Here’s an alternative POV that could be illuminating: To be financial successful as a writer (or any creative endeavor), if you do not have special access, you

Here’s an alternative POV that could be illuminating: To be financial successful as a writer (or any creative endeavor), if you do not have special access, you must either gain special access or get into the business of publishing yourself. As noble as “gain access” may seem by comparison, it has very few seats on the ride & the power law seems to have the perverse effect of narrowing the number over time. The business of publishing is & has always been substantially about manufacturing hype. You might get one generational talent at its start, but mostly you are selling the talent you have. As much as we all seem to want opportunity to be earned on meritocracy alone, we don’t spread our attention that way and we certainly don’t distribute in any kind of premeditated way to ensure our values are applied to society. Perhaps algorithmic content distribution will change that one day, but so far it mostly hasn’t. So for any new work, even for authors you know & love, to get sufficient revenue it has to grab significant attention in a brief period of time. Underlying all hype machines is usually some kind of gameable metric of attention - views, endorsements, critical review. All publishers have a formula for how they get some of it or they fail at their job. Publishers will be the first to tell you what they do isn’t enough because everyone does it. “New York Times Best Seller” is a great example. Generally considered a fair standard of what is interesting, it mostly drifts off Amazon rankings with some mollifying factors. Part of the durability of this system is that when one person has been found to hack those rankings, like here by purchasing 400 of their own books, it appears that they are a dishonest person gaming the system. Every NYT Best Selling author I’ve met either personally orchestrated, or had it done for them, volume book sales to friend’s businesses & conferences to achieve the same affect. Perhaps people who are insufficiently clever should be morally punished for the crime of showing us our own foibles. But the “scumbaggery is endemic,” which is now one of my favorite sentences, is as easily cast as disapproval for a few people as it is a statement of how people in large groups choose what is interesting to talk about. Either way, we’ve got no solution for society working the way we think it does vs working to exploit the way we think it does. I thought the Internet might, but so far it seems better at distributing the latter than solving for the former.