Authors Need to Abandon This Aspirational Nonsense
Learn the lessons from unionized creatives and workers, already.
There’s a very good chance the difference between you, your work, and the level of success you’ve achieved compared to someone else whose work is comparable to yours is not about how hard you work. It’s about money. It’s about resources.
Capital.
Luck isn’t quantifiable. You can’t measure luck, nor can you predict it or reproduce it. So let’s just get that out of the way.
As an artist or creative person, the desire to grow and get better should always be a part of you, because there’s never a limit on expressing yourself to others, nor are there levels to it. The idea that there are bootstraps to be pulled up to get you to where you need to be, though? That’s bullshit.
You should work hard. I mean, relatively speaking. You should try to put in an appropriate amount of effort into anything you do, but rarely is success about that effort. Again, it’s about money.
Does that sound too easy?
Because it’s about money.
Or let’s go further, it’s about resources. It’s about capital, be it monetary or social. This isn’t new, nor is it exclusive to any one industry. Still, it’s something I feel people in publishing need to hear and understand.
All the effort and skill in the world may not get you to where you want to be, while someone with less skill and a substantial effort could soar. You’re a writer and you’ve written a great book. To get it into the world, you need to either self/indie publish it, or you need to run through a confusing, frustrating gauntlet of querying agents who will pitch to editors and publishers, or submitting to small presses and whatever else to get published. If your neighbor down the street from you decides they want to be a writer, they sit down and write a book and their mother-in-law is an established literary agent, that’s a resource. That’s capital. The same with going to an expensive school, in an expensive program, that publishes a literary journal that jumps them into the front of the line with agents and publishers. Resource. Capital. Just like if you’re both indie publishing and your neighbor has $50,000 in their bank account to bankroll their indie book and you have $500, that’s a resource. That’s capital.
That $50,000 affords them the ability to make mistakes. They can try that risky-looking ad platform and tinker around with it. They can set higher bids and get more eyes on their work. You, with your $500, don’t have that luxury.
The system, as it stands right now, is built to reward people with capital. It’s built by people with capital for people with capital. There are always going to be statistical anomalies who get ahead regardless of their resource/capital deficit.
That does not mean we hold them up as a shining, aspirational example. It means we can be happy for them, but need to understand they are an exception, not exceptional.
As I write this, we’re deeper into the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. The UAW is gearing up to strike as well. Because the systems in place for those fields are broken. The people at the top are taken care of, but they’re still out there, on the streets, picketing because the folks at the bottom aren’t being taken care of.
Coming from a place of being an author, it’s incredibly frustrating to watch how little change any of us have been able to push. For me right now, I feel stuck between worlds. Indie authors make better money and have a better chance of finding financial stability. In that regard, indie authors occupy the bottom and squishy middle of publishing right now. Trad authors occupy the lofty highs and the crushing lows, with very little in between. I’ve spent years in indie author circles and find them to be oppressively business-minded. That being said, there are more indies making good money because of that. In trad circles, there’s much more talk of artistry and passion for the writing itself, although there’s also an undercurrent of acceptance that being a writer will almost never be an actual full-time job.
When I say publishing is broken, it is not an either/or situation. Both traditional and indie publishing are broken.
They’re broken in different ways, but the common denominator remains capital. As long as authors are continually pushed to be rugged individuals walking a lonely road navigating broken systems, things will continue to deteriorate. A trad author at the top blurbing someone else’s work shouldn’t be some political, kingmaking transaction. Just like a successful indie author sharing aspirational Facebook posts about their wild, runaway success with step-by-step directions shouldn’t be seen as community building.
We need more of the Neil Gaiman wearing a red shirt on a picket line energy among authors. Because each of us and our talents as individuals can only go so far. Working together, taking care of each other and raising each other up is how this gets better. That’s not bootstraps.
Remember, being able to properly diagnose a problem isn’t the same as taking action. We may not have a direct answer for capitalism’s trappings right now, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have options and can’t work together. Working together and making sure everyone is accounted for will always be where our power lies.
I’m Dave Walsh. I’m a writer and much like Orange Cassidy does not have a catchphrase, I do not charge you money to read my thoughts.
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