Why you should start your own publishing collective

I’m about to say something that may feel wrong, because we’ve all been brainwashed to endlessly spend our resources and our lives chasing very particular carrots, but I swear to Glerb everything I’m about to tell you is true.

It’s gonna feel like a bummer, but hang with me. I think it’ll be worth it in the end.

I know that you know the odds of making it big in traditional publishing are stacked against you, but I don’t think most writers know just how firmly the odds are stacked against you. For people who started when I started, it was easier. You could come in as nobody, no social media following, and the house would invest in you and build you up. Not as much as twenty years before, but definitely more than now.

And let me approach this with a lack of bitterness. The system is built to make a lot of money for a very few. The people who work in traditional publishing are just as amazing, talented, and hard-working now as they ever were, but their hands are increasingly tied, the same way yours are at your job. We’re in the middle of an economic and societal collapse, and that means that every industry, due to a small handful of greedy fuckers, is suffering.

Like everything else, traditional publishing is collapsing in on itself like a dying star.

And trust me when I say, no one wishes this were not the case more than the agents and editors who work in traditional publishing.

All of the people on the various apps and sites telling you that they have the secret to how you can get an agent, get published, achieve financial security, and garner the respect of your peers are, respectfully, full of shit.

If they knew how to do that, they’d be doing it themselves, and then they wouldn’t need you to buy their online course or subscribe to their Substack.

The bait doesn’t need to be real in order to snag you. It just has to look real.

Or, rather, not famous the way that famous was before social media made everyone famous. You can be famous for a minute or two, maybe a day, but it’ll pass like a fever if you don’t keep running harder on the treadmill to generate more smoky wisps of fame. But because more and more people are famous every day—remember very demure, very mindful?—and they are forgotten a day later, fame doesn’t mean what it used to mean.

It doesn’t mean money, or glory, or positive attention. Usually it means derision and death threats; double those odds if you’re a beautiful woman, who get the most naked, abusive, misogynistic hate I’ve ever seen. If you want to be truly horrified, wade into the comments section for content made by a beautiful woman. You’ll want to throw your phone into Mount Doom.

Fame also doesn’t mean that you never have to work again. If anything, it’s the opposite. You have to work all the time, because your fame attaches to you and you become your job.

Ugh.

I’ve been around some fairly successful people in my life, and can report that they are no happier than the rest of us. If anything, it’s quite the opposite, because they know they should be happy, they Did The Thing… but they’re not. The pool of people who might be real, true friends shrinks because fewer and fewer people can understand your life the higher you rise. No matter how much these success stories have or achieve, the validation they were chasing at the start still eludes them because actual validation needs to come from the self; you can’t buy or command it. Since they have money, they often use it to try to buy their way out of that feeling, via drugs or possessions. All the money they have gets thrown into a bottomless pit, and then success fades, because it always fades.

It fades even faster now than it used to.

I’ve met one uber-successful, uber-rich person who seemed truly happy and grounded to me, and that’s because she lived her life like a normie, using her money to build community around her and run a small, hometown business while doing work that I suspect she would do whether it made her a dime or not, because she loved the work. Her success and money seemed to me like things that happened to her, not her focus. She used them to build a secure life for herself and help other writers gain traction, but mostly they seemed like things she shooed off her desk before sitting down to write.

You’re never going to have the kind of money or success that you have always craved, because the system is designed to make you chase it while making sure you never get it. Even if you beat the odds and get an agent, then beat them again and get a publisher, and then beat them again when a handful of people read your book, and then beat them again and hit a list or win a big prize… it still won’t matter, because what was promised (fame, respect, wealth) is all a fairytale.

It’s not real.

It was never real.

The system doesn’t work if you get what it’s telling you to chase. You will never be a billionaire, or even a millionaire, probably. If you do become a millionaire, it will be because of the value of a dollar dropped in value to the point where A Million Dollars doesn’t mean much anymore, the same way that fame doesn’t mean much anymore.

The carrot you’re chasing isn’t even plastic. It’s rotten, from the core out, and if you do manage to grab it…

…it’ll poison you.

That is a really good question.

The first thing you wanna do is to think deeply about what you’re chasing these things for, and then see if there’s anything else that can provide those things for you.

For most of us, we want to be successful writers so we can do what we love while getting money, Money (the capitalization makes it different, keep reading), and fame.

So… why?

We chase money so we don’t die. Yeah, this sucks. Without money, you can’t pay for food, shelter, water, electricity, healthcare or housing… all things you need just to survive, and all of which are becoming increasingly unattainable in society as it is now. I’m sorry. That’s a real reason to need money.

But, if you share resources with as many people in your community/family as possible, that leaves more resources open to make sure you can get the things you absolutely need. No one needs a huge house to themselves. If you can move in with people you know and trust, I recommend it. Since living in a van, my husband and I pretty much live at our friends’ houses all the time. It has opened my eyes about the value of sharing resources and the power of organic moments of connection that don’t need to be planned on a calendar for months before everyone cancels because they’re too exhausted.

After that, having the money you need to survive is enough. You don’t need more. It won’t do for you what you think it will.

We chase excess Money for freedom. We want to be able to buy what we want, when we want. But most of the things we can buy don’t give us a sustained high. We have to keep buying and keep buying and keep buying… and then we end up with a bunch of shit we never use (hello Vitamix, hello Thigh Master) that we either have to give away or throw away. Some of us just keep it all, and end up have to walk around piles of it in our homes.

And we’re still left craving… something. Likely, it’s something we can’t buy. We want to feel peace, we want to feel safe, we want to feel loved.

Once again… these are things that only community can really provide, and community cannot be purchased.

We chase fame so that we matter. This is an existential thing; we think somehow famous people are above it all. They have money, they have no worries, everyone thinks they’re wonderful, la di da. They’ll be remembered after they die.

Nope. Fame is the worst. I have never been famous… well, maybe I’ve been a tiny bit known in very specific and very small circles, but that is different, and even that small whiff of it was enough for me.

Most people who get famous are completely forgotten after their fever of fame has passed, and most are definitely forgotten after they die. Anyone who is remembered after death is most commonly remembered because their narrative serves a function for people in power, who bend it into the shape they want to promote their own goals.1

But honestly, it doesn’t matter anyway. Once you’re gone, you’re gone. Do you care who still remembers you from elementary school? I doubt it, because it only mattered that you were there when you were there. The people who know and love us now, for who we really are, while we are still here, matter so much more than people who only know our external presentation, who consume the image of us for their own purposes.

Fame doesn’t make you feel better about yourself. It doesn’t validate you. It doesn’t comfort you when you’re sad. It doesn’t get you respect, if that’s what you’re after. It’s a temporary high with a very far fall the higher you go so…

…why do you want it again?

Writers desperately want publication and sales and lists and fame and money for all of the reasons listed above and more I can’t even imagine, and every time I come onto this app, I see advice promising you the secret to cracking through this system… and no one is asking if the system is worth cracking.

Spoilers: It is not.

This system is offering you a poisoned carrot, and the only way you can survive success within this system is if you never wanted the carrot in the first place. It doesn’t give as much as it takes, ever. Trust me, you do not want to crack this system, for all the reasons I’ve already listed, but also, for this one:

These systems are unsustainable, and they are dying.

Remember all that jazz about collapsing in on itself like a dying star? Books will always be a thing, stories will always be a thing, but the publishing industry is eating itself. What used to be the Big Six is now the Big Five. It’s only publishing projects that it knows will succeed, and like the film industry, its being choked by its own greed. The incredibly talented people within it will eventually shove off and start their own independent publishing companies, and eventually, that power and money will redistribute.

But right now, you’re fighting for a spot on the Titanic. You have to ask yourself why.

You want something you can do right now that can get your career moving?

Create a publishing collective. Gather with a group of friends and share your talents and resources. Someone is a graphic designer who can make killer bookcovers; someone else has marketing experience; someone else knows the entire printing and distribution system by heart. Gather together and help each other publish your books so it’s not as grueling as doing it alone.

And it’s way more fun.

I know; it sounds a little crazy, and a little daunting, and it kills your fantasy about becoming the next industry darling (which you don’t want; take a look at the way big authors get ripped apart by the jackals every day) but starting your own publishing collective isn’t an option of desperation. It’s an opportunity to share resources and talent with a group of people you like and respect. People you choose.

Your community.

Money doesn’t buy happiness, and it can actively sabotage it. Fame doesn’t get you happiness; it puts you in a cage separate from everyone else, perceived as better, but really just alone.

But if you could work with a collective of writers who help each other with the tasks of publishing, who each contribute their strongest affiliated skill—copywriting, cover design, cover copy, copyediting, developmental story editing, marketing, typesetting—to each project in order to see it through to publication, then that might be doable.

It’s what I’m working on now, and I gotta tell you… it’s fire.

Because the bottom line is that it doesn’t really matter what the question is, community is always the answer.

Everything,

L