Warning: rant follows.
I’ve been struggling with deep (sometimes enraging) frustration over the state of the publishing industry for several months now. AI is a piece of it, but it’s more a combination of the following issues:
• as the barriers to putting up material and getting it (in theory) in front of readers have dropped away…
• there’s been a massive influx of published material in the field (some of it now computer-generated, whee.)
• and the social media companies have gotten serious about monetizing our lives here, so their algorithms have gotten very good at choking out anything that looks like you’re trying to sell something
• traditional publishers, who always kind of operated on a wish and a prayer, are struggling (and this goes back to the collapse of the distribution channels decades ago, but it’s just getting worse and worse) with immense pressure to produce mega-hits that will hopefully bankroll the rest of the operation
• and small press and indie publishers either have to spend serious money or serious time into pushing their work, or be okay with just putting it out there and having it probably disappear (this is why I haven’t started publishing anyone else at my small press, like the spec fic climate change anthology I’ve been wanting to do for years, because I don’t have confidence that I know how to get their work publicized well enough on a shoestring budget)
• and you’d think you could build direct connections with readers, through newsletters and the like, but the proliferation of communications media (e-mail / social media platforms / texting / messenger / etc.) means that for a lot of us, we’re just inundated ALL THE TIME, and the things we actually want to hear about disappear into the noise and the spam filters and the choked algorithms —
— the number of times I’ve heard people say, AFTER one of my Kickstarters has ended, that they had missed it completely, despite my posting about it EVERY SINGLE DAY for a month…
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It all makes me crazy. It makes me feel like I have to be selling selling selling all the time, when I want to be creating. It makes me want to cry.
I was talking to Kevin about this last night, and he said, why not just create and not worry about selling? We are lucky enough to both have good day jobs and are not dependent on my writing income.
Which is fine from a financial POV for us, but it is INTENSELY frustrating to pour your soul, and often months, if not years, into a piece of writing, and then put it out into the world and have it drop into the vast sea, leaving not a ripple behind.
I don’t just write for myself, I write to be READ. I write to COMMUNICATE with readers, to be in conversation with them. I want to hear what they think of what I’m writing — good, bad, argue with me, please! And I feel like it’s gotten almost impossible lately to even let people know — people who want to know! — that I’ve written something new.
GAH. The following post is going to be me trying to sell you something, but I’m keeping this one clear of ads, just because I needed to rant. Maybe that means people will actually see it.
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I suppose anyone trying to make and sell anything deals with this to some extent, but it feels like it’s gotten SO MUCH WORSE for writers (and I’m guessing visual artists) in the last few years. Is it just me? Or is it really as bad as I feel like it is? Anyone have any suggestions or solutions?
(The only thing I have is that I try to spend at least some of my writing income on hiring people to do some of the publicity for me, so I don’t go completely mad. But full-time experienced publicists are very expensive, so it’s more like a few hours a week from a writer friend with a side-hustle…)
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Comic credit: https://poorlydrawnlines.com/comic/sometimes/