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On Publishing: Authors, It’s Time To Fight Back
TL;DR In today’s piece, I call for authors to reclaim their leverage and navigate this new landscape with creativity and resilience. Now let’s dive in, shall we?
There aren’t and there never were shortcuts in publishing.
It really is that simple. But what do I mean by that?
Once upon a time, the author was an author, and a publisher was a publisher. Those authors, mostly white, male and “well-respected” members of society, were “selected” so that other mostly white, male and affluent members of society could read the byproducts of their great minds.
Fast forward to today and it seems that entire proposition has been blown to bits. In a good way, one could say, democratized (tricky word). In a bad way, the barbarians (capitalists and big tech) tore down the gate, pillaged and razed, and left “content” in their wake. Not that diversity has gotten much better: a survey in 2015 showed that 79% of people in the publishing industry were white, and 78% identified as heterosexual. But other platforms have emerged: Wattpad, as an example, has allowed writers from around the world to share their work with millions of readers, at least within the confines of some subgenres of speculative fiction and romance. “The Kissing Booth” by Beth Reekles, which started on Wattpad, became a Netflix film.
