experience with W. turned out to be even worse than my time with C. W., like C., wanted extensive edits. I was eager to take direction, to make my novel saleable. I revised the novel over the summer. We had a phone call in September, where I was told City of Simcha wasn’t ready yet. One sticking point, I remember, was making the cult less of a takeoff on Hasidic Jewry. I had no issue with that. We exchanged further emails, my edits seemingly getting us nowhere closer. On October 27th, he told me he’s get back to me soon after I sent in the latest version of my manuscript. On November 20th, he told me he still owed me a response. He said nothing to me in December. In February 2016, he wrote me back, at last, to tell me there was nowhere left for us to go. “I feel cloudy and angry at myself for sitting on your manuscript for so long,” he said. “I wish I could say it had something to do with something manageable and irritating like laziness, but in truth, the manuscript has been bouncing around my head for ages and I have not been able to pin it to the wall long enough to kill it and label it as an agent should.”

“There’s a real real raw anger in this manuscript, in the main character, but also in his protagonist, that I cannot subsume into the story in a way that talks itself into a saleable tag, or an intelligible selling point,” he continued. “Or even as a story point. It’s a really vicious manuscript. I know we are supposed to be in a post-sympathetic-character world, and we are in many respects, but I don’t know if your protagonist is post-sympathetic as much as he is extremely loud and incredibly close.” He added he felt “defeated” by my manuscript.

So it went. He offered to read other work I might have. None stuck, and he responded less and less. I was without an agent once again. By late 2015 and early 2016, I began work on a novel called Demolition Night, which would end up as the first actual book I ever published. A time-traveling satire, set in the 1970s and the dystopian near-future, Demolition Night owed its writerly DNA to Thomas Pynchon’s V., a novel I devoured in the summer of 2015. In the fall of 2016, I wrote an essay for the Village Voice about an overlooked novelist, poet, and playwright named Marvin Cohen who was having his work reissued by Tough Poets Press, a small independent publisher based in Massachusetts. After speaking with the man who ran Tough Poets, I asked, once my essay was finished, if he was accepting any new fiction. He said yes. I sent him City of Simcha and he rejected it. I decided, then, to try Demolition Night. He liked this novel much more, and we set a publication date for the summer of 2018. By then, though, I was running for office, and there was the question of how I’d promote a book while politicking every single night, a certain future mayor telling me to knock on ever more doors. There were also the novel’s contents—it was quite louche and lurid—and how this might “play” during a campaign. We pushed publication back to the fall, not long before my birthday, and I was safely defeated in the Democratic primary by the time I held my first and only reading for Demolition Night at the BookMark Shoppe, Bay Ridge, Brooklyn’s local bookstore.

I still had no agent. My submission to Tough Poets had been direct, and the payment was a straightforward royalty split. No advance. For my next novel, I wanted to at least secure an advance and try my luck with a bigger house. Through a literary connection I made, I came into contact with a Power Agent. This Power Agent had represented several famous literary authors that you have definitely heard of. I hoped to entice the Power Agent. To her credit, she answered my emails and seemed drawn to my media background. Since, in 2016, I had quit the Jared Kushner-owned New York Observer over their decision to make an endorsement of Donald Trump they had told me wasn’t going to happen, the Power Agent thought I might write a nonfiction book. That could make us both more money than a novel. She suggested a biography of Kushner. I didn’t really want to do it, but I did want to be published again, and I thought if I found a large house for a Kushner book, this could aid my fiction career. The Power Agent liked the proposal I wrote—when you shop nonfiction books, you shop proposals, whereas completed novels are sent on submission—and we sent it out to the leading editors in the country. None were interested.

I suppose, though, my credo was to keep writing. I was like one of those sharks who can’t fall asleep or they’ll smash against the ocean floor. During a few hot summer months in 2019, I wrote a new novel. I called it House of Earth or Blood Earth, the former referring to the name of the cult in the book, the latter, in my mind, more appealing. House of Earth, later to be renamed The Night Burns Bright, was about a fictional cult in upstate New York in the first years after 9/11. I wrote it from the perspective of a child who is trapped there, who watches as his world slowly crumbles all around him; he is manipulated by his mother and the charismatic cult leader, and in my original draft, there wasn’t much uplift. I sent the novel, in early 2020, to the Power Agent. She really liked it. This was, naturally, very exciting. Unlike my first two agents, the Power Agent had a track record that was undeniable. She spoke, offhandedly, about how the advances of one of her famous authors helped pay for her country house. I was barely thirty, and I might be rich! The pandemic hit, but from the perspective of publishing the novel, this didn’t seem to matter too much. With the Power Agent, the editing process was more seamless. She had a young assistant I worked with, and the Power Agent would swoop in occasionally, offering bits of advice. By June 2020, we were ready to go on submission. I had never had an agent submit one of my novels to any publishers before.

With C. and W., we had tried to build airplanes that never left the hangar. Now, I’d be soaring into the clouds.

Every publisher the Power Agent submitted to—they were, in many cases, the brand names, the dream-makers—said no.

They had, I learned, different ways of saying no. Some were terse. Some were apologetic. Some were effusive. Some were blunt. “When it came to discovering all the bodies, especially those of kids, I was rattled,” one editor wrote. “I think kids being killed that way would make it a tough read for many people. It was for me. It wasn’t the cult stuff that I found difficult (though it’s certainly creepy, but also fascinating). It was the mass murders of children and parents, especially the children.”

A second round of submissions went nowhere, too. As frustrated as I was, I had yet another novel to absorb me, one I had begun in the fall of 2019. I eased into it, and then, with the arrival of the pandemic, I found I could dedicate far more time to its completion. The pages poured out of me. In August 2020, I had a draft—160,000-odd words of a sprawling social novel that I was calling, at first, An American Affair. I had written, I thought, a very good novel about 9/11, when there weren’t many out there. Don DeLillo was one of my favorite writers, but Falling Man, to me, was inadequate. Perhaps An American Affair could be published by September 2021, more than a year away, to coincide with the twentieth anniversary of 9/11. I emailed the Power Agent, sending the novel to her and her assistant. And then I waited.

In early 2021, a publisher told us they’d accept House of Earth. I had forgotten the Power Agent had even queried them: Lake Union Press, a division of Amazon. Amazon had its own publishing houses, with legitimate editors and marketing teams. They had tried, with limited success, to compete with traditional publishers like Penguin Random House and Farrar, Straus and Giroux. I knew little of Lake Union. One problem I suspected House of Earth had run into with most publishers was how the Power Agent had pitched it—as a thriller and horror novel with literary elements. To me, it was a literary novel that carried some thriller and horror elements. Keeping the reader in suspense wasn’t really the point. I didn’t care all that much if a reader guessed the plot twist. Most vital to me were the interiority of the child narrator, the way the world was rendered, and the psychology of the cult. Lake Union, I suspected, wanted to position the novel as a thriller of some sort. Philosophically, I was opposed to Amazon as a company—I still am, and rarely buy from them—and struggled with whether I should publish with Lake Union. Ultimately, after consulting with my partner at the time as well as her family, I decided to say yes. It would be silly to turn down an opportunity to publish, to not let my book exist. Lake Union offered $25,000, which was more than reasonable, and I signed with them. The editorial team was friendly and the publication date of February 2022 was only a year away, a short timeline by industry standards.

My editor liked the novel quite a bit and changed relatively little. What she did want was a different ending—less gloom, some nod to a better tomorrow—and I agreed, if I preferred the novel’s original coda. The title also wasn’t going to be House of Earth. Lake Union would decide, ultimately, what the book was called. My other suggestion was Every Side of Darkness. It sounded like Lie Down in Darkness, an alluring William Styron title, and captured, I believed, the essence of the novel. The Lake Union team rejected the title, disliking any use of the word “dark” or “darkness.” This was the first time I had ever encountered a “sensitivity reader” and, in 2021, “darkness” was viewed as problematic in some fashion. Other titles were suggested to me and I didn’t like any of them. The least bad option, I decided, was The Night Burns Bright. My experience with Lake Union was pleasant, overall, but the title never sat very well with me. I quietly vowed, if I ever had the chance again, I’d decide exactly what my books would be called, even if the publisher opposed me.

Meanwhile, OR Books, a small leftist publisher, had approached me at the end of 2020 about writing a short book about Andrew Cuomo. At this time, the New York governor was a national hero because of his response to Covid. I was deeply skeptical of Cuomo’s handling of the pandemic, having written critical dispatches for The Nation and starting this very Substack—originally named the Cuomo Files—to hold the governor to account. OR offered me a few thousand dollars, I accepted, and a publication date was set for July 2021. I wrote the book in about six weeks, building off of reporting I had already done, and found real-world events rapidly overtaking the manuscript. In the early months of 2021, Cuomo faced down around a dozen sexual harassment allegations. As the book went to press, his standing was deteriorating, and he would resign after publication day. Luckily, the title of the book—the one I had selected—worked just fine. The Prince: Andrew Cuomo, Coronavirus, and the Fall of New York was met with a strong critical reception and modest sales. The summer book party, at an outdoor venue in Brooklyn—it was still the pandemic—attracted a few anti-Cuomo politicians, including my old friend, Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani.

All of this was gratifying. But I very much wanted my new novel, An American Affair—I was also calling it Mona—to see the light of day. In August 2020, I had handed it off to the Power Agent. In early 2021, her assistant told me she enjoyed the novel and recommended it to her boss. Still, the Power Agent said nothing. Finally, in November 2021, more than a year after I sent the novel to her, I received a dispiriting response. “Right now there is a real drive for very high concept fiction set in an entirely different world without the confines of our current daunting reality or work from previously marginalized voices,” she wrote. “In addition, there were many elements of your novel that overlap with others I represent- [names redacted]. And while very different I just couldn’t summon the full-throated support your work deserves.” She offered praise for me, said she’d consider other novels I wrote, but wouldn’t be shopping my new book.

The novel that would become Glass Century—in fact, the manuscript I had sent to the Power Agent differed very little than the book that would eventually be published in 2025—was not going to be sent to any editors anytime soon. Since this was the novel I wanted to submit and I had no other work I cared enough about—this book mattered more to me than any other—I would be, once more, without an agent. I could cheer, in 2022, the publication of The Night Burns Bright, but without any feasible path for Glass Century, my celebration couldn’t be full-throated. Since The Night Burns Bright was an Amazon title and I didn’t, truthfully, know how to promote it, it wasn’t reviewed much at all beyond a few trade publications. Thanks to Amazon, a lot of readers did receive free digital copies, and I was invited to speak to a Zoom book club. I was glad to be a published author again. Still, I wasn’t sure what steps I should take to get my next novel to an actual publisher.

I didn’t consider self-publishing because, at the time, I felt it carried stigma—I do not think this is true anymore—and I didn’t know how to do it. I didn’t know how to design or format a book. The process was mysterious to me. I needed someone else to take the reins. After querying a bunch of agents and hearing nothing, I decided to try another Power Agent represented by a writer I knew. This Power Agent was quite busy and had a couple of his young assistants read Glass Century. (I was still calling it Mona then.) They liked the novel, and the young male assistant—let’s call him M.—who was, at the time, a junior agent said he could represent me. This was good enough; I had tired of Power Agents anyway. This was the first time I had an agent who was younger than me. I did, for a while, like M. He was responsive enough. He thought it might be better to pair my novel with a nonfiction work and sell it all together. Why not? I had ripped through Chuck Klosterman’s The Nineties and thought I could write something of a follow-up, a cultural study of the 2000s. I wrote a proposal for my agent, he thought it was strong, and we sent it out to editors at large, well-known publishing houses. It was roundly rejected, if a few offered compliments. The introduction written for that proposal would emerge as a series of essays on this Substack in 2023.

Meanwhile, M. was strategizing on the novel. The plan was to submit it to publishers at the start of 2023. But January arrived and M. wasn’t ready to submit. He was slower responding to emails and needed more time to tinker with the novel. This became a theme: M. would offer a deadline, blow it by months, and barely respond to texts or emails. I came to resent him and I confess this resentment remains. In part, this was because I strongly implied to him time was of the essence; there was a family matter I alluded to that made me more restless than usual. My elderly father was in and out of hospitals. I very much wanted to tell him about Glass Century, a novel he partially inspired, and even have him read it. But it mattered to me, greatly, that I secure a path to publication—that I have a deal of some kind with a publisher that I could then tell my father about. Perhaps that was all quite silly—tell him, anyway!—but I decided that was important, vitally important. January, February, March, April, May—M. had excuses for why Glass Century couldn’t quite go out yet. None of them, quite frankly, made much sense. He seemed spacey and inattentive. Finally, at the end of June, the novel was submitted. My father died at the end of August, as my novel was on submission.

No deal was forthcoming anyway. Every single publisher, two dozen or so, had rejected Glass Century or not responded at all. Ghosting was most common. Most editors didn’t answer M. I despaired, of course, if I had numbed myself slightly after watching so many publishers turn down The Night Burns Bright. In the fall of 2023, however, I did have one lead: a top editor at a prestigious small publisher read my Substack. He had inquired about nonfiction and I told him about the novel. I sent it to him. In November, we met for coffee. He liked Glass Century, was absorbed, even. He wanted to publish it. My journey was done; I’d have a publisher, and a very good one. Writers knew this publisher. I wouldn’t be at the front of The Strand, but so what? Or, well, maybe I would. This publisher was good. “I just have to take it to my team,” the editor told me. He explained they decided on novels as a group and if there was too much opposition, they wouldn’t go ahead. But he was the top editor, and he had a lot of pull. The way he spoke about the process, it sounded like a formality.

I heard nothing from the editor in December. It was January 2024, after the holidays, and I decided to inquire about the status of the novel. The editor was apologetic; he meant well, truly. He explained to me he thought highly of the book, but the team didn’t. They hadn’t found consensus. They would have to reject it. He had already told my agent. But my agent hadn’t told me. My fury built. I texted M. M. said he was going to tell me. He was in the process of writing an email, or a text, or composing a thought to convert into language that would reach me sometime before next Christmas. I wanted to fire M. then, but who the hell was I, really? How was I going to find another agent? It had taken me a year just to get to M.

I did, at least, have a revelation—the problem wasn’t me. It was the system. The system wasn’t working all that well. I knew my novel was good enough to be published. I knew, if it ever reached the public, it would do just fine. And at that point, I couldn’t let the whole decade leak away. It had been nearly four years since I finished the draft of Glass Century. A whole presidential term. For the first time in several years, I contacted Tough Poets Press. I told the editor, Rick Schober, about Glass Century. He was enthusiastic. I was back to where I started, and that would do. Rick would release the book in May 2025, so we’d have a year to prepare—more than enough runway. He let me name the book and I had a strong hand in the cover design. Our deal was a royalty split. M. oversaw the contract, which I regretted because I had done all the work of securing the Tough Poets deal myself. If there were ever film or TV rights, M. would take a cut. I asked M. if he could try to sell foreign rights. M. was noncommittal, as he was about most things, and he could go weeks without returning a text message. I wanted to be done with him.

To lay the groundwork for Glass Century, I promoted it incessantly, in a way I had never done for any other book. I was like a helicopter parent desperate to see my child succeed. I had barely written anything on Substack about The Night Burns Bright. Self-promotion, then, felt gauche. Now I was a carnival barker for myself. I even, out of my own pocket, paid for a publicist. (I honestly wouldn’t recommend this unless you’re willing to spend a significant amount of money.) Most of the publicity, though, I’d secure on my own, through many emails, many galleys in the mail, and a dogged insistence on having the novel get some kind of reception. In the meantime, from May 2023 to March 2024, I had written another novel, far shorter than Glass Century. It was called Colossus. I gave it to M. to submit; most of the publishers ignored the submission. In 2025, after having met the team at Arcade at a party in New York—I was getting The Metropolitan Review off the ground—I sent them Colossus. They responded quickly, accepted the novel for publication, and set a date of April 28th, 2026. I was allowed to name the book and had a tremendous amount of input on the cover design. I am very thankful to Arcade.

The publication of Glass Century was, by far, the best time I’ve had as a novelist. The Wall Street Journal gave the book a strong review, the New Statesman in the U.K. praised it, I got to appear on Bret Easton Ellis’ podcast, and many Substack writers read it generously. It was all I could have asked for. We drew a huge crowd, maybe a hundred people, to the launch in Manhattan, and I got to hold readings in Philadelphia and Portland, Oregon. My alma mater, Stony Brook University, invited me back for a talk. Now I hope for some of the same with Colossus. What’s the lesson of all this? On a practical level, if you’ve got an agent and want to part ways, part ways. I did that in 2025 and now have a great one. To get anywhere in the writing world, you need luck, certainly, and that won’t be manufactured. Connections help. You need a dash of talent, too. I do think, as trite as it may sound, persistence is underrated. If you stop trying, you won’t get anywhere. If you do try, you may also get nowhere, but you’ve got more of a chance. Novels can have longer tails. A launch matters, but so does someone, a year later, telling you they’ve just finished your book and enjoyed it. Books can linger in the bloodstream. After Colossus, Random House will publish my book on Zohran Mamdani in the fall. I’ll have more to say on that soon. And, I hope, I’ll have news to convey about a new novel, the one about the drone assassin. Let’s hope a publisher bites.