It’s upsetting that a successful writer would not help or promote someone who is trying to have a book published.whats wrong with these people more readers sell more books.More authors more readers more sales.Not more Marxisime.
When writers lift each other up, they create not just better books but a better world—a world where creativity thrives, competition inspires, and success is shared, not hoarded
I would like to preface this response by saying I originally wrote a response to this article but ended up deleting it for personal reasons with that said, let's get started. Once again, a round of virtual applause for this outstanding and informative article, Liza! I know I've said this before, but you truly are the Diane Sawyer or Barabara Walters of the literary world! Exposing the corruption, arrogance, dog eat dog nature, and the woke leftist indoctrination of the publishing industry in this country. Not to mention open discrimination against white men and Jews. The influence of Marxism on the literary field can definitely be seen in how you were treated by other writers who saw you not as one who just wanted some assistance to make it in the industry and achieve their dreams, but as a potential competitor an/or a moocher trying to leech off their success. This zero-sum view of the literary world whereby one author must fail in order for another to succeed, very much echoes the thinking of Marx and Engels and is one of the primary factors behind why the publishing industry and literary field are both gradually on the decline right now. Why would one want to become a writer or hope to succeed as a writer, if every time they ask another author for help or simply for some friendly advice, and they are snubbed, ignored or told they will never make it? The literary and publishing industries need to adopt the free-market system and mindset. Capitalism has been wildly successful throughout human history while Marxism has been a disaster. Just ask the USSR, Red China, Cuba, North Korea, North Vietnam, East Germany, Hungary, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and many others how Communism worked out for them. Not to mention the hundreds of millions of men, women and children that were murdered in cold blood in the name of the "utopia" Communists around the world have attempted to build. The literary field would be wise to read a book (no pun intended) on the Holodomor, Great Leap Forward, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the Gulags in the USSR, the Katyn Forest Massacre of nearly 22,000 members of the Polish intelligentsia in 1943, the plight of Soviet Jewry in the 60s, 70s and 80s, the brutality and inhumanity of the KBG and the Stasi, the numerous deportations done by the Soviet Union, the brutal way the East German Uprising of 1953 and the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 were put down, etc. I could go on and on and on. Oh, and by the way in case you didn't know, Karl Marx was a misogynist, racist and antisemite (despite being of Jewish descent himself) and Communism was horrible for the poor, workers, racial, ethnic and religious minorities, people in the third world, LGBT people, and disabled people. How about instead of all this mutual distrust and backstabbing, what if and hear me out here I know this is a crazy, radical idea...writers helped one another?! If you help someone write their book and it does well, people will be interested in reading more books and will pick up yours too. If you help proofread or edit someone's manuscript, they'll refer other writers to you or help promote your work. Thus, making your business and career boom! If that young writer you gave advice to’s career takes off in the process, your career is boosted too! The free-market system is why the West and East Asia thrived during the Cold War while those countries that had fallen on the other side of the Iron Curtain fell into poverty, misery, bloodshed, and darkness. Take East and West Germany as an example. East Germany was a paranoid authoritarian police state that was an economic basket case. People had to ration food, nobody worked hard because there was no incentive to, wages and living standards were low, economic opportunity was sorely lacking, the quality of goods and services sucked, and all the wealth was concentrated (ironically) in the hands of Communist Party bureaucrats and politicians. West Germany on the other hand had a booming economy, rapidly expanding Middle Class, high wages, high living standards, economic opportunity a plenty, surging economic growth, top-notch quality goods and services, and a vibrant entrepreneurial scene. How about the United States post-WWII as another example? Who better to represent how marvelous free-market capitalism is? The United States gave people the freedom to dream, build, invent, tinker to improve, and try their hand at starting new businesses. Many companies that were tiny little start-ups exploded and became highly successful global businesses we all know today that create products and services, we couldn't live and wouldn't recognize our country without like to list just a FEW, McDonalds, Disney, Pizza Hut, Holiday Inn, Dairy Queen, H&R Block, Dunkin' Donuts, Southwest Airlines, Domino's Pizza, Walmart, Comcast, Nike, Starbucks, Foot Locker, Microsoft, Nickelodeon, WWE, Home Depot, Whole Foods, Fuddruckers, Apple, Google, Yahoo, and Tesla. Need I say more? The freedom of American society also gave us amazing musical talents like Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, Jerry Lee Lewis, La Bamba, Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, Prince, Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers, George Michael, Selina, Tupac Shakur, Biggie Smalls, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, The Beach Boys, Marvin Gaye, Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, Frank Zappa, Roy Orbison, and too many more to list. It gave us brilliant literary talents like James Baldwin, Arthur Miller, Norman Mailer, Roald Dahl, Ian Fleming, Rev. W. Awdry, Dr. Suess, Kingsley Amis, Elie Wiesel, and Albert Camus. Not to mention all the phenomenal movies and TV shows we've gotten from the era like Ben-Hur, The Ten Commandments, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Sleeping Beauty, Rear Window, Pulp Fiction, Ghostbusters, the original Star Wars Trilogy, A Clockwork Orange, Apocalypse Now, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, In the Heat of the Night, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?, The Matrix, the Harry Potter films, Clueless, Batman, Dirty Harry, etc. and Mission: Impossible, the Andy Griffith Show, the X-Files, Lost, Magnum P.I., Dragnet, Matlock, Diagnosis: Murder, Murder She Wrote, Streets of San Francisco, Kojak, Miami Vice, Numbers, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Scooby Doo, The Simpsons, All in the Family, etc. respectively. Shall I go on?
Writers need some hustle and some business acumen to make it.
We live in a world where anyone can write and sell books with no monetary investment. If you hustle, your book will make it into the right hands. But there are a million excuses not to.
People who go out of their way to hate on strangers are always projecting. These people will do any amount of mental gymnastics to avoid looking at themselves in the light.
I've been torn on trying to get into the big 4 versus self or small publishing since the beginning. After that NYT essay, I kind of want to just to turn them down. But thats petty. And I know a local man's man who is marketed by a big publisher. Anyone who's persistent can find an agent and sell their book.
I have queried 170 agents. While I have 12 agents currently reading it, still no book deal. I agree that hustle is necessary, but the gatekeepers of the literary world don't quite reward persistence as much as they do adherence to certain themes. Having amassed 2.5k Substack subscribers in just 6 months, I have a sense that it's not my writing quality to blame here.
I suspect your politics may have gotten you in trouble, unfortunately. Have you tried imprints that specialize in conservative books? I know your main interest is not political but that's what it seems to take these days.
There's no reason building a reputation by Substack and then using it to sell your book is unreasonable. It's pretty much what Scott Alexander did I think. There's also no reason literary output has to exist in forms and channels that existed in the 20th century. Your heroes like Eliot were drawing on traditions that existed before the modern publishing industry, after all; who was Homer's publisher? Shakespeare's? Shakespeare was an entrepreneur who aimed at both the upper and lower classes and tossed lots of dirty jokes in his plays for the groundlings--no reason to be a cold maid clutching at dead men's fingers. And 'low' forms like comic books and even role playing and video games have become hugely more influential in recent years.
I wonder if a partially paywalled serial novel might be a way to build interest. Guys like Dickens did it, and Alcott famously changed her ending to marry off Jo after complaints from 19th-century nerd girls.
You already have an audience to sell to, which publishers want, however, if you do get published and most of your sales originate from your work on Substack, youre giving money to the publisher for nothing.
You're killing it here. Keep your money and learn some more marketing tricks, or hire a marketer for a fraction of what the publisher takes.
I do not. The ugly truth: This is what I tell myself. It keeps me going. Im certain that persistence pays, however, if I try to sell a book that no one wants to read, not so much.
You're very kind, and I appreciate you. My brother's friend is an agent, and read my work a couple years ago. Just have to get it finished. Wrote a lot of shorts in 2024, and one was published by a small press.
Indie publishers know their writing is a business. Many indies have learned business, marketing, taxes, estate planning, etc. Some are making 5 or 6 figures a month. They can write what they want, as fast as they want. They hire editors and book cover designers. They can run kickstarters. They get to make more than .25 for a book sold. You don’t have to put up with draconian contract terms. You can keep your rights to your own work. You can even start a website and sell ebooks and print books directly! But learning all this is daunting and hard. And your MFA teacher and those insane French literary “thinkers” might not approve of that messy dirty business stuff so writers can’t be bothered to learn it.
The best thing about all of the above? It’s really fun and challenging! I swear!
These are exciting times for writers!
I am a (self taught) book cover designer. I would be happy to design a cover for someone for free. No charge at all. I would love to help. 🥰
I chose to self-publish for many of the reasons you listed--but mostly to keep control of my own stories. I write young adult fantasy, and this is kind of the epicenter of agents/editors who are into queer elves in prison. I'd rather die than have any of these people start demanding changes to my stories.
But there's no doubt it's hard going. There's a lot to learn, and you have to be in it for the long haul. Quick, easy success is not a thing I've experienced at all.
I am still learning the indie publishing business, definitely. Mostly, I enjoy it even when it’s hard and confusing.
Queer elves in prison made me laugh. I remember some truly vicious and sociopathic behavior from a group referred to as YA Twitter a few years ago. Ugh.
The traditional media is in transition on many fronts. Film, news, books, etc. A dilemma has emerged between radical collectivism and hyper-profit corporatism.
One one hand, the Critical Theory plague is resistant and robust. Post-Marx group-think remains alive and well.
On the other hand, there's a block buster mentality that "either it's huge or it's trash." Thus the insufferable superhero, 007, Fast-and-Furious-23 film onslaught.
This dilemma opens up a space for small market answers.
Combined with the obliterated technical barriers to publishing any media, the small market answers can focus on quality while standing fearlessly between the two horns of Blockbusterism and Collectivism.
Stumbled on you via Notes this AM; so fortuitous and fortunate to do so.
Read with great interest - am an entrepreneur, professor, writer, among other things - what you write here is polymathic.
From Wikipedia RE Ezra Pound
Working in London as foreign editor of several American literary magazines, he helped discover and shape the work of contemporaries such as H. D., Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, and James Joyce. He was responsible for the 1914 serialization of Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the 1915 publication of Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", and the serialization from 1918 of Joyce's Ulysses. Hemingway wrote in 1932 that, for poets born in the late 19th or early 20th century, not to be influenced by Pound would be "like passing through a great blizzard and not feeling its cold".[a]
I do offer that A Gentleman in Moscow as one worthy fiction within the last decade.
There appears to be a zero sum mentality in the writing space because there's a general lack of community, and there's few people willing to facilitate the development of such a community.
This seems to be attributable, in part, to the fact that time spent building a community is time spent not writing.
The funny thing is, writing communities and artistic movements were definitely a thing in the past. Even pulp writers like Lovecraft and Howard would share their monsters.
I’m a writer (five novels with a small press and launching a sixth on Substack next month). I’m also an editor and writing instructor, and I live to help other writers. I’ve had editing clients who wound up much more successful than I’ve ever been. And that makes me so excited and happy for them. And I’ve met some phenomenallly helpful writers along the way. But I see a lot of the ones you’re referring to as well. But if you want to read a good book published in the last 10 years, I have recommendations. ;)
It’s sad that you do not understand that this is literally (old school definition of that term) the opposite of the author’s point about zero-sum game mentality…
There is a profound (and tragic) difference between Critical Theory and Critical Thinking. The former is a Marxist construct which leads to hell, while the latter, while not exactly leading to heaven, at least gives us the chance of finding our way there.
I don't mean to say your experience is unique but I have received help from other writers not only in ways to improve my writing but also being encouraged to query certain agents and help in forming the materials for that. Even had introductions made. Perhaps it is that my experience is unique although I will be the first to point out that I am still unrepresented.
As a counterpoint, may I offer the Killer Nashville writers conference. Every year it brings together an amazing community of mystery and thriller authors who spend 4 days helping each other.
I'll see you Holodomor (3.5-5 million dead), and raise you the Great Leap Forward in China (30-50 million dead from famine when they melted down their tractors, planted their crops close together, and killed the sparrows that ate the locusts), and Pol Pot in Cambodia (1.5-2 million dead, roughly a quarter of the population)...
The literary world, and the world in general, is better with you in it, Liza. Hope you experience phenomenal success in 2025.
It’s upsetting that a successful writer would not help or promote someone who is trying to have a book published.whats wrong with these people more readers sell more books.More authors more readers more sales.Not more Marxisime.
When writers lift each other up, they create not just better books but a better world—a world where creativity thrives, competition inspires, and success is shared, not hoarded
I would like to preface this response by saying I originally wrote a response to this article but ended up deleting it for personal reasons with that said, let's get started. Once again, a round of virtual applause for this outstanding and informative article, Liza! I know I've said this before, but you truly are the Diane Sawyer or Barabara Walters of the literary world! Exposing the corruption, arrogance, dog eat dog nature, and the woke leftist indoctrination of the publishing industry in this country. Not to mention open discrimination against white men and Jews. The influence of Marxism on the literary field can definitely be seen in how you were treated by other writers who saw you not as one who just wanted some assistance to make it in the industry and achieve their dreams, but as a potential competitor an/or a moocher trying to leech off their success. This zero-sum view of the literary world whereby one author must fail in order for another to succeed, very much echoes the thinking of Marx and Engels and is one of the primary factors behind why the publishing industry and literary field are both gradually on the decline right now. Why would one want to become a writer or hope to succeed as a writer, if every time they ask another author for help or simply for some friendly advice, and they are snubbed, ignored or told they will never make it? The literary and publishing industries need to adopt the free-market system and mindset. Capitalism has been wildly successful throughout human history while Marxism has been a disaster. Just ask the USSR, Red China, Cuba, North Korea, North Vietnam, East Germany, Hungary, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and many others how Communism worked out for them. Not to mention the hundreds of millions of men, women and children that were murdered in cold blood in the name of the "utopia" Communists around the world have attempted to build. The literary field would be wise to read a book (no pun intended) on the Holodomor, Great Leap Forward, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the Gulags in the USSR, the Katyn Forest Massacre of nearly 22,000 members of the Polish intelligentsia in 1943, the plight of Soviet Jewry in the 60s, 70s and 80s, the brutality and inhumanity of the KBG and the Stasi, the numerous deportations done by the Soviet Union, the brutal way the East German Uprising of 1953 and the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 were put down, etc. I could go on and on and on. Oh, and by the way in case you didn't know, Karl Marx was a misogynist, racist and antisemite (despite being of Jewish descent himself) and Communism was horrible for the poor, workers, racial, ethnic and religious minorities, people in the third world, LGBT people, and disabled people. How about instead of all this mutual distrust and backstabbing, what if and hear me out here I know this is a crazy, radical idea...writers helped one another?! If you help someone write their book and it does well, people will be interested in reading more books and will pick up yours too. If you help proofread or edit someone's manuscript, they'll refer other writers to you or help promote your work. Thus, making your business and career boom! If that young writer you gave advice to’s career takes off in the process, your career is boosted too! The free-market system is why the West and East Asia thrived during the Cold War while those countries that had fallen on the other side of the Iron Curtain fell into poverty, misery, bloodshed, and darkness. Take East and West Germany as an example. East Germany was a paranoid authoritarian police state that was an economic basket case. People had to ration food, nobody worked hard because there was no incentive to, wages and living standards were low, economic opportunity was sorely lacking, the quality of goods and services sucked, and all the wealth was concentrated (ironically) in the hands of Communist Party bureaucrats and politicians. West Germany on the other hand had a booming economy, rapidly expanding Middle Class, high wages, high living standards, economic opportunity a plenty, surging economic growth, top-notch quality goods and services, and a vibrant entrepreneurial scene. How about the United States post-WWII as another example? Who better to represent how marvelous free-market capitalism is? The United States gave people the freedom to dream, build, invent, tinker to improve, and try their hand at starting new businesses. Many companies that were tiny little start-ups exploded and became highly successful global businesses we all know today that create products and services, we couldn't live and wouldn't recognize our country without like to list just a FEW, McDonalds, Disney, Pizza Hut, Holiday Inn, Dairy Queen, H&R Block, Dunkin' Donuts, Southwest Airlines, Domino's Pizza, Walmart, Comcast, Nike, Starbucks, Foot Locker, Microsoft, Nickelodeon, WWE, Home Depot, Whole Foods, Fuddruckers, Apple, Google, Yahoo, and Tesla. Need I say more? The freedom of American society also gave us amazing musical talents like Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, Jerry Lee Lewis, La Bamba, Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, Prince, Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers, George Michael, Selina, Tupac Shakur, Biggie Smalls, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, The Beach Boys, Marvin Gaye, Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, Frank Zappa, Roy Orbison, and too many more to list. It gave us brilliant literary talents like James Baldwin, Arthur Miller, Norman Mailer, Roald Dahl, Ian Fleming, Rev. W. Awdry, Dr. Suess, Kingsley Amis, Elie Wiesel, and Albert Camus. Not to mention all the phenomenal movies and TV shows we've gotten from the era like Ben-Hur, The Ten Commandments, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Sleeping Beauty, Rear Window, Pulp Fiction, Ghostbusters, the original Star Wars Trilogy, A Clockwork Orange, Apocalypse Now, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, In the Heat of the Night, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?, The Matrix, the Harry Potter films, Clueless, Batman, Dirty Harry, etc. and Mission: Impossible, the Andy Griffith Show, the X-Files, Lost, Magnum P.I., Dragnet, Matlock, Diagnosis: Murder, Murder She Wrote, Streets of San Francisco, Kojak, Miami Vice, Numbers, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Scooby Doo, The Simpsons, All in the Family, etc. respectively. Shall I go on?
Writers need some hustle and some business acumen to make it.
We live in a world where anyone can write and sell books with no monetary investment. If you hustle, your book will make it into the right hands. But there are a million excuses not to.
People who go out of their way to hate on strangers are always projecting. These people will do any amount of mental gymnastics to avoid looking at themselves in the light.
I've been torn on trying to get into the big 4 versus self or small publishing since the beginning. After that NYT essay, I kind of want to just to turn them down. But thats petty. And I know a local man's man who is marketed by a big publisher. Anyone who's persistent can find an agent and sell their book.
I have queried 170 agents. While I have 12 agents currently reading it, still no book deal. I agree that hustle is necessary, but the gatekeepers of the literary world don't quite reward persistence as much as they do adherence to certain themes. Having amassed 2.5k Substack subscribers in just 6 months, I have a sense that it's not my writing quality to blame here.
I suspect your politics may have gotten you in trouble, unfortunately. Have you tried imprints that specialize in conservative books? I know your main interest is not political but that's what it seems to take these days.
There's no reason building a reputation by Substack and then using it to sell your book is unreasonable. It's pretty much what Scott Alexander did I think. There's also no reason literary output has to exist in forms and channels that existed in the 20th century. Your heroes like Eliot were drawing on traditions that existed before the modern publishing industry, after all; who was Homer's publisher? Shakespeare's? Shakespeare was an entrepreneur who aimed at both the upper and lower classes and tossed lots of dirty jokes in his plays for the groundlings--no reason to be a cold maid clutching at dead men's fingers. And 'low' forms like comic books and even role playing and video games have become hugely more influential in recent years.
I wonder if a partially paywalled serial novel might be a way to build interest. Guys like Dickens did it, and Alcott famously changed her ending to marry off Jo after complaints from 19th-century nerd girls.
You already have an audience to sell to, which publishers want, however, if you do get published and most of your sales originate from your work on Substack, youre giving money to the publisher for nothing.
You're killing it here. Keep your money and learn some more marketing tricks, or hire a marketer for a fraction of what the publisher takes.
I need to study what you've been doing here.
"Anyone who's persistent can find an agent and sell their book"
Do you have an operational definition of "persistent"?
I do not. The ugly truth: This is what I tell myself. It keeps me going. Im certain that persistence pays, however, if I try to sell a book that no one wants to read, not so much.
That was a trap, which you wisely declined to fall into. And I'll decline to give my rejection count, although it's less than Liza.
It could indeed be that not many people want to read my book, or even (gasp!) that it's not very good. But I like it.
I'm serializing a chapter a week, almost done now.
Sweet! If I can't find an agent once this thing is done, I will serialize it here.
Will gladly give you an agency referral if I manage to land one of the twelve agents currently reading my book! Odds seem pretty high 🤞🏻
You're very kind, and I appreciate you. My brother's friend is an agent, and read my work a couple years ago. Just have to get it finished. Wrote a lot of shorts in 2024, and one was published by a small press.
Way to go. I can’t say it’s been a breakthrough, but hey, you can’t beat “free” as a price.
Indie publishers know their writing is a business. Many indies have learned business, marketing, taxes, estate planning, etc. Some are making 5 or 6 figures a month. They can write what they want, as fast as they want. They hire editors and book cover designers. They can run kickstarters. They get to make more than .25 for a book sold. You don’t have to put up with draconian contract terms. You can keep your rights to your own work. You can even start a website and sell ebooks and print books directly! But learning all this is daunting and hard. And your MFA teacher and those insane French literary “thinkers” might not approve of that messy dirty business stuff so writers can’t be bothered to learn it.
The best thing about all of the above? It’s really fun and challenging! I swear!
These are exciting times for writers!
I am a (self taught) book cover designer. I would be happy to design a cover for someone for free. No charge at all. I would love to help. 🥰
I chose to self-publish for many of the reasons you listed--but mostly to keep control of my own stories. I write young adult fantasy, and this is kind of the epicenter of agents/editors who are into queer elves in prison. I'd rather die than have any of these people start demanding changes to my stories.
But there's no doubt it's hard going. There's a lot to learn, and you have to be in it for the long haul. Quick, easy success is not a thing I've experienced at all.
I don't mind books about queer elves in prison. I mind that they won't publish anything else.
I am still learning the indie publishing business, definitely. Mostly, I enjoy it even when it’s hard and confusing.
Queer elves in prison made me laugh. I remember some truly vicious and sociopathic behavior from a group referred to as YA Twitter a few years ago. Ugh.
“Yet at universities across America, students of English literature are being fed Marx for breakfast”
The only thing wrong with this piece is the idea that it is only, or even primarily, the English literature department that is indoctrinating Marxism.
Almost all the humanities and social sciences at almost all universities are now doing this.
Including to a sad degree many economics departments as well
It originally seeped in through English departments. I’m working on a book about this right now, actually! But yes, it is quite ubiquitous now.
I don’t doubt that English departments are one of the ways it “seeped in”.
But it surely wasn’t only “original” way. Unless you want to claim that all of the social sciences only exist because of English departments.
The traditional media is in transition on many fronts. Film, news, books, etc. A dilemma has emerged between radical collectivism and hyper-profit corporatism.
One one hand, the Critical Theory plague is resistant and robust. Post-Marx group-think remains alive and well.
On the other hand, there's a block buster mentality that "either it's huge or it's trash." Thus the insufferable superhero, 007, Fast-and-Furious-23 film onslaught.
This dilemma opens up a space for small market answers.
Combined with the obliterated technical barriers to publishing any media, the small market answers can focus on quality while standing fearlessly between the two horns of Blockbusterism and Collectivism.
Now is the time.
https://substack.com/@demianentrekin/note/c-82661969?r=dw8le
Stumbled on you via Notes this AM; so fortuitous and fortunate to do so.
Read with great interest - am an entrepreneur, professor, writer, among other things - what you write here is polymathic.
From Wikipedia RE Ezra Pound
Working in London as foreign editor of several American literary magazines, he helped discover and shape the work of contemporaries such as H. D., Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, and James Joyce. He was responsible for the 1914 serialization of Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the 1915 publication of Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", and the serialization from 1918 of Joyce's Ulysses. Hemingway wrote in 1932 that, for poets born in the late 19th or early 20th century, not to be influenced by Pound would be "like passing through a great blizzard and not feeling its cold".[a]
I do offer that A Gentleman in Moscow as one worthy fiction within the last decade.
There appears to be a zero sum mentality in the writing space because there's a general lack of community, and there's few people willing to facilitate the development of such a community.
This seems to be attributable, in part, to the fact that time spent building a community is time spent not writing.
The funny thing is, writing communities and artistic movements were definitely a thing in the past. Even pulp writers like Lovecraft and Howard would share their monsters.
I’m a writer (five novels with a small press and launching a sixth on Substack next month). I’m also an editor and writing instructor, and I live to help other writers. I’ve had editing clients who wound up much more successful than I’ve ever been. And that makes me so excited and happy for them. And I’ve met some phenomenallly helpful writers along the way. But I see a lot of the ones you’re referring to as well. But if you want to read a good book published in the last 10 years, I have recommendations. ;)
Nice read, but all in all we live an Oligarchy. Capitalism is the wool over the sheep’s eyes, unfortunately… we being the sheep.
It’s sad that you do not understand that this is literally (old school definition of that term) the opposite of the author’s point about zero-sum game mentality…
There is a profound (and tragic) difference between Critical Theory and Critical Thinking. The former is a Marxist construct which leads to hell, while the latter, while not exactly leading to heaven, at least gives us the chance of finding our way there.
I don't mean to say your experience is unique but I have received help from other writers not only in ways to improve my writing but also being encouraged to query certain agents and help in forming the materials for that. Even had introductions made. Perhaps it is that my experience is unique although I will be the first to point out that I am still unrepresented.
As a counterpoint, may I offer the Killer Nashville writers conference. Every year it brings together an amazing community of mystery and thriller authors who spend 4 days helping each other.
I'll see you Holodomor (3.5-5 million dead), and raise you the Great Leap Forward in China (30-50 million dead from famine when they melted down their tractors, planted their crops close together, and killed the sparrows that ate the locusts), and Pol Pot in Cambodia (1.5-2 million dead, roughly a quarter of the population)...