neponeko

I know probably three dozen authors.

$500k every two years seems great for a job that so many people romanticize, but the money goes fast. The writing is the easy part. Self promotion becomes a full-time job, and you do the writing in your off hours.

Also, you don’t get to take all that money home. Your agent gets 15%, but you’ll never get published at all without one. And there is an unspoken rule that you must put a certain fraction of your advance into marketing yourself, the proportion depending on genre and level. Most authors at the $500k level (“major deal”) have to retain publicists and live in New York to sustain it. The publisher might give you one hour per quarter with a publicist if you’re really lucky. If you want favors called in and arms twisted to get your book coverage, you have to pay for that on your own.

The best way to be a writer is honestly to get a 9-5 you don’t hate and that stays 9-5, and then self-publish and accept the likelihood of obscurity. The book world is toxic and the proportion of actual smart people isn’t zero but it’s no higher than you’d find in a decent high school.

If you go trad and you genre-maxx, you’ll get typecast to one niche and be treated like shit the moment the house no longer sees you as a reliable 7-figure line item. If you try to go literary, you’re forced to write within the narrow confines of a social class and format you probably won’t enjoy for the next forty years.

That’s the problem. Literary culture requires nucleation—for shared discussion and to finance projects. But the real talent differences are not steep enough to justify it. I I said my offline identity there is a chance you would recognize me and, while obscure, I actually am a top 1% writer. But there have to be thousands of obscure figures who are just as good and who are even more invisible.

Meanwhile, the talentless jokers who run the industry continue to promote mediocrity, and the world slowly loses readers.

You should meet literary agents.

An LLM is not as good as a skilled human who has already committed to giving your work a fair read. It is far superior to the quality of read you will ever get from a literary agent unless your parents are Manhattan old money.

What cronyism buys you is restarts. Having an enforcer can get you more than the 20 pages. You’ll be read to the end by every judge, and you may not get the award (these are competitive, and even most people with good enforcers aren’t great writers) but you’ll get a thought-out reason if it’s a rejection. You’ll know that everyone tried to find a yes because, while they were allowed to say no and eventually did, not taking you seriously would be bad for their careers and reputations. Only 0.01% of people have that kind of access, though, and you don’t write your way to getting those agents and publicists—you’re either born into it or you’re not. The rest of us poor loser fuckers get tossed at the first bump, which could be a minor copy error like a missing comma.

The truth about the literary world is that, while a lack of talent can impose a ceiling—no one gets book awards in fiction for being rich or famous if they can’t write at least as well as an above-average college grad—there is no level of talent that overcomes the lack of access, and it’s a kind of access you’re born into, to get a fair read from anyone who matters in the industry.

It’s all a scam and even most people who succeed spend more trying to fulfill the expectations of the published-novelist/public-intellectual role than they’ll ever get back from it in royalties or options or anything else. It’s an exhausting, dismal life in truth. The lifestyle costs of being someone who can get a $500,000 advance every two years run to… easily that rate.

If you actually want to write and have a decent life, you have three options:

1. Write genre and go back in time to the 1970s when getting a literary agent (as opposed to a schmagent who can’t get anyone to read anything) was possible.

2. Figure out the self-publishing game and get really, really good at it.

3. Take a job that has absolutely nothing to do with writing and accept that you’ll take three times as long to produce a book as a career author. Self-publish or work through university presses and don’t expect to be read by more than a few hundred people.

I don’t love Silicon Valley but if they had done something about publishing in the era of “disruption” I would have cheered it on.

Rich people are panicking because they’ve seen a capital-poor country win a war with cheap drones and want to lock down as many technologies as they can, lest the ruled realize they can actually do something about their rulers.

Right, and half the time they can’t tell what could sell because their thinking is so provincial and rigid.

Publishing houses will screen fiction for well-written and interesting fiction.

Why would they start now?

At every step, a human had the opportunity to say "no, this is bad". And the fact that they didn't is a vote of quality and reputation.

Romantic image. Doesn’t hold. Traditional publishing has pushed out lots of poorly edited slop for decades; it didn’t start in 2022.