Day 87

Day 87:

Is it my right to write?

Is this collection of writing worthy of publication? Is my collection of writing worthy of publication? On the face of it, these seem like the same question, but slightly differently phrased. However, they feel like and are very different questions. There is an aura of prestige around having a published book, the level of which varies based on a number of factors (who published it, if it won any awards, critical reception, sales figures, the appearance of the cover etc.). In order to access that level of prestige, you must overcome all of the boundaries to publication, which are supposed to be there in order to maintain that level of prestige. This makes sense; if anybody could write anything and get it published (even if it was full of mistakes and objectively poorly written), then consumers wouldn't be able to trust the publishers and bookshops to reliably stock quality products. As a result, the book industry would suffer and the prestige that comes with publishing a book would be lost. 

We actually have a good case study of this, the Steam store. Steam is a PC gaming platform and marketplace, on which users can buy games, play games, earn achievements and trading cards, buy and sell items on the community market, and much more. Years ago, the barrier to entry for a game to get onto the Steam store was incredibly high. Each game that wanted to be on the platform had to be vetted and approved by Steam, and most were already successful elsewhere. If you were a developer or publisher, and your game was on Steam, that meant something. If you were a customer on Steam, you felt reassured when purchasing games that you were getting a quality product, which was especially important considering that the games were fully digital purchases (you couldn't just trade it in if you didn't like it). As the video game market continued to grow, and Steam received more and more applications each day, standards started to slip. Rules became more relaxed so they could keep up with applications, and some real stinkers started to slip through the cracks. In 2006, 118 games were realised on Steam, which was the first full year that Valve (Steam's parent company) allowed third-party companies to release games on the platform. In 2021, 10,394 games were released on Steam*. It would be hard to describe some of those as 'games'; many are low-effort copies of other games, very cheap and bad games that only exist for their trading cards, and some games that just flat out don't work properly. In this huge pile of content that gets released each day, it is now very difficult for small developers with brilliant games to stand out from the crowd, unless they have a large advertising budget or a lot of luck.  While it may not be as bad as it was a few years ago, getting your game on Steam now means very little. In fact, it is expected of publishers and developers of all shapes and sizes to have their games on Steam, or it doesn't exist at all in the eyes of some.

So, we know that it is important to maintain good quality boundaries to maintain the reputation of the platforms, to the benefit of those who publish with them. Unfortunately, in many creative sectors, those boundaries are not always set in stone, and can be flexible depending on who is trying to get over them. If you are a writer with little reputation and not much capital, then your manuscript will have to be amazing for the person reviewing it to give it the green light, if you can even get it to the stage of being in someone's hand. To get that far, you are likely going to need to make a significant investment of your own money, in the hope that people will see it. Meanwhile, if you are a celebrity with good name recognition, who is writing an autobiography or a novel, then you may well get the green light from a publisher before you've even finished it. For the publishing houses, this makes good business sense. Whether the content inside is gold or not, the celebrity's book will likely get good sales figures just because their face is on the cover. Why take a chance on someone with hardly any notoriety when this other deal is a near-guaranteed profit? Sure, the publisher will need to pay the celebrity a higher fee, and the new author's book might turn out to be a hit bestseller, but they do not come around very often, so the publisher will often not do so well from these deals.

Now, is this morally correct and what is best for the industry? ... That is a difficult one to answer, and something I do not have the time to get into for this. For now, let's put whether this should be the case to one side, and acknowledge that it is the case. There are some indie book publishers that focus on young or minority authors who don't have much recognition, but they do not have the same sway or prestige that the large publishers have. Also, this is not to say that all books written by celebrities are bad, and the ones written by new authors are all excellent. Many non-writer celebrities have gone on to write excellent books, Richard Osmon springs to mind. However, it is near impossible for the publishing houses to judge a manuscript purely on it's contents, and not consider who wrote it. It would be possible to present all manuscripts to the people deciding which ones are 'good', with no names on them, but that wouldn't work all the time, and people would inevitably try to find ways around it. The difficulty we all have, and the question that is really bugging me is, who gets to decide which manuscripts are 'good'? Annoyingly, I don't think there really is one answer.

If a manuscript does become a published book, then the reviewers and journalists and the people who bought it get to give their verdict on whether it's 'good' or not, which (in most cases) drives sales and success based on quality. However, only a tiny percentage of manuscripts make it this far. Going further back in the process, proof-readers and editors decide which parts of manuscripts are 'good', several people at the publishing house go through it and decide whether it is 'good', plus more people that I don't have enough industry knowledge to consider. Ultimately, the first person who has to decide whether the manuscript is 'good' or not, is the person who is writing it. Before they send it off to anyone, they must be proud of it and consider it worthy of publication. And, they must consider themselves worthy of publication. 

This is a very difficult balance to strike, since a writer may say to themselves "I know that I can do better than this, I don't want to be judged based on this manuscript, because I know I'll be able to write better things in the future. I'll wait until I've got something that is truly the best I can offer." Equally, an author may say "I think that what I've written is really great, but I've never had anything published before, and hardly anybody has seen it. I don't know if this is actually good, or if I'm just telling myself that because I've put so much into it." 

In both of these cases, the author will likely not ever even attempt to get published, because of how they perceive themselves, and not their manuscript. Whether these perceptions come from low self-esteem, negative feedback from others, or institutional norms or criteria (stated or unstated) that they do not seem to fill, they cannot be separated from their work. I, try not to look back at the things that I have written for this, but I have a couple of times. I find myself questioning whether this is really worthy of being published, but I don't know if it's because the writing is bad, or because of how I view myself. Also, if my opinions of myself are in some way attached to this writing, and people read it and hate it and make, comments, then how would that affect my (or anybody else's) self-esteem or view of myself? Is risking the consequences of that a good idea? I suppose that we all need to leap at some point, but should I do it now, or try to get better first?

Am I right to write? 

*Statista, 2022.