Ian Pierce

Tag: publishing

  • hanging on in quiet desperation is the english way

    Okay. We’re back. 

    Sorry for the interruption in service on the website. Something got all shittered up on the server end, and the webmaster (aka my dad) had to fix everything on his end, which ended up taking a whole lot longer than anyone expected. At least all the data was saved, even the pictures. My dad wasn’t sure that they could be saved, so now I don’t have to spend hours reuploading all my concert photos and dumb cartoon scribblings.  

    But even before the server outage, I’ll admit, there’s been a long gap between posts. The last update, the Acid Bath one, was in August, and it’s October now. Sorry for not writing anything, but to be honest, for about a month and a half, I just wasn’t writing. Anything: novels, short stories, obscene limericks, anything. There are times when you need to recharge your batteries, but to be honest, there was a lot more going on in my brain than just a recharge. 

    Basically, I had an agent reading a YA novel of mine, who ended up passing on it. That happens – I’ve had agents pass on novels before – but in the last three years, only two agents have even requested anything more from me. Before 2023 or so, I had agents request partial or full manuscripts every few months or so. Now, with so many missed opportunities, I guess the failure just piled up like snow on the roof, and finally the roof caved in. I had a crisis of confidence that, mixed with an issue with my brain medicine, led me into a depressive spiral. I was sleeping more than twelve hours a night, I wasn’t really eating all that much, and even dragging my feet to the Safeway by my apartment seemed like an impossible journey. 

    There’s no need to worry about me. I’m feeling better now. For the moment, I’m in California, not because I’m in some kind of crisis mode, but because of reasons I’ll tell you about in a little bit. Besides, I’ve survived way worse mental health episodes. In fact, after I graduated college, I was in such a bad place that, if it weren’t for the ACA allowing me to use my parents’ insurance to get brain medication until the age of 26, I probably wouldn’t even be here today. Thanks, Obama. 

    I’ve talked to a few people who are in the know, and they say that it’s not just my perception that agents are a lot more gun shy these days when it comes to new authors. Sales are down across the whole industry, and margins are thinner than ever. I get that. What pisses me off is that it seems agents and publishers want contradictory things. They want something that’s guaranteed to sell and make them a ton of money on commission, but they also want something distinct and unique like nothing else in the marketplace. You can’t square that circle. No one can predict what’s going to be successful in the market (remember Fifty Shades of Grey?), so you may as well publish good books and hope they find their place. 

    So recently, I’ve been changing tack. I’m sending novels to indie publishers. Since they operate outside the corporate structure of the Big Five, they might be willing to take more of a risk on unknown authors. Besides, “indie” doesn’t necessarily mean “small”. Scholastic is technically an indie publisher, as is Harlequin, and they both have massive market shares. 

    To my surprise, the first indie publisher to which I sent a novel manuscript offered me a contract, completely out of the blue! Unfortunately, after reading their offer, I noticed a bunch of red flags. Serious red flags, like soaked-in-the-blood-of-my-enemies red. This publisher was asking for me to “help financially with some of the production costs”, and after doing some research, I found that this meant that if I signed this deal, I would be on the hook for £3500 or so (it was a UK publisher), and once I’d paid up, the publisher wouldn’t really care about marketing the book or anything, since they would have gotten their money out of me already. So it was a scam. Somebody tried to scam me. 

    Whatever. I’m too smart to fall for that trap. Besides, I don’t have £3500 to spare. I can only dream of one day becoming a multi-thousandaire, but if I had a spare three thousand quid, I’d just blow it on open world video games and chaste, slow-burn yuri manga. 

    I don’t know why I’m so desperate to get validation from complete strangers about my writing, or why I value their opinion over my friends’ and family’s, or my own. I think it has to do with the emotional abuse I got when I was a kid. I wanted so badly to feel I had value, value that only existed in the eyes of others. Because that’s the lesson autistic kids get taught: hide your true self, pretend to be just like everyone else, or EVERYONE WILL LAUGH AT YOU AND HATE YOU. I liked writing. I thought I was good at it. Maybe if I published a book, I thought, at a younger age than Christopher Paolini did with Eragon, people would treat me as though I had value, that I wasn’t just some weirdo playing imagination games in the bushes. 

    But what does “value” mean? When you’re trying to publish, you’re turning yourself into a commodity. You become something that can be bought and sold, that can be assigned a monetary value and marketed like a new flavor of soda. Because in many ways, my stories are me, or at least a part of me. How are you supposed to reconcile that? When you see your worth as a person as a commodity to be monetized in an impersonal capitalistic system, you’re going to end up being crushed, again and again and again. 

    This is why I go to therapy. 

    This is getting to be a bit of a jumbled-up ramble, eh? Sorry about that. I’ll just close by letting you know a couple of things: 

    Thing the First: I just got back to Santa Cruz from a camping trip through the Nevada desert with my dad! We had a great time. I spent a lot of the trip rereading The Book of the New Sun and burning through Margaret Atwood’s new memoir. I’ll have a dump of photos in a few days, once I’ve got a chance to do so. Because like I’ve said, this blog is sort of like an Instagram, at times. 

    Thing the Second: I’m going to see Acid Bath again at the Quarry Amphitheater in a few days! It’s my third time seeing Acid Bath, and my second time this year (as you remember from my most recent post, waaaay back in August). I knew I’d be swinging by California after the road trip, so I got tickets to the show, mostly because one of the opening bands is the Melvins, and the Melvins are some of my biggest musical heroes. Photos will be coming! 

    Thing the Third: Literally as I was writing this blog post, I got a response from an agent requesting a full manuscript. It came out of the blue, since I expected to go months or years without getting another submission request, as elucidated in the previous paragraphs of this blog. I don’t want to get my hopes up, of course, but it’s a chance. A small chance, but “small” doesn’t mean “zero”. 

    Anyway. That’s all the fit that’s pit to shoast, at least for the time being. I’ll check in soon, I promise. Keep your appendages crossed for me. 

    ~ Ian (listening to Death Knocks by Hoaxed)

  • untitled update, june 11, 2026

    I had a visit to the tooth doctor again last week. It ended up with some bad news: it seems like three of the teeth on the upper left side of the mouth are so fucked up that removal is the only option, as soon as possible, along with implants, bone grafts, the whole nine yards. If you’ll recall from last year, I had some additional tooth-related problems that led to a root canal, which was the most painful experience I’ve ever had, since for some reason the anesthetic they gave me didn’t fully work, so I could feel most of the pinching and pulling at my nerve. I hope they give me the gas this time, since three teeth are coming out. Let this be a cautionary tale to all ye Gen Z wastrels who will not go to the dentist! I didn’t go for years, and at this rate, I’m going to eventually look like one of those cartoon characters that gets hit over the head with a piano and stumbles out of the wreckage with piano keys protruding from his toothless gums.

    And yet, even if things are going poorly mouth-wise for me, I can’t help having a bit of confidence, a bit of spring in my step. The news that one of my stories will be published has reinvigorated me, where in the past few months I have definitely been de-invigorated. It’s given me a boost to my spirits that makes me feel like the big weird fish guy in that lake in Resident Evil 8.

    This piscine ebullience also stems from the fact that, after two years of radio silence on the part of agents, a literary agent has requested to see a full manuscript of one of my books! It’s no guarantee that I’m going to get an agent – in fact, considering my luck, I’d still say the odds are stacked against me. But it’s a new start.

    A lot of the time, the process of trying to get published has felt like bashing my forehead repeatedly against a brick wall until the wall crumbles. Usually, that strategy is a failing one. It does much more injury to yourself than to the wall. Over the last few months, however, ever since being nominated for the Resnick Award and going to Dragon Con, I’ve started to see cracks form in that wall. Hopefully it comes down before my skull is as broken and shattered as my teeth!

    ~ Ian

  • various thoughts and thinkings, february 2026

    I continue to not be writing very much, at least writing that’s intended to be published in any real form. I don’t know if I’m supposed to feel guilty or not because of that. I assume I shouldn’t, because I don’t feel guilty, but it still feels weird. When I’m in the swing of things, I usually write about a thousand words a day. This doesn’t feel that impressive to me. When I was a teacher in Madrid, I mentioned to one of my fellow auxiliares, a grad student from Swansea in Wales, that every day after school got out, I went to a cafe and wrote 2000 words. He was astonished. “How long does that take you?” he sputtered.

    I was confused. “Like, maybe an hour and a half?”

    “It would take me five hours to write that much! How are you so fast?”

    I shrugged. “Autism.”

    It sounds flippant, but it’s not. My brain’s ability to hyperfixate means that, when I get into the groove of something (especially something I’m interested in), I can block out the entire world and hone in on just that one thing for effectively indefinitely. There are drawbacks, but honestly, considering how they are in so many other ways, it’s surprising to me that neurotypicals can be productive writers. I mean, how can you be productive on a book if you’re spending all your time dating or having a family or a career or such other unnecessary fripperies?

    Still, aside from minor touch-ups on a few short fiction pieces, I haven’t written anything meant for publication in weeks. I was talking with a friend before our biweekly D&D session, however, and she said something that was more profound than I think she realized. “It’s okay to have a fallow period every once in a while,” she told me. I immediately thought, Fallow. What a great metaphor. As I’m sure all history nerds know, in a crop rotation system, a fallow field is hardly unproductive. Rather, it’s a critical part of replenishing the soil with nitrogen so that the field can be even more fertile the next season. Especially if you graze livestock in that fallow field so you can get still have some productivity out of that field that year. I just have to let the goats of daily experience poop in my brain so that my mind-field is re-nitrogenated, thus allowing much more fertile story-crops.

    Does this metaphor make sense? I think this metaphor makes sense.

    In any case, just because my story-field is currently fallow doesn’t mean that I haven’t been creative. Rather, I’ve rotated into writing lore and backstory for my D&D campaign. This is pleasant because there’s not much pressure to perform. My players are some of my best friends. I know that, no matter what, they will be a receptive audience, even if agents and short story markets might not be. Besides, writers love coming up with lore. I can think of several fantasy series that I’m sure primarily exist so the author can tell you all the neat lore they’ve come up with. It certainly can’t be because of the characters or the plots, because they’re not good or interesting. Ideally, I want the lore in my stories to be a side element. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t enjoy making it, and this gives me an excuse.

    Also! I had a conversation with an editor I met at DragonCon this last summer. He’d given me his business card, so I figured that it would be cool to reach out, and he was very kind in letting me ask him questions about the publishing industry and the way it be. Specifically, I wanted to know why, for the last few years, I’ve found it very difficult to get agents to request full manuscripts, when in the past I actually had agents reaching out for more writing rather frequently. He said that it’s not just me. Because of how everything generally is, sales are down across the publishing industry, and as such, agents are far less willing to take chances on unknown writers, especially if the writing defies easy categorization. The most important thing, he said, is to do the same thing that I’m already doing: keep writing, keep revising, keep querying. The number one thing that separates successful from unsuccessful writers is the same as it ever was: sheer, bloody-minded, pig-headed determination.

    At the very least, I can at least rest easy that, as always, there’s nothing wrong with me. It’s capitalism’s fault!

  • the act of creation under late stage capitalism

    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)