publishing is a fake industry

but also: bUy mY b0oK

Receiving the first box with copies of your first book is supposed to be an exciting moment. And I guess it was, only I just so happen to be dealing with cascading personal and family crises right now and it’s hard to feel excited about anything. And also this book was so painful to write that I can’t take an uncomplicated joy in its existence: I feel mostly like I got to the end of a grim battle, and defeated it before it defeated me.

Writing Dangerous Fictions was difficult for a number of reasons, but the primary one was that I simply wasn’t paid very much to write it. A lot of writers wax on about the agony of writing, how hard it is to find the right words and bleed your soul out, blah blah blah. Yeah sure, figuring out the right ideas and expressing them in clean and necessary order isn’t easy. But it’s much harder when you don’t have the time to do it, and you don’t have the time if you don’t have the money.

Dangerous Fictions is fundamentally a research project: I had to do a lot of reading and organizing and rewriting if I was going to shape a credible history and present of the moral panics over fiction, the fear (and the fact) that books, movies, TV shows, comic books, and video games both do and do not shape reality. My publisher gave me a $10,000 advance for this purpose. That sounds good on paper, and it’s certainly normal by the standards of independent presses. But really that was $10,000 split into two payments, one on signing, one on delivery of the final draft, and minus my agent’s 15% (my agent is amazing and frankly deserved more.) So, effectively, I received two payments of $4,250, and the publisher was very slow to get me that second check.¹ And remember, I also have to pay taxes on freelance income, so my net gain here was two payments of about $2,850. For a person living in New York, as I was at the time—because it’s a good idea for writers to live in places where there are actual job openings and chances for networking—that’s about two months of rent and bills. I was only then, arguably, a full-time writer for two months, and for the rest of the year I spent writing Dangerous Fictions, I was taking other freelance gigs to make ends meet, while trying to research and write in the gaps in my paid employment.

This is not sustainable. It’s bogus. I talk in the book about how unstable and bogus the entire publishing industry has become, and how little writers are paid, and how risky that is when politicians, conservative parents, and spoiled consumers feel entitled to declare books dangerous. And still my best case scenario for Dangerous Fictions is that people read it, and like it, and buy enough copies that I earn out my advance, which means that publishers may decide to take more chances on me in the future. I might even be able to negotiate slightly larger advances, though given that I plan to switch over to fiction, I’m still writing my first novel² on spec. (Nonfiction books are usually picked up via a book proposal and a sample chapter; first novels are mostly written at the writer’s own cost, before a publisher even has the chance to say “I loved this, I read it in a day, but it’s just not right for us.”³)

“If freelancers had cojones,” writes Pete Tosiello, “they’d file labor suits against every American publisher, but that never happens because (a) writers are bootlickers, and (b) publishers aren’t serious businesses, and they’d sooner close shop than pay contractors a living wage.” He’s right and he should say it. This is a fake industry. It survives off the cheap labor of writers who are desperate to express themselves and will settle for pennies, and the ranks of publishing professionals which are made up almost entirely of rich kids who weren’t smart enough for law school. We’re not supposed to say these things out loud, of course. When you’re a writer you’re supposed to smile and network and promote your books and speak passionately about the worth and value of writing, even though the very people who write your checks constantly demonstrate that they value you and your work about as much as they value the gig workers who bring them their groceries. We’re all equally anonymous and replaceable.

Mark Zuckerberg recently made a similar argument from a different perspective. In an interview yesterday with the Verge, he said that writers and other creators who don’t want to participate in AI scraping can simply be ignored: “I think individual creators or publishers tend to overestimate the value of their specific content in the grand scheme of this…Look, we’re a big company…We pay for content when it’s valuable to people. We’re just not going to pay for content when it’s not valuable to people.” I talk about this iN mY bOoK (buy my book), but the defenses of fiction as valuable (politically, intellectually, morally) nearly always fail because “value” is an arbitrary and mostly bullshit concept. Zuckerberg himself puts out worthless products all day. His vaunted metaverse is a disaster. It has no actual value (politically, intellectually, morally, aesthetically, or even numerically.) Yet Zuckerberg will never struggle to pay his bills, even if his work is worthless (and it is), because he once managed to convince rich people that he had value and was worth investment, which must mean that he’s brilliant and deserves everything he has forever.

And it’s frustrating that, in the face of all the categorical bullshit we deal with every day, in the perceived valuelessness of everything that’s actually valuable and the high price bestowed upon absolute nothingness, my one available response is to write about it: to say buy my book, subscribe to my newsletter, buy these other books, subscribe to these other brilliant newsletters. I lack the cojones I guess, or the organizational ability, to help build alternatives. (Though I did try once, and may try again in future…stay tuned……) But nonetheless, as frustrating as it is, as hard as I’ve had to work, as painful as Dangerous Fictions was to write, I’m still glad I wrote it. I doubt it will make much difference in the face of so much stupid garbage. But I do think a lot of the things I say in it are true, and it’s still important to say things that are true.

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1. A certain important legacy publication currently owes me $800. And yet if I egg their building, they’ll never hire me again. The bogusness is everywhere.

2. I’ve written 2+ long works of fiction at this point. Many novelists end up writing multiple novels before one gets picked up; sometimes it’s because these early novels were good for practice but not really readable by others. But publishers also tend to pass on riskier works in favor of a first novel that’s considered more commercially viable, and so these earlier and more risky novels often end up getting published later on in a writer’s career. May I say it yet again: bogus.

3. A literal rejection I received on one of my fiction manuscripts. If you liked it, put a ring on it!!! Bogus!!! I will egg you!!!!!!!!!