It’s the season for momentous news, I feel. In my last letter I wrote to you about the rebranding of my company. Today I want to tell you about another major shift.
The major shift is that I am officially a Lionstower (Mount Books imprint) author.
The title Artist in Recovery is currently in production. I don’t have any more information for you yet, but you’ll hear about it in future letters.
Ok, so this is not quite so momentous for you as it is for me. Publishing is an anybody’s game in 2022. You can publish a book in a matter of hours and have it listed in the world’s largest online bookstores. It doesn’t mean it will sell; that’s an entirely different thing. It doesn’t mean you will make money from it. It means it is published.
Yet having a publishing house produce your work, a publishing house that you do not own, is still an important milestone. For me, it is a childhood dream come true.
I debated this idea of publishing with a friend a little while ago. He sent me an article titled The Future of Substack. I responded to him that it was cute but not realistic.
It was not realistic because the issue that the article doesn’t recognise is authority, which is something that traditional publishing models have in spades. I pointed out to him that if I spend two years trading by-lines up the chain to the New York Times, this will instantly 1000x my readership and authority. Knowing this, why would I spend ten years grinding on Substack?
Grinding in publishing is a real thing. Digital self-publishing is an adult, it’s already 20+ years old. What we’ve learned in that time is that it doesn’t have the authority of a traditional model. It can’t. It is what used to be called vanity publishing.
Publishing yourself is not nearly so impressive as someone else deciding that your work is valuable. That ‘value’ means that they are spending their time, their money, and their effort publishing you. You are not the person engaging editors, lawyers if necessary, illustrators, photographers (or finding, gaining rights, etc), designers, marketers and social media ads, and on and on.
My friend suggested to me that self-publishing equals a known downside (which he equated to zero), and an unlimited upside. But that (for a journalist anyway) you’re working under a wage where you write what you’re told and have a limited upside as a wagie.
What he didn’t know, however, is that many journalists do live very well by pitching their own ideas. That there are more publications and call-outs than there are journalists with work ethic and discipline. That doing this means you can prioritise your art while still having an income.
He also didn’t know that a by-line is insane for SEO purposes, where publishing yourself simply can’t compete. Add to all of this the fact that software-as-a-service platforms have as many downsides as social media, and the ‘zero’ downside is suddenly the Swamps of Sadness. By which I mean: Huge effort for minimal return.
As an aside, Substack paid high profile writers to use their platform. They didn’t jump over to Substack because they thought it was going to be brilliant for their upwards career trajectories; it was essentially an influencer deal. So there’s also that.
From The Guardian:
On the face of it, Substack Pro was simply offering writers the benefits that usually come with full-time employment. But the program was seen as controversial for a number of reasons.
To begin, the cohort of writers selected by the company remained undisclosed. This created an invisible tiered system dividing those who were actively supported, and those who were taking a risk in trying to build their own subscriber base.
According to journalist Annalee Newitz, this made Substack into something of a pyramid scheme. Some anonymous writers were destined to succeed while the vast majority were providing Substack with free content, hoping to one day be able to monetize. As the New York Times columnist Ben Smith put it, Substack was surreptitiously making some writers rich and turning others into “the content-creation equivalent of Uber drivers”.
And if you’d like to read it, here is Newitz’s post about how she had an ‘inadvertent role’ in what she calls the ‘Substack scam’.
So what has all of this got to do with book publishing?
Self-publishing, through what has become a ‘traditional’ means (i.e. sell on Amazon) means that most self-published writers become Ben Smith’s ‘content-creation equivalent of Uber drivers’. You can make good money as a self-published author, if:
you choose a high-selling genre
you spend time studying that genre (and you read it yourself)
you create works that are patterned on what sells
you have a high level of productivity, so that you match the buying cadence of the genre’s audience.
Note that we’re not talking anything like channelling the muse or creating meaningful works. We’re talking about money for jam. That’s all.
The writers who don’t make good money? That’s everyone else. You know, the people who don’t approach self-publishing as if it were a chicken takeaway shop and don’t understand how to ‘businessify’ their books.
In a fascinating irony, many authors who achieve greatness for the meaningful nature of their work tend not to self-publish. They don’t blog. They’re not active on social media. They may write columns and essays for ‘newspaper’-like outlets, and those outlets are ‘traditional’. Instead of doing all the publishing legwork themselves, they focus on their writing, and they find ways of working with editors to improve it. This was something that emerged in a wargame I ran for a mentee who is working to build up a profile like one of her creative heroes. Following her hero’s pattern she is not only creating more and nourishing her inner artist, but she is building a profile much more rapidly, gaining outstanding SEO kick-backs, and building a portfolio that will make publishing her books a no-brainer.
To be honest, I didn’t do anything like that.
I simply channelled the muse.
I got a query out of the blue from a publisher.
I took a punt, added a dash of discipline and a splash of trust, and here we are.
Momentous creative shifts can happen when you pay attention to minutiae. When you get into flow and allow yourself to learn from whatever comes through this channel that you become. It requires attention (to spot ideas as opportunities). It requires courage (to take action). It requires trust (to keep your foot in the door when it opens). It requires love (to keep the flow moving).
What I discovered was that shifting into presentness allows these points to coalesce into flow, and from flow into art.
Artist in Recovery is a poetry collection that honours woman as creator. It speaks of the darkness of losing your inner creator, of stripping yourself back to shadows. It sings songs that serenade the rising dawn that heals you. It is filled with a love that spills from each line. That will, I hope, resonate in the bodies of everyone who reads it.
Do I want to make money from it? Sure, that would be nice. But it’s more important to me that the work is felt.
Thus, I can honestly say for the first time in my life that my art matters.
xx Leticia