The WordPress/JetPack writing prompt for today is:
How Do You Deal With Uncertainty?

I’ve been stuck on two words lately: Plan Accordingly. So many elements of life are becoming unpredictable. You have to prepare, assume uncertainty and plan accordingly. I’ve been contemplating doing a very long essay or series of essays on all the ways ‘the system’ and its many subsystems (the economic system, the social system, the educational system, etc) are breaking if not broken.

But the part that is coming into focus for me right now is that publishing is broken and there’s not enough time to fix it before my novel comes out.

As with most mornings, I woke up to find a familiar refrain from a traditionally published author: Publishing is broken, and I’m going to fix it by going indie and creating my own publishing house. Come join me!

It’s true, the traditional system of publishing is under attack. As with almost all of the systems that used to work, this one has been gutted in the name of profitability. The consolidation of publishing houses into the five (or now four) major publishers has allowed new owners to reduce or completely remove the pieces that used to make publishing a sustainable career for the people working in it – not just the authors and agents, but the editors, the marketers, the myriad people who you never knew were all a part of making a book a success.

Pity the editor working for a Big Five publisher in New York City, the epicenter of English language publishing. The pay scale for these jobs has been depressed to the point where if you aren’t rich enough to live off of family wealth, you can’t afford to work in publishing. It’s become at best an achievement badge for dilettantes.

The problem is that the solutions people immediately jump to won’t work. Starting yet another small publishing house won’t help authors. It will take the well-intending founder out of their comfort zone and away from their passion, as they pursue some fix. It will pit them against their own author friends as they suddenly have to make decisions about budgeting that will mean not being able to do enough for people they’ve promised to rescue.

No, I haven’t tried this path myself, but I do know a number of friends who saw this as the solution and are now finding their professional lives in quagmires as the realties and vagaries of publishing sink in.

Publishing is broken and when it comes to selling your books (the hardest part of being an author), there is no easy solution.

I don’t have an answer, I’m not here advocating one, but I have glimpses of how I think we need to proceed. We don’t need more publishers, we need more cheerleaders. To some extent, that has been BookTok the last few years. Influencers on TikTok would champion some book in their favourite genre and for a while an author would have a bump of success. But that’s not sustainable, and it doesn’t last long.

We need a collective promotion, a way for authors to push not only themselves (which we’re both always told to do and criticized for doing) and promoting other authors. Newsletter swaps are one way this does already happen, but it’s not widely done, and it only works if every participant has an equal number of subscribers to their newsletter (I only have about twenty, for example).

I know there was a writing collective that called themselves something like the wolf pack, and they were dedicated to promoting each other’s work on Twitter. It was an idea that seemed to have some potential, but the whole process disappeared from my social media when Twitter imploded into X. And I haven’t seen it replicated.

Another area of uncertainty in publishing is the rise of AI. In spite of all those money-making scams you see telling you that you can become a best-selling author by using AI, you can’t. First, AI isn’t good enough. Every story it writes sounds just like every other story it writes. Secondly, there are many issues around AI and ethics. AI was trained on stolen material, and using it is therefore not only immoral, but cannot be copyrighted. Readers, authors, publishers and theoretically amazon itself frown on AI-written work. AI users are being outed, blocked, and excluded from the creative communities, be it art, music, or writing*.

Then of course there’s piracy. This adds a whole bunch of stress and uncertainty to authors’ lives. if Amazon finds one of your books on a pirated site, they can delist you for your apparent breach of their rules. But there is a lot of anecdotal evidence that most book piracy is somehow coming from inside Amazon. Authors are reporting early edits and incomplete drafts uploaded to Amazon as placeholders for final copy showing up on pirating sites. Only the author and someone working for Amazon could have accessed those.

So, with all this uncertainty, how does a fledgeling author go forward?

Boldly. Screw ‘em.

I have stories to tell, not for the sake of some gimmicky get-rich-quick scheme (most first time authors sell less than a hundred copies of their book. That works out to about three hundred dollars income for a year or more of effort. Does that sound rich?) but because these are stories that live inside me. They represent some aspect of my psyche as I’ve moved through life and grappled with issues – sometimes of life or death, sometimes of the ‘can we get a kitten?’ variety.

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Yes, I use oxford commas. No, that is not a sign of AI, it’s a sign of an educated person.