Some things perhaps you shouldn't care about...
...even though you desperately - and instinctively - want to.
In this quarter’s The Author, the journal of the Society of Authors, there is a sobering lead article from Sam Jordison and Eloise Millar (of Galley Beggar Press) who expose some financial numbers from the world of an independent publisher.
Headlines: the cost of book production has more than doubled since 2015 and, partly thanks to a proportionately lower increase in the average retail price of c.20%, profits per volume have tumbled (£0.43-£0.93 in 2015 compared to £0.21-£0.46 in 2023). Many publishers have folded as a result. Grim reading which left me wondering why they still bother?
Then tangental thoughts. Firstly, there’s not much I can do to affect this decline other than continue to buy books; secondly, these numbers would suggest that the ‘Big 5’ must be under pressure too (though they have volume on their side); and thirdly, given such a financial backdrop, you can understand why commercial and/or genre fiction is so attractive to the industry i.e. the lure of something that actually has a chance of selling.
Even if there’s no magic wand I can wave, I still have a choice when it comes to my own work. If my primary goal was to make good money from writing, then I would be playing the game too and turning my hand to Fantasy, Murder Mystery, Sci-Fi etc. But apart from the odd dipping of the quill into the ink of dystopian narratives, genre fiction isn’t what I write. And it isn’t what I want to write.
So why not stop caring about genre fiction, stop caring about submissions and agent rejections? No agent/publisher is going to make serious money from my work (no matter how good it may be) so why torture myself by making their lack of interest personal?
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This was a thought which also led me down other avenues. I largely self-publish and am a hybrid publisher for other writers. I use print-on-demand and make the most of my own skillset in the overall process where I can. Obviously this publishing model is radically different to that of Galley Press etc. and my volumes are minuscule in consequence — but fortunately I’m not trying to justify the effort financially...
It’s an internal debate which forces me to keep focussed on the key question “why do I write?” — and it also allows me to remind myself that making money just isn’t near the top of my list. So I shouldn’t really care about that either.
With two down, these considerations also lead me to ask myself what else I shouldn’t really care about — and thus perhaps what I should.
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Self- / hybrid-publishing can generate some fairly black-and-white opinions. Even as a paid-up member of that particular club, I have them myself — especially when it comes to work only published as ebooks via Amazon’s KDP. I don’t use KDP; the books I publish are physical by default; they are registered with the British Library, and can be purchased worldwide on-line and on order from good bookshops.
I can’t really influence those who are vehemently anti self- or hybrid-publishing. Indeed, when considering what I write or the process through which I go in order to allow that writing sees the light of day, I know it’s impossible to satisfy everyone — so why try? Maybe I shouldn’t worry what people think about my publishing choices — nor what I think about others’.
More important is what the people who read my work — and those whose work I publish — think about the end product. Care about that, always! (Thus far I have published 30 books / anthologies containing work from other writers.)
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Three more topics…
One. I grew up incredibly numerate, and worked in an industry where numbers / logic / right & wrong were clear cut. With that kind of background, I can’t help but be drawn to numbers — of subscribers / likes / followers / comments (and occasionally sales…) — yet I don’t want to care about them. But this one’s hard; partly because of many years’ ingrained conditioning, and also because numbers partly answer questions as to whether people actually like what you do.
So I’m trying to be more relaxed about whether 1 + 1 = 2…
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Two. There’s an increasing volume of contemporary poetry I simply don’t understand, or don’t regard as poetry, or see as nothing more than gimmickry (no matter how ‘clever’ it may be). And there also seems to be an inexorable rise in the number of published / successful poems — and entire collections — which are all about the poet: the ‘I’ poem, or the literary equivalent of the ‘selfie’.
When this work strays into self-indulgent therapy it annoys me — as does the implication that I should actually care. I don’t like having non-universal personal experiences foist on me — I struggle enough with my own! Rather than engaging me, most often I am alienated by such work. (I’ve cancelled my membership of the Poetry Book Society partly as a result.)
So I am trying to educate myself to care less — and one way to do so is to stop reading it. However, I fear there’s already a major downside: the growth of this kind of poetry — and these trends — now have me questioning the overall value of contemporary poetry and thus whether I should stop writing the stuff…
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Three. What about AI? The ‘hot topic’.
Firstly, where do you draw the line? I’ve had people suggest that using a spell-checker in Word or Pages is using AI, never mind it writing whole documents… On that basis, who is to say what is and is not ‘AI’?
And secondly, the genii is out of the bottle — and it’s not going back in. AI is everywhere. And as a former IT professional, I would argue it has been with us in some form or another for an awfully long time; in the past we simply didn’t recognise it as such — nor give it a fancy label.
Can I do anything about it? No. Am I going to use it for writing? Certainly not! Spell-checking is about as close as I come. Microsoft’s force-feeding of Copilot as a default Word add-in is, in my view, despicable. You should have to opt-in to AI, not be forced to opt out.
Do I care? On one level, yes of course; but I see no value in wasting creative energy in the cause — other than to turn off Copilot each time MS issues a software update; a principle’s a principle…
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That’s enough for now. These items are, I think, big enough tickets… And this post is already too long (I don’t care for over-long articles; TLDR etc.).
Do you have similar bête noire? My list may be different to yours, but I suspect it won’t be that unique either.
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For me, everything always comes back to “why do I write” and “who do I write for” — questions so central and so fascinating that I’ve written a whole book based around them:
“when you see anything of mine that you don’t like remember that I’m sincere in doing it and that I’m working toward something.” - Ernest Hemingway
“There is no such thing as a new idea. It is impossible. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope. We give them a turn and they make new and curious combinations. We keep on turning and making new combinations indefinitely; but they are the same old pieces of colored glass that have been in use through all the ages.” - Mark Twain
I turned off spell checker when the damn thing decided that muscovado sugar in a recipe was clearly made in Moscow and spelt it Muscovite. I've never used it since. But I am a trained proofreader, hence my irritation.