FULL BLEED: I WILL LOSE MYSELF TOMORROW

I probably should talk about publishing. Maybe I even will. But I came across a few things last week that I want to get out of my system so they don't fester any longer than they already have. I attempted a quick purge last night and it was both too broad and too something else. Not entirely sure. But it missed the mark, so let me try to remedy that.

One thing was stupid. Really stupid. It was an account pretending to be an employee, if not actually an agent at a literary agency. Never said which one, of course, because where's the fun in that? Anyways, this account said it was going to run synopses of unsolicited manuscripts it had received in the last year or so, presumably to dunk on them. I only saw the lead post in the thread, so didn't look. But let's be real. Accounts like this don't do lists of these things to praise them. They're there to make fun of these people who submitted their manuscripts for whatever reason, to the agency. Fame or the hope of it. Or prestige. Or getting paid or maybe just maybe finding a single solitary person in this shattered landscape who would get what the writer had to say. Just one reader to say "Hey, that was cool. Thanks for writing it."

That's it.

And this account went on to again, presumably but circumstantially accurate, ridicule these books. These books whose crimes I would imagine consist of nothing more than being not immediately marketable in what passes for the reading audience in the United States these days. Tee hee! Look at these idiots who thought their words might get somewhere! Let's all laugh! Funny! These dupes. These morons. These poltroons. And this is from a literary agent. An important figure in the publishing landscape now. You want to be published by a big house? You better listen up!

Full disclosure: I don't have a super-high opinion of literary agency and big-house publishing as both of those are being practiced today. And I get it. It's a wasteland out there. It's the cruelest month every god damned day. Nobody knows what will hit, and the fact is that the numbers to make a book a hit now are pretty minor compared to what they were twenty or ten years ago. The business is on life support. Which means that the businesses that serve publishing are also on life support. They're worried about their bottom line, which means that they're not really worried about that of their authors. You think that James Patterson's publisher is particularly concerned with the day to day of James Patterson (and barely credited ghostwriter?) Well, they'd prefer that he not kick off publicly I suppose. But so long as that name can go on the books and they can fly off shelves (in ever-decreasing numbers, but great in the face of market attrition? Keep those keyboards activated, true believers! Do you think that publishers are concerned that their midlist authors are being squeezed? Do you think they can really build anyone into a big name from no presence whatsoever? Hell, do you think that large publishers are marketing any more, asides from announcements in PW and Publisher's Marketplace? Tough to market in an atomized set of markets, on platforms where it's hundreds of influencers clawing their way to klout and influence.

Big publishers are worried about survival. They're too scared to do anything other than make the safest of moves. The lead and acquisition times are too long to take real risks. That's for small and self-publishers. My point is that publishing will not love you, no matter how much you love it. People might love you. Even people who constitute some of these larger organizations that writing is tied up in, even they might love you. But they won't be able to move the will of the folks whose only interest is making more money in a set of worlds where more and more middlemen want more bites of a smaller pie along the way. But if you want to see your books in airport bookstores or at grocery stores or on lists that guarantee self-satisfaction and the feeling of a job well done (oops, gotcha, there's no such thing, sorry) then you better get used to the only game in town.

And the only game in town wants safety. It wants broad appeal. It wants a franchise in waiting. It wants to be Scholastic in the early 2000s when a nothing series from a nobody author blew up and became everything. Sure, authors want that. I guess. And yes, while I'd like a larger readership, having Hazeland become something akin to Harry Potter sounds like a god damned nightmare. Yes, it'd be nice to never have to worry about money ever again no matter what stupid thing I did. Everything else sounds like a horror show. I mean, at least she tried to write some books beyond the easy franchise hit, but even those were of lukewarm reception at best. So sorry. It's the franchise. Sign out front shoulda told you.

You're a hot new something who might mature into a mid-list solid-citizen, but people joke about the death spiral for a reason. Or you're going to be gone. I've watched it happen. It'll happen again.

Now, there are publishers who care, who will actually take chances, who will actually band together and drum up support when an author hits hard times or a personal crisis. I see that happening, too. But their books never end up in airports. Because they're not publishing anodyne work that cozy and reassuring (or scary in acceptable lanes of scary) that's designed not to hit with people who read, but maybe hit with people who don't read. Which leads to a cycle of flatter and flatter books that look more and more like other series that have already hit big and will probably be here forever because nothing succeeds like success. These publishers will be outsiders, maybe forever. This isn't like the craft brew revolution of thirty years ago or more where small shops got bought and folded into IngBev to put a tattooed and indie face on just another tentacle of the beer kraken. I mean, it'd be nice for some of these publishers to get paid out for the work they've done, but once they're bought, they become something else. Yeah, you got it. They become that sled dog from The Thing. Looks like and barks like a puppy, but is awful and calculating and just wants to make everything like itself.

I wish that every indie publisher could pay "do nothing but write a book a year and still live well" salaries. They can't. Books simply don't sell that well. They mostly don't sell that well for the big publishers too. Bummer. And I ask now, why even pursue that. Why pursue the big houses? Because they still live on as grantors of prestige, of title, of worth. If one of the big four deems you worthy, well then, you by the Maker must be worthy. Even if they're paying peanuts and you remainder more hardcovers than you sell. You're still worthy.

I believed that for a long time. But then I came up in a family of writers who did well, maybe even crazy well, even by the standards of thirty years ago, much less today. So I internalized a lot of that. Still have it. Still have to fight it back. But folks who've never been inoculated against the pursuit of prestige? Oof. That's like not having ever been online any time in your life and being thrown into political discourse in 2025. Welcome to hell, have a nice day.

The big houses don't care because they don't have to. There will always, always, always be writers hungry to hand manuscripts over to them. They will crawl over broken glass to get the right imprint by their name. I know because I was that guy for a long time. And those publishers will sell whatever they think will stick. Sometimes it's even good. Mostly it just has the possibility of broad appeal. Which leads to agents posting trope lists on their websites saying "Hey, I want books that have four or more of these" and there's some authors who know no better and will try to chase that dragon, even though there's no indication that any of that stuff will be anything more than a dated meme by the time the book would actually come out, after having been run through the acquisition machine. But yeah, you get agents who think they're in the driver's seat and yeah wow no. If they knew what would hit, they'd ask just for it. If publishers knew what would hit, they'd only publish that. They don't and to some degree don't care so long as the book gets out without tarnishing the perception of anyone's judgement too badly. Yep, books are the result of organizational processes, but organizations are made of humans trying to protect their own reputation and influence. Bummer.

Unless you're a one-human shop and just worry about doing what you want to do. Oops. Or you're lucky enough to find someone who really gets your work and wants to get it out to as meaningfully big of an audience as they can. I thought I did. I'm not sure what I found instead. Took me awhile to process that whole thing and move on from it. So yeah, the only people I've found who've connected with my work, actually connected were, as it turns out, readers and not publishers (unless they were already self-publishers.) I don't have what it takes to be a Big Author. Okay, lesson learned. I lose. I lost. Keep striving.

Look, when I say stuff like "publishing will never love you" the shotgun is pointed at me. If you think it's pointed at you, that's a you thing and maybe you're thinking thoughts that you never allowed yourself before. That's okay, too. When I say stuff like "publishing as an industry is dying" then sure, it's about me attempting to get into the publishing industry with my work and what it was doing to my ability to look at my own work. Yeah, that's the only thing I'm saying. And when I say "the only way to say what you want to say is to self-publish" I'm not lying. If you want to write commercially successful work, well, there's only one way to do that, right? Go at it. I gave it my shot. It's not in me.

But is chasing someone else's dragon worth spending your time on this planet with? Is that a pursuit worth giving up the possibility of literally anything else? Like I said, this is my damage. And the answer for me was, after years of futility of pain as teacher, that no, it wasn't. That it's time to do what only I can do, and as it turns out is one of the only things I'm really any good at. You may feel different, but I sure as hell don't.

I had a lot more I wanted to fold into this, but ran myself out of time. I guess I'm not done on the subject, wrestling with my own personal Qlippoth, which I gave too much time and energy of all varieties to. You don't have to, but you do have to do what you have to do.

In other news, just shy of forty pages on The Missing Pieces in two weeks. Could've been better. Could've been zero. Gotta keep stacking those bricks.