No Hard Feelings
Sunday, March 30, 2025 at 10:00am
A certain event, which I’m going to intentionally obscure, recently prompted a friend to ask me something along the lines of, “why has income from writing dropped so dramatically within the last thirty years?” I explained that, to hear it told by publishers-turned-writers, like André Schiffrin (The Business of Books), this has largely to do with the fact that publishers used to make an explicit internal policy of using their income from well-selling books to fund authors who were new, or books that the publisher considered to be high quality but knew would not sell well.
Starting in the 1980’s and 1990’s, that all changed. A business ethos started to dominate publishing, in which profitability for the company was maximized by doubling down on the titles that would sell well. New authors and high-quality works were kicked the curb. The purpose of the publishing company became about maximizing sales.
Amazon realized the endgame of this ideology: If computers and the internet can allow us to try out absolutely every piece of writing on the market and see how it performs monetarily, with zero financial risk to the company, then why have any gatekeepers at all?
I had known all of this information already, but this was the first time I’d explained it to someone with no background on the topic. Having done so, I was forced to confront a semi-awkward feeling: I found that I had very little remorse for the disenfranchisement of that bygone publishing world.
When I look at my own body of work, I now have six novels, one novella, and three story collections available in print and in ebook form. I’m proud of every single one of them. Some I like better than others, but there are none for which my qualms are so great that I want to remove them from public sight. If the changes to publishing that I described above had never happened, if I lived in a world with the publishing system of my childhood, then I’m certain that none of these books would be publicly available in any form.
Gatekeepers are great way to entrench standards, an if the standards are good, that’s a wonderful thing. The trouble is that toxic, low-quality standards seem at least as likely to get entrenched as healthy ones. For at least the duration of twentieth-century, the literary gatekeeping system for genres of the fantastic seems, to my mind, to have been utterly dysfunctional. On the one hand, you had the so-called “literary” folks, whose definition of literature excluded any elements of the fantastic, leading to at least three generations of intellectually and imaginatively decrepit “literary realism” being considered “high status.” Meanwhile, those publishers that were willing to publish science fiction and fantasy had equally dysfunctional conceptions of other aspects of narrative quality: among them complexity, characterization, prose flow, and even basic narrative coherence, aspects which the literary group admittedly excelled at.
My position has been, and likely always will be, that I would rather not have one of my works in the world, than to have it in the world in a garbled, muddled, or eviscerated form. I have a very low tolerance for tampering that degrades the realization of my vision. I cannot imagine how I would publish with any of the reigning publishers before the big shift of the nineties and aughts.
Do writers today make significantly less money off of their work than three decades ago? Almost certainly. Would I trade out this system for the prior one that paid authors better? No. It wouldn’t have benefited me one bit. It might be that I am now paid a pittance for my writing, but the point of my art has never been to make money. It’s been to exist, and to be available to all, in the form that I choose it to be.
