A writer's manifesto
The business model for writing is designed to make you feel bad about yourself.
Before Fernwood published Siegebreakers, I was so desperate to “get published” as a fiction writer that I followed every piece of advice I found in books and online, even advice that was self-contradictory.
One piece of advice, for example, about twenty years ago, was to never submit manuscripts to publishers directly. You had to find a reputable literary agent, and most publishers only looked at work from agents. So, I looked at more online resources, bought various Writer’s Market publications, and started a process of desperation and supplication to get the attention of a literary agent.
It worked well: Instead of racking up rejections from publishers, I was racking up rejections from agents, which led to ever weirder experiences. One agent said he liked my submission, scheduled a phone call for months later, and ghosted me after the phone call (I guess there was something he didn’t like). It seemed agents liked to be polite, so they would rather find ways to politely ghost you than to write the kind of rejection letters academics are used to getting from journals (“a rather pedestrian study”, was the favorite rejection comment I got for one of my early scientific papers).
But one rejection was maximally revealing about the state of the world for writers. One agency rejected me after the standard 12 weeks, then put me on a mailing list for one of the courses they run for writers on how to get published! There are literary agencies out there that make money off of courses teaching writers how to increase their chances of getting published. What’s even worse: years later, I took one of their courses! In the course, a group of writers communicated with each other, and gave one another feedback on writing, and at the very end, one of the agents gave one or two sentences of summary feedback to each writer. Finally, I think one writer was selected to pitch their manuscript to the agents. We writers paid a literary agency (handsomely), whose job it is to find publishers for writers and take a fee, so that we could give one another feedback on our writing.
How did it come to this? Because money flows in this industry not from readers, not to writers, but from writers and to those who give them the false promise of “publication”.
But it has been decades since the time when a writer, in order to be read, needed a publisher to work on a printing press with ink and paper to be read. It has been decades since the time when those publishers, who wanted to make sure they made profits off of selling those paper-and-ink products, had to be careful gatekeepers, rejecting most manuscripts and assigning editors the work of improving the lucky few that were chosen.
That isn’t how it works any more, writers. Today you join the other billions with an internet connection and put your words up somewhere - probably in some space owned by one of the tech giants. What, then, is this mystique of “getting published” that writers are being sold? It is nothing other than any other promise of fame and fortune.
It turns out the less meaningful the service offered (“publication” of words you can put out in any of a hundred places on the web within seconds of logging on?) the more intensely the service is marketed to writers – who should be the sellers, not the buyers.
Writing isn’t the only thing that has gone this way. Money is made by teaching people how to become yoga teachers, not by teaching yoga. Money is made by teaching people how to become life coaches, not by coaching people how to live their lives. The best though is of course the online courses that teach you how to make money making online courses! Such courses do exist.
And yet, I have to admit that the most valuable advice I found about how to understand our current publishing landscape came from an author of a how-to book about how to make money creating how-to books. This author, John T. Reed, has self-published a novel called The Unelected President about what happens when “Mike Medlock, a libertarian, non-politician accidentally becomes president of the United States while serving out a dead senator’s term.” I’m the author of the Anti-Empire Project. I don’t see eye to eye politically with John T. Reed, whose novel blurb ends: “ There’s a new sheriff in town, and the North Koreans, Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, Chinese, and Russians are very unhappy about that.” I would, no doubt, also be unhappy about Mike Medlock being the new sheriff in town.
Nevertheless, I have always believed that insights can come from anywhere and anyone and what anti-imperialist doesn’t have at least one uncle with John T. Reed’s politics? At any rate, Reed sold me his How to Write, Publish, and Sell Your Own How-To Book. I sent him the payment. He had the book printed and bound. And his family operation had it shipped to me (at my expense). And my favorite line in the book was (from memory, because I loaned the book to a friend): “There are two kinds of publishing: vanity publishing and self-publishing.”
For as long as there’s been a publishing industry, self-publishing was disparaged as “vanity publishing”, because writers, unable or unwilling to risk rejection by a “real” publisher, did it only to see their book in print. But John T. Reed argues that today it’s those who seek a publisher that are the real “vanity publishers”, since all they want is to see their name on a book as the author. That those who want to make money selling books have to undertake the editing, printing, and distribution tasks themselves. And, John T. Reed warns, don’t use Amazon, which is the worst of both worlds!
I found John T. Reed’s ideas so compelling that I’ve decided to try them out. More on that later.
First, let’s finish unraveling the propaganda mechanisms upon which the business model of marketing to writers depends. For them to work, writers must be completely psychologically broken, convinced that we have to beg readers for attention and beg social media companies for access to the chance to beg those readers for attention. So broken that we forget the reason we started writing. So broken we forget how much, and how eagerly, people love to read.
Capitalist propaganda would never try to sell writers on a pitch like: “learn how to research and write to provide use-value for others and earn a good living in the process!” Instead, it’s the promise of being one of the superstars and, importantly, of not being one of the rejected losers!
(Probably worth mentioning that it isn’t just propaganda, but legal and monopoly mechanisms that the propaganda serves. Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin call it Chokepoint Capitalism.)
But in fact, the market for writing is a long-tailed one. Sure, there are the superstars. But you don’t need to be one of them to find your readers, even - gasp - readers who are able to pay for your writing.
No matter how much they try to make you feel otherwise, there are three facts that endure: 1. Readers like to read 2.Despite all the hype about how people don’t read any more, you know people love reading and they do it all day. 3. It’s about you and readers and everything else is people coming in between trying to make some money off of both. The social media giants have made you feel like, in the attention economy, readers are doing you a favor by reading your stuff and above all, these platforming profiteers are doing you a favor by putting your stuff in front of readers.
Not true. All readers want is to find out something they didn’t know before through a written conversation with another person. They don’t need stars or superstar authors, the precise 28 beats of storytelling to be followed, “plain english” excised of all Latin words, or Joseph Campbell Heroes Journeys for every character.
Maybe everything becomes a superstar system in our world, including the substack over which I write you today (having left mailchimp because they lowered the size of their free tier mailing list to better focus on their paying customers - which didn’t include me). But let’s have the conversations we can have in the meantime.
Don’t let them break your spirit, writers! We are all on here to write to each other, and we all love to read. Allow me to qualify my earlier words that only writers and readers matter and nuance it this way: Let use-value be your filter. Editors are here to help. Publishers do valuable work including assigning good editors and artists and making your writing into a nice book.
[Sidebar: There are exceptions, including big ones. I have loved working with Monthly Review and with Fernwood as a writer - and it’s probably no coincidence that I love reading their books as a reader. Monthly Review and Fernwood are mission-driven publishers that serve their community of readers. You don’t work with them for vanity or for money, but for the mission. And the mission doesn’t have to be as exalted - in my opinion - as MR or Fernwood’s: academic publishing generally is supposed to be mission-driven too.]
But you don’t need gatekeepers between you and readers and you definitely don’t need gatekeepers who make you feel bad about yourself. Your writing is an offering and I’m grateful for it. So, writers: thank you.
And whether you:
make tactical use of a blogging platform like substack or wordpress;
follow the advice of John T. Reed laying out, printing, and mailing your own books;
or even find a publisher that shares your values and doesn’t treat you like a nuisance;
Stop letting the platform giants (and those who have internalized their propaganda) bully you!
And readers – if you’re interested – do consider buying my books. You see, I’ve started this whole self-publishing thing… and I’ll make a substack post announcing just that in a few days.