I really should have known, picking the word of the year. I mean, I’ve striven for the Real all my life, but consciously setting the intention seems to have also set a great many things in motion. Not that it’s a bad thing! It’s just…a lot, and I should have bloody well expected it.
In fact, it’s rather akin to a rollercoaster. Out in the physical world I find such things quite soothing, nearly sleep-inducing, because once one is strapped in and the machine begins to chug, that’s it. You’re in the hands of the gods, nothing else to do about it, might as well relax. If a rivet pops, a catastrophic failure occurs, or lightning strikes, well, there it is. According to my (admittedly not very reasonable) nervous system, a rollercoaster is not a perceived helplessness (which is utterly damaging) but a chosen risk, and that makes all the difference.
Yes, I’m odd. We all knew that.
Anyway. The wonderful Ann Aguirre made a few observations on Bsky yesterday about writing to trends and why that’s not optimal. Right now there’s a lot–and I do mean a lot–of pressure to write proposals and synopses for projects that seem akin to those currently hot on BookTok (of all things), which is super short-sighted on the part of publishers, acquiring editors, and agents. By the time a book gets through the production process to take advantage of a flash in the influencer pan there’s no light remaining, only burnt, bitter residue sludge. It’s in influencers’ short-term economic interest to always have a hot new exclusionary thang to rave about, just as it’s in their economic short-term interest to manufacture drama for engagement ad dollars. And let’s face it, short-term is the only term the algorithm knows. Every platform depending on rage engagement, data scraping, and increasingly bizarre drama inevitably cannibalizes itself, leaving behind a trail of broken people and infrastructure. The initial grifters disappear early because they have their cut, and start looking for the new grift to inflict on the rest of us.
It’s much better and more long-term viable for everyone in publishing if the authors are supported in doing what they know readers want, because we’re the ones who hear from said reading folk. (Our names are, after all, on the covers.) Quality work produced with real, painstaking effort brings those readers and teaches them an author can be trusted. Unfortunately, with trad publishing consolidating into less than a handful of robber-baron megahouses and venture capital scenting the moribund beasts in the drying water hole (Amazon’s sucked all the H2O out to cool their ecology-wrecking servers, natch), we’re seeing increasingly short-term cycles of “this thing’s hot right now, GET ME FIFTY JUST LIKE IT, what do you mean it takes time to write a real book, fine, let’s just get the plagiarism machine to do it!” leading to “wait, why aren’t people reading our LLM-spewed ersatz with crappy covers, churned out in droves to game the KU algorithm? Aren’t the bots reading our fake books anymore? DO MORE OF THEM!”
It’s enough to make an actual flesh-and-blood author despair. Or drive them full-feral indie, which is a route I see more and more going for. It’s great that the tools exist and that more writers than ever are using them, but they still require hardware, software, experience, and time/energy a lot of marginalized folks just plain don’t have. I mourn for the stories we’re losing because trad publishing let Amazon foul the waterhole past bearing before sucking it dry. To be excruciatingly honest, a lot of trad publishing’s upper management saw only that Amazon was harming those pesky authors who demanded to be paid for hard work, but so long as those nuisances were the ones being hurt, that was just fine. After all, it made said pesky authors easier to exploit, and by the time publishers realized the ‘Zon was coming for them too, the monopsony and monopoly were both well in place and had years of unregulated shenanigans to provide it with plenty of nutrition for metastasis.
The fallout is ongoing, brutally devastating, and while the publishing ecosystem will eventually recover after the inevitable extinction event–whenever that happens–it’s going to penalize the already-vulnerable most. As per fucking usual.
Anyway, part of my re-commitment to protecting the work has been pushing back on the ridiculous “advice” and strenuous pressure to write “to trend”. I will not be performing to whatever some algorithm thinks will get the most advertising engagement for a third-party data-scraping platform, thank you. My goal is to write real, actual books. Besides, it’s fucking exhausting to run oneself ragged in that fashion. I mean, I’ll always try new things–I spent a year doing Reading with Lili before being driven out by harassment and bots, after all–but there’s a distinct difference between “giving novelty a spin” and “servicing the egos of those who wouldn’t know a good book if it bit them because they’re so busy looking for the next quick buck/score”. The first provides spice to life, the second is just a waste of precious, finite time and effort.
The coffee is finished, Boxnoggin is stirring from his first morning nap, and dawn is making itself apparent through the firs. I’ve another day of real work ahead of me, writing a duel interrupted by an entire army plus a Sekrit Projekt attempting to get off the ground. Maybe I’ll lose out by betting on the Real.
But in all honesty, there’s no other bet I can make. I’m buckled in, the safety bar is down, and we’re on the rails. Time to relax, quit second-guessing…and focus on protecting the work.