For those who have not been following along, my author career has gone like this:
- In 2013, I wrote a funny apocalypse novel. I did it to see if I could. Not expecting anyone to want it, I self-published using CreateSpace (then an independent platform) just so I could hold a copy in my own hands.
- People did want it. They bought it. They left nice reviews about how fun it was. They asked me when the next one was coming out. I was not prepared for this.
- In 2014, I pitched a novel about hackers and fae to a friend at a party. He said I should write that. I did. Based on my first book’s performance, I was able to sell this one to a medium-sized publisher.
- Confronted with the possibility that this was becoming a viable career, I was forced to create a website, make business cards, and start telling people that I was a writer.
- I wrote more books. I made graphics. I made friends. I made money; not life-changing amounts, but enough that I could tell people what I did for a living without feeling like I should finish that statement mumbling “I dunno, y’know, it’s just, like, for fun or whatever, it’s stupid.”
- By 2021, I had sold enough copies to qualify as a full member of SFWA. Suddenly I was in a group chat with authors I considered to be celebrities.
- Simultaneously, my medium-sized publisher was taking hits. Members of my team got long Covid and effectively retired. With both printing and bookselling being increasingly ruined by a monopoly, the publisher was unable to budget their way out of it. It shuttered. The rights for those books reverted to me.
- I took a good look around and realized that the middle class was falling out of publishing. Authors I considered superior to me in every way were struggling. Newbies were spending all their time trying to dodge AI scams. Everyone was aggressively professionalizing and self-marketing because they felt like not making “viable” money was their fault. The top 1% of bestsellers were doing fine; Everything else was oozing along the bottom of the moat.
- Since it didn’t seem to matter what authors did, and I had complete creative control back after the collapse of the publisher, I pulled all my books. The new editions will be self-published. None will be published through Amazon (or even for sale there, if I can help it). They will all be DRM-free. I will likely not make any more money. Why would I go this way? Because the options were to redefine my career as banal book-mongering and hashtag-spamming and begging for scraps of royalties to turn into ad dollars to push my name in the faces of nonhuman internet-scraping entities…or to say “fuck it” and do whatever I want.
- Fuck it. I am now doing whatever I want.
Somehow, I doubt this story is unique. In fact, thanks to talking to other writers on many different career paths, I know for a fact that it’s going around.
There are certainly still people who buy and read books. Some of them even read my books. (Suckers. I love you.)
But as a job, as an honest-to-ink profession, we’re doing slightly better than monastic scribes and slightly worse than journalists. There are outlets that pay the same per word now that they did in the 1920s, not accounting in any way for inflation. The proliferation of AI slop means that browsing online for a next read is effectively dead; honest novels are lost little fish swimming in miles and miles of procedurally-generated seaweeds. Readers are giving up on trying to drag a hook through it. The 100,000-word book, the main product of the species Authoris Nobilis, needs a massive amount of attention to survive, and attention is a crop suffering devastating effects of digital climate change.
The thing is, we’re not going to stop. We’re writers.
Is there anything left to us but the love of the game? Maybe. The old model of patronage is making a resurgence, except now the crowd is king. We don’t need a printing press to get the book into someone’s hands anymore, and there are people out there who would rather send an author five bucks directly in exchange for a file than shop at the cartoonishly evil monopoly. And we have old-school allies; the libraries and bookstores who are also in it for love, who hold the gates against the sloppening tide of their own free will, making sure there are still spaces for us to go home to.
So I guess my point is, the middle class has fallen out of publishing, and it doesn’t have to matter. Publishing is not writing. Publishing is not reading. Publishing is not the art.
Let’s do whatever we want.
