untended goodreads author page going to seed

[x_los]

Already bitched about this a bit on Twitter, but.

It's nice when people say stuff like 'oh if [fic writer] wrote a book, I'd buy it', because they mean it as a compliment, but I'm already in like idk 12? 20? collections of fiction and nonfiction, not counting all the journalism and adjacent shit. Why do they assume I'm not published? It's a weird thing to assume given that I'm pumping out a fuckton of fairly competent fiction, and makes it feel like I didn't do all that work. (Is the implication that I shouldn't be here, doing this, but should be off doing Real Shit?)

'Published' is not a hard thing to be. The pay is shit, so it's honestly not that selective. And I know people don't buy those books my pieces got into, because I can see my royalty statements. I've had a couple online pieces go viral or whatever, but again, I got paid maybe $40 for each wonderful experience of an entire Reddit board being set up to a) assume I was a guy, because I was writing about 'masc' subjects, and also b) hate me, at length. The therapy session to bitch about this cost more than I got paid. You want me to what, dox myself and possibly compromise my actual pay-check so that five fandom people can prevaricate about buying a book and one of them can do it? Yeah, no.

I've been long-listed for a couple awards, and gotten a couple. I've had, here and there, a couple of reasonably high-profile gigs I was excited about. Even that leads to: absolutely nothing. There is no steady work in this field now, there is just Hustle to no end. The whole business of arranging work and self-promotion now rest entirely on the writer, however ill-qualified they are for either task. You must live an active social media life, pretending to be more twee, dumber and less critical than a decent writer ever is and, further, possessed of good but safely Milquetoast opinions. The job now involves offering yourself (or some version of yourself) up to the buffets of opinion and the souring thereof, which will have something to do with you but will mostly be guided by how tired people are of seeing your name. My friends who are doing the absolute best, here, get very insufficiently rewarded for their writing, let alone this secondary career of playing themselves on television. They are making significant trade-offs to do this rather than an easier gig for more money. I respect them for following their vocation, but I cannot stand to be thus insulted, and to be expected to be grateful for such 'opportunities' besides. So when someone says 'oh I'd buy her book', I think---they don't know enough about the field to know that this is just saying 'oh I wish you'd donate another cake to the church supper' after having finished off the first.

It's a big slog, and I don't know that I care anymore. You have to be an egoist to soldier on in any of these fields under present conditions, and this is not among my several personality issues, The other thing you can be is committed to a given project: so committed to Your Novel that you're willing to be spat on, not as a stage in the proceedings, the way to become Chief of the Beggar Clan, or in pursuit of that kind of advancement (because there is no advancement), but because you believe so much in your book that you're willing to do this to see it get out there. And I don't believe in any of my projects that much, right now. Like, maybe pre grad-school trauma, but now? Eh.

The other-other thing you can be is a craft artisan self-publishing or whatever just because bustin' makes you feel good. Which is fine, and which I get because I droop when I don't write anything. But at that point, why bother do that rather than fic? The slender shred of greater cultural valuation? It's the same sort of hobby activity. 

It's not that I think everything should be weighed by capitalist metrics. Logically, I don't think that at all. But why participate in heavily capitalism-shaped activities without commensurate capitalist rewards? I can't stand to work on those terms and fail, again and again, or 'succeed' only to find I've still been shafted. If it were detached from industry and economic valuation, I could see it. (Walpole wasn't inventing the gothic novel for the money, he had stupid amounts of money: there's certainly a whole era of such gentleman-scholars.) But the more fandom moves to e-girlism rather than gift economy, the more difficult I find it to justify participation. 

On Facebook, I watch an acquaintance who has 50 excellent, ground-breaking BBC radio plays to my one, mediocre first attempt grow bitter, begging for work: gay and old and useless now, apparently. I asked a friend to think of him, if he needed script writers. But if even he is fucked, well, what am I? And the worst part of this is, I still envy him his chances, born of an era I simply didn't live in (and, to be honest, of his gender and nationality). How incredibly stupid I am---I look at this man, in his declining financial position, and I think, god I'd shank someone for the opportunity to write what he's written, to be as good as he is. I'll never git gud thus, I'll always have had one chance where I was working out how to write a radio play and you can tell. But what has growing highly skilled even done for him, in the end? I'm going to die like that, old, gay, useless, and have far less to be proud of than he does.

Why have I spent my whole life trying to be someone who could bake excellent bread, only to grow up to find there's no more bakeries? Why can't I pivot, now that I know this? Katy said once, "that piece must be important, for you to choose to spend so much time on it". Is it? Are any of them? I think I just grab low-hanging fruit, with little idea of where I'm going with this. But I am insane for still boiling with envy when someone gets a contract I don't. Yet I wasn't even happy when I discovered that perhaps the most successful person from my undergraduate Iowa Writer's Workshop year (far prettier than me, much better at sewing, arguably better at cooking: the type of person whose very friendship is, accidentally, an insult) also sustains herself with a shitty nonsense job like mine. I felt for her. She's so much better than that. She deserves a better sector. 
    
I've said before that I want to be competent and productive, to make things like a baker makes bread, and to know my work is sound and get paid a fair price and move on. I'm not precious about this. I cannot sustain woo-woo in my mind. It's not graft I object to, or a modest life. It's impossibilities, and the way people say shit they don't mean just to talk, and the outdated or absent understanding such chat relies on. So many absent-minded compliments read like demands for more, more, more, more work, and people mostly don't even mean them, but fucking hell the noise.

Comments

[lunarriviera]

i feel like this entire post was yanked directly out of my id, as i am also a trained pastry chef in a pastryless world—first as a film critic, then a magazine editor, then a sometime academic. with my first book of poetry coming out next year, when poets my chronological age are on their sixth or seventh collection and have tenure,—okay i can't finish that sentence.

my point is your mind is so, so fine; and you are right, and i fully expect all the "we can't wait until your book comes out!" people to result in like a dozen pre-sales, and then the publisher will drop me like an awkward brick. i'll die in my car an adjunct, probably, driving from campus to campus, migrant intellectual. i might jack it in tho. better to die at home where at least the cat can eat me.

[pallas_rose]

Ouch, ouch, ouch: she, and you too, do deserve a better sector. I'm sorry things seem always to be getting worse rather than better for artists.

I was part of a creative writing program in secondary school, and evaluated myself against my peers at 17 as not good enough for a career and bailed for, bizarrely, the military and medicine. But I think of all of us (the 50, 60 writing students that I knew) one of us managed to make a writing career, and she ended up in academia for a while, coordinating an undergraduate writing center, and now consults. And she was the best of us. So talented, so smart; dedicated, a hard worker. Won every award in every contest she entered. I'm bizarrely grateful for the mediocrity that led me to give up so early.

At the risk of being more noise clamoring at you, I am deeply grateful for your fanwork. I'm nearly 40. I've been in medical training since 2009 and read fanwork voraciously, around the clock, as the only expression of self, and (what felt like) selfish creative activity, that I can consistently manage. No hobbies; few other sources of joy. Countless nights in a call room too alert and too often interrupted to sleep, curled up around my phone, reading and rereading; often too stressed to read anything new, or from a new author. I always meant to write again, but never could manage it (till now?) though I suppose I was doggedly doing the prerequisite step of reading, widely and passionately. It's been your work (and others like you) that's sustained me, inasmuch as I have been sustained. I've only been able to look at my (maybe severe? who knows) depression and burnout from the corner of one eye. Reading authors of your calibre felt like an umbilical cord connecting me to another, neglected and abject--at times almost imaginary--self. Truly, it's been a gift of unbelievable value, to a faceless anonymous parasite an ocean away.

And I will not attempt to make excuses for how parasitic I've been, though I am sorry for it. I'm trying to improve but have historically been terrible at commenting and even bad at leaving kudos; how appalling to freeload on a gift economy! But all the same, I am so grateful for you and the effort you make, the time you spend to make such splendid gifts for us all. That and $5 will buy you a shitty sandwich for lunch, without the chips and drink combo, I know. And even this comment itself is more masterbatory than useful! But perhaps it might tickle you for a moment that I consistently have to look up words and references when reading your fanwork, and the last time I had to was reading Eliot and Nietszche in school (not to imply any other kind of similarity). I'm thrilled, and exercised, by learning from you that way. I admire you as a mastercraftsman and a role model. If you never posted anything else on AO3 again, I would keep rereading your work forever. I have probably reread, for example, Gentle Antidote multiple times a year since it was published, and never read the source material.

tl;dr: I am sorry publishing sucks so much, and think you deserve more and tangible rewards, but offer intangible but deep thanks anyway.

[vorvayne]

There's another thing that's especially stupid about the whole publishing situation, which is that somehow I'd forgotten you're funnier and cleverer in long-form.

I do just look around outside and think, what a nonsense society full of people not able to do things they're good at and enjoy because they can't get decent pay for them, so they're all out there doing things they're not as good at and hate, which means all the good things they'd be able to do don't exist. Fortunately there's plenty else to worry about and I'm easily distracted, but I do see it.

I wonder what's going to happen to fandom now that twitter's days or numbered; oddly, I'm optimistic, as at least a few folks seem to be meandering on to dreamwidth. If nothing else, you can write longer things here. It seems so far to be a good antidote for the attention-span-leeching effects of places like twitter and tiktok, for me. People seem terribly worried that fandom will fracture, but I'm not sure that's a bad thing: if it fractures, then people will collect in little groups that do their own thing their own way, and honestly if I've learned anything from my whole fandom experience it's that those sorts of little groups are the best way to have a good time.

[sallymn]

It is hard... the amount nearly all published authors, good published authors, make seems to be pitifully small (there was an article on it recently in an Australian online journal recently). I never had the courage to try and write for a living, so went into an office - now I'm retired I'm doing more writing but will it ever see publication -? Maybe not.

It is especially hard for people like you who are published, who are good writers and publish good work, and still can't get ahead. It's a rough world...

[sunshine304]

It’s such a frustrating sector! I think the public usually thinks that published authors make a ton of money because, you know, they’re published, so they must have made it, right? When in reality, there’s a few really big names who indeed manage to live off of their successful published works, and they manage this because they got lucky, or had the right connections, or hit that very sweet spot of right time/right place, or have been in the business for so many years and came to fame when this sector was still working in a very different way…

One of my RL friends has self-published a few books, because she just loves to write and get her stuff out there, but she’s also been very frustrated about it because it’s all about self-promoting on social media, hitting just the right tone to be interesting, as you’ve said. Publishers don’t want to do this anymore, they want an author with a pre-build social media following or something, who is super engaging and fun and quirky, but not too quirky – or mysterious and dark, but not too dark, or… etc. etc.

And there are so so many writers, literature and plays and scripts and whatnot, who are really great but are getting by on scraps somehow, because they must, because even though being a published author is lauded as such a great thing, it’s not paid accordingly except for some really select cases.

I’ve bought books of fic authors when they promoted them and I thought they sounded good. But I wouldn’t just buy them because, you know? If I like their fic and then they publish something that is completely different, a genre I really don’t like, or a factual text about a subject that doesn’t interest me, it would feel like a pity buy, as you’ve said, and that doesn’t really help all that much, in the grand scheme of things. Because I won’t post about it, leave a good review on Good Reads or whatever and so the author won’t benefit besides the pitiful money they get from that one buy.

 
 

[shrimpchipsss]

Ahh that it’s not enough to be good at writing, there’s the whole game of personality and industry politics to play and if even doing all that, you can't pay the bills, what is the point?

I think I get into a [why do I participate in fandom] existentialism bout once or twice a year and I do tend to come back to the necessity to my soul of a un-monetized thing I do for fun, and the total marvel of getting to read the work of writers like you.

Which, as someone outside the industry and who is not a writer, I've always interpreted, "I'd buy your book if you had a novel out," as, "I pay money for novels, I can't believe I get to read this for free." Which still makes your whole point about people not knowing how things are in publishing. And is also interesting given fandom as gift economy?

Which is not a way I've heard fandom described before but I'll be thinking about that because that’s exactly how it works in all my hopes and favorite moments of it.