My friend Tim makes beer. He’s actually really good at it. He has this beer that he brews with chamomile that, if I had it at a microbrewery or a good pub, I would consider to be one of my favorites of the year. The beers are 100% good enough that you could sell them.
And yet, every time I hear someone tell Tim that he should sell his brews, my skin crawls a little bit. There are a few reasons for this. One is that the skillset required to make beer and the skillset for operating a microbrewery form a Venn diagram resembling Meszut Özil’s eyes. Making a business of brewing means producing beer at scale, leasing space to do it in, hiring employees, dealing with finances, arranging distribution and marketing… in short, all kinds of things that don’t involve beer and the making thereof. This is why so many microbrewers fail, even if their beer is excellent. Making stuff and selling it are vastly different endeavors.
But most of the skin-crawly ick that these comments give me comes from something deeper. There’s a casual assumption in society that, if you’re good at something, it’s practically your obligation to monetize it, that creative work is only worth doing if it results in a salable product at the end. Under this paradigm, Tim is actively wasting his time with his homebrew hobby, no matter how much satisfaction the process of brewing gives him, or the joy that his family and friends receive from drinking his beer. Any moment of the day that is not devoted to maintaining basic bodily needs, according to society, is squandered by not squeezing every drop of revenue from it.
It is a genuine tragedy of our culture that doing something for simple enjoyment is considered frivolous if it doesn’t result in a profit. And that’s what creative work is supposed to be: enjoyable. If you make beer, or knit, or paint, or create incredibly detailed tiny wooden sculptures of Bloom County characters, isn’t the pleasure you get from creation inherently worth it?
Then I think about myself and my writing, and I get even more conflicted.
I started writing for a lot of reasons. A lot of it was that I wanted to prove to others that I had value, the asshole students and bullying teachers that I dealt with every day. I thought that being the youngest ever published fantasy writer would win me friends and approval. But once I’d become better at writing, I discovered that I enjoyed it. Everything in my life seemed like work, from school to socializing to just being at home. Because writing didn’t feel like work, I thought that, if I were able to make money doing that, I wouldn’t have to deal with all the difficult life stuff that I hated.
When I was a teenager, I wanted to write a genre-defining epic fantasy novel like Lord of the Rings. Now my goals are more modest. I just want to make a living as a writer so I don’t have to do that work stuff. I’m not there yet– the only money I’ve made is the $100 from the runner-up prize for the Resnick Award. Part of me, though, thinks that if I don’t end up making money as a writer, all of the work I’ve done, all the millions of words, the unpublished novels and short stories and games I’ve written, will have gone to waste.
Is that an attitude that I have genuinely? Or have I somehow bought into the cultural delusion that creative work only has value if it’s profitable? I genuinely don’t know. Whatever the reason, that desire is tangled up with a lot of other things: my need for approval, my fear of failure, my wish to make a living without having to do “real work”. I don’t have any easy answers, and this post won’t provide any answers.
At the very least, it’s hard submitting stories because the publishing industry, as much as it claims to be about literature, is an ultimately capitalist endeavor. The publishing houses, whether they’re Big Five or small press, are in the business of extracting as much money as they can from consumers for the least amount of overhead. This means that publishers and agents are very hesitant to take risks on any new writers or material. They would much rather have something by an established writer whose work is guaranteed to sell, or whatever trend is currently popular. That’s why you saw so many YA vampire romances twenty years ago and dystopian novels ten years ago. Now the trend is for smutty romantasies with titles like A Noun of Nouns and Nouns. It’s harder than ever for new writers to break through.
Where does the line exist between selling out and selling, though? Do I have to change my work to fit in with current market trends? Ultimately that’s a self-defeating practice: it can take two years for a book to go from sale to publication date, so all those Sarah J. Maas and Rebecca Yarros ripoffs that just got six-figure deals will be hopelessly off-trend when they come out. Is my best bet to just write books I like, write works that I think are valuable, and keep submitting until I find an agent or editor who likes my writing for what it is?
I don’t know. All I know is that this short-sighted trend chasing from the Big Five publishers contains the seeds of its own destruction. No one can predict what’s going to be a massive success in publishing (hell, just look at Fifty Shades of Grey), so playing it safe and just doing what sells is ultimately doomed. What sells now might not sell in the future. All those copies of Twilight and Fifty Shades are crowding the shelves at Goodwill. Maybe that doesn’t matter to their authors, who are massively wealthy, or the publishers who have already been paid for those copies. But doing what’s easy or safe, while tempting, is a losing strategy in the long run. The publishing industry, as well as society as a whole, has to learn that soon. Otherwise the future will crush it.
~ Ian (listening to Bexley by Bexley)