Entitled Writers Deserve Obscurity
Let me start this off by saying I am not a successful writer. At least not by my standards. I’ve made maybe $10 from my books in the past year. I might have three reviews across all platforms and books.
So I’m a nobody. But I recognize that I’m a nobody because I haven’t put in enough work to not be a nobody.
I was wasting time today reading a blog on Medium. Someone decided she’d had enough of not being Stephen King. She had decided that the world needed to hear the truth about being a writer.
“Wah, bitch, moan, cry, wah,” she said. “Me not make lots of bucks from books.”
This woman is, without doubt, a more successful writer than me. She has a few hundred followers on Medium and she has a book on Amazon with about a dozen reviews. She’s further along than I am.
But this person has two books published. Two. Fucking TWO. One of those TWO books is in French for some reason, and it has a shitty cover with an ugly vampire guy. The other one is about food. One of them was published in 2010 and the other in 2012.
IT HAS BEEN TWO YEARS SINCE SHE HIT PUBLISH.
IT WAS TWO YEARS BETWEEN THE FIRST PUBLISH AND THE SECOND PUBLISH.
So her argument boils down to “you just can’t pay the rent if you want to be a writer.” That’s her argument. That’s all she has.
What’s the real reason she’s unsuccessful?
Two books in four years, one of them in French. That means she has written ONE BOOK IN ENGLISH IN FOUR YEARS.
This is not uncommon. Writers have such a sense of entitlement about their precious fucking words. I have written two whole books, we say. How dare you not praise my asscheeks? I am a WRITER!!
If that “writer” had produced 10 books in the last four years, I would be slightly more sympathetic. Slightly. If she had written 30 or 40 great books in 10 years and was still not able to scratch a couple dimes together, then I would say, “you’re right. Some people just can’t win in the writing world.”
But she hasn’t written 30 great books in the last 10 years. She has written two books the quality of which I can’t say because I’m not going to pay her 10 fucking dollars each for the Kindle version of her books, especially one that’s in French.
This is really important. You don’t just publish two books in four years and then earn the right to say, “derp, writing is a shitty job. You just can’t get rich.”
Later in her article she links to some other no-name writer (with three whole books since 2006) who — surprise! — also can’t sell shit and also charges over $10 for the Kindle version of her books.
You can charge that much if you’re a known figure in your field or genre and have written a great book. But if you’re just some literary fiction moron or food reviewer who nobody has ever heard of then no, you don’t get to charge that much unless you have an amazing marketing-related reason for doing so and a great sales plan.
This traditionally-published genius then ends by saying something like, “welp, I guess you just have to write for the love of it, because you’ll never make money. Isn’t that why we all write anyway?”
Yes, you lazy writer. That is why we write. But some of us just like writing more than others, which is why we also make deliberate plans to turn our favorite activity into a self-sustaining business, so that we can keep writing and keep selling to keep writing more to sell more and write more.
Remember: Nobody owes you shit. Just because you published a book doesn’t mean everybody has to read it. If you can’t make people want it, you deserve obscurity. You’ve earned it.
