Publish or Perish
In academia, there is the phrase ‘publish or perish’. It means that if you want to be successful, you have to produce articles and get them published, or your career will stall or end. This is amazingly stressful and leads to a lot of unnecessary junk being produced. People will search for an idea that will get them into the latest important journal, instead of exploring something meaningful and worthwhile. Research and writing becomes a conveyor-belt to please an industry, rather than a path to creating unique, good-quality work.
With the rise of self-publishing, and access to social media sites paired with audiences’ voracious appetites and short attention spans, it seems as though this idea now exists everywhere. Produce content! Produce content! Produce content! It doesn’t matter how vacuous or full of typos and platitudes it is. Does it distract people for 10 seconds? Put it out there! That is what’s most important!
I am as guilty as the next person of sitting up at night scrolling through my various social media feeds looking for just about anything to divert my attention and help me wind down. This post is not meant to shit all over that. There is a place for it. In this post I want to talk about the stress that this puts on authors, particularly, authors who are focused on creating content larger than social media posts.
Someone I follow recently posted that she read that in order to be a successful erotica writer on Amazon, you should have a catalog of 50 books, and that until you reach that, you should publish two books a week. I also saw a post from another author who was feeling inadequate because he has ONLY published 42 books since December. Are you fucking kidding me?!
My first question here is: In this context, what is hell is their definition of a book? Seriously. According to the MasterClass wordcount guide, a solid novel should be between 80-100k words, with a minimum of 50k. A novella comes in at 10-40k. Novelettes, 7500-17k, and short stories 5-10k on average. These numbers are by no means set in stone, but they do represent the bulk of fiction length categories pretty accurately.
Let’s go with the smallest category up there, the short story. First, this is by definition NOT a book. It is a story. A short story. Big Difference! They come in at 5-10k words. Practically speaking, this means that every three days, the author has to come up with an idea, write a minimum of 5 thousand words, edit and tweak the story, then edit for quality control and spelling and grammar and such, then format the work, design the cover and finally post it to the site of their choice. Every - 3 - days. Now, up that word count and effort to slot in with the length of an actual book. Um….no.
I know that there are some authors out there who can just spew books out. (Thank you! We will eat your stuff up! It is amazing!) But, this is gonna be a tall order even for them. For the rest of us? WE ARE NOT MACHINES! We don’t have a staff of ghost writers and editors and we actually want to write good plots and engaging characters, and that makes these expectations quite simply, ridiculous.
Pushing out anything of quality at that rate is just not realistic, but that is what we are told we have to do if we are going to survive as authors. I do not accept this., and that thought of having to survive in a ‘publish or perish’ world was really stressing me out today, so I wanted to throw some opposition to the idea out into the ether. I have an idea for an awesome story. It has been brewing in my mind for a few months. I found a submissions call with a theme where it would fit. I have been working on it for a couple of weeks and you know what? It is shit. It sucks. It has good bones and may grow into something worth sharing with someone other than my most supportive beta reader, but it is not gonna make it there by deadline. It needs more time to mature. The story deserves better than a rush job. My readers deserve better than a rush job. And the editor of that anthology…she sure as hell wants better than this rush job. If I send this to her, she is gonna cringe the next time I submit something, and rightly so, and I want my reputation to be one that is associated with some thing good, not something that came off a high-speed conveyor-belt.
Stories do not emerge from their authors’ brains complete. They do not. Even the most experienced writer needs to edit. So please. Aspiring authors: do not sacrifice quality for quantity. Give your audience your best work, not just your speed. There are enough writers for all the readers out there to have something new new to read all the time, and the ones that truly love your work will wait for it and be all the more happy when you get it to them…polished and perfect!