When I decided to self-publish When Darcy Met Lizzy last December, I believed I wanted to accomplish two things:
Avoid debt from the high costs of self-publishing.
Find an audience.
But, if I were being honest with myself, the reasons were a little more complicated.
There are many reasons why writers write. Some writers write to answer questions that consume them; some write for joy; others write for therapy (I disagree with Alice Notley’s statement that writing is not therapy), or as a release or spiritual practice. But, while I am not prepared to make any universal, grand statements about what motivates people to write, I feel confident in claiming that there are only a few reasons writers seek publication:
Financial gain
Validation/attention
This is not to say that writers are sitting around at home submitting to agents and editors so they can get rich and buy New York penthouses (although this may be the case for some). Instead, I think writers engage in the masochistic shitshow that is the submission process because they want more time. More time to write, more time to read, and ultimately more time to live and thereby acquire the depth of experience required for writing.
For example, I spend a lot of time daydreaming about different concepts and stories, and researching random and niche pieces of history, like 19th-century British naval warfare. Wouldn’t it be so much more pleasurable to exchange this creative work, this beautiful and transcendent time of thinking and dreaming, for money? Because if I did exchange this work for money, it would mean that the time I give to work is also the time I give my soul and desire.
A short (I promise!) explanation of capitalism:
It took me a long time to understand how capitalism works. I intuitively knew it was behind most (but not all) of my existential depression, but I was afraid I wouldn’t understand it because the only class I dropped out of in college was Economics. Also, I was tired of getting into arguments with capitalists and socialists without truly understanding the subject matter. After years of reading and discussing economics with my partner, I genuinely have my own opinion about capitalism. An opinion I am about to share with you all.
So, what follows is “the brief guide to capitalism for artists who want to understand why work makes them want to kill themselves”:
First, you must understand value. Everything–from this newsletter (if I charged for it) to the laptop I am using–has a value based on the time it took to produce it. Marx referred to this as Socially Necessary Labor Time (SNLT).
SNLT is the average amount of time required to create a product.
Let’s pretend I get super into building computers and decide to make my own. It takes me 400 hours to build a computer myself. Is my homemade computer worth 400 hours of labor time? No, because Apple can make a MacBook in three hours. If I tried to sell my computer based on my 400 hours, no one would buy it because they can just go out and buy a MacBook for much cheaper.
Money is how we measure and trade time across companies and borders.
So, in a capitalist society, we’re not selling our physical and intellectual labor; we’re selling our labor time. This means we’re selling our ability to work for a set amount of time. In the U.S., if you’re privileged enough to work a 9–5, this is 8 hours a day, five days a week. This is your labor time.
This creates a class divide:
Working class: You must sell your time to survive.
Capitalist class: You own the means of production (like the tools or the office), which allows you to buy other people’s time.
If the capitalist class directly paid for your time, there would be a direct exchange of value, and there would be no profit. So, if it takes you 3 hours to build a computer, and the company sells the laptop for the cost of paying you for your 3 hours, it would be an even trade from the consumer to the capitalist to the worker.
Companies make their profits in the gap between two types of time:
Necessary Labor Time: The hours you work to produce enough value to cover your own wage (the 3 hours to make the computer)
Surplus Labor Time: Every hour you work after you’ve paid for yourself (the remaining 5 hours of the workday)
To sum up, if a computer has a value of 3 hours, a capitalist will only make money if you, the worker, can build the computer in 3 hours and then continue to work for free for five more hours.
In a world of declining literacy rates, where the average book sells only 12 copies (more on this coming in a few weeks), the only books that are really making money right now are romances and mysteries. Consider HBO’s latest queer project, Heated Rivalry.
It’s based on a book by Rachel Reid in a series that has sold 650,000 copies since 2018. While publishing houses rarely publish data on how much literary fiction sells, the romance market is growing. According to Publishers Marketplace, “year-to-date print sales [are] up 24 percent from the same period last year. A total of 51 million units have been sold in the past 12 months, nearly doubling sales from four years ago. While some of this growth can be attributed to Rebecca Yarros’ Onyx Storm, which sold 1,288,300 hardcovers across deluxe and standard editions in its first week, the category shows double-digit growth even excluding the Yarros.”
I am not going to dis romance writers because I myself wrote a romance novel and I fucking loved it! But was writing When Darcy Met Lizzy remotely as hard as writing my first book, The Family That Carried Their House on Their Backs? No way. And yes, part of what made it easier was that I copied Jane Austen’s plot. But I’d argue that doesn’t make much of a difference because romance novels, like all of genre fiction, rely heavily on beats. These are things you’re expected to do at a specific page count. As Dr. Anna Lembke, author of Dopamine Nation, says of her addiction to romance novels, “I am now sadly in possession of the knowledge that if you open any romance novel to approximately three-quarters of the way through, you can get right to the point.”
There’s comfort and safety in a formula. It doesn’t make it less inventive; it doesn’t mean you have less talent or that you’re less creative, but it does mean that writing takes a lot less time. Especially if you’re a professional like Rachel Reid, who clearly possesses both the habits and talent to churn out a book a year (to be fair, her work did take a long time to generate massive sales and a lot of it had to do with her work being recommended on social media. Later on I will try to make the point that social media won’t make a huge difference to your career and I recognize that Rachel Reid is an exception to that point.)
There’s a reason people are hungry for romance right now. Our attention span is nominal, we’re exhausted, and we just want to feel good. So the beats of a romance novel act like a consistent delivery of dopamine to your brain. You know precisely when you’re going to feel good and how, and you begin to crave it, just like you would any other kind of drug. And, Amazon wants to keep you on your Kindle just like Netflix wants to keep you on your TV. As Netflix’s CEO has publicly stated, he’s not worried about Disney or Apple. His biggest competitor is sleep.
Reading literary fiction is hard work. Reading poetry is hard work. It doesn’t deliver dopamine at a consistent and steady pace. And so how can the consumer (reader or film connoisseur) fight literal billion-dollar industries invested in building media and technology designed to keep you gorging yourself on content? You’re at war right now, and you probably don’t even know it. You’re at war for your time, for your rest! Let alone your intellectual or spiritual growth.
So, how does all of this equate to Socially Necessary Labor Time? If people aren’t buying books, but they are buying romance, and (based on the minimal publishing pace of a single author) a romance novel can be written in a year, then the SNLT of a book is a year.
So what if you spend 10 years writing your hybrid lyrical novella about Proust? The value of that book will still just be 1 year. Not only that, your publisher (should you have a publisher) won’t want you spending those nine extra years on the book because they’re a waste, because they go beyond the SNLT. There’s no profit in it. They want you churning out books at least once every three years, if not faster. (Take a look at all the indie bestsellers, and most, if not all, match this cadence. Think Brandon Taylor or C. Pam Zhang. Message me if you think I am wrong.)
But! It gets even worse! If your book can be published in 2018, like Heated Rivalry, and still be relevant in 2025, you’ve got yourself, and more realistically, your publisher (who owns the means of production), a true hit. So, the SNLT of a book is not just the time it took to write the book, but also the time the book remains present in the consumer’s mind. And, unless your book wins a Pulitzer, like Martyr!, your lyrical, hybrid work of fiction is likely not to remain relevant in the consumer’s mind for long. And how do you stay relevant in the mind of a consumer?
The landscape of publishing, journalism, and film has changed dramatically in the past twenty-years. Newspapers, movie theaters, and books have been replaced by platforms for digital delivery of content. Like news apps, Instagram, Netflix, and Kindle. We’re living in the age of the platform industry, which is essentially where the majority of reading either begins (people are more likely to buy print books on Amazon) or takes place on an eBook (where you can impulse buy anything you want) or through audio (the fastest growing area of books by far), how you stay relevant in the consumer’s mind is by feeding the algorithm. And feeding the algorithm with more posts or reels isn’t enough. You need to create more art to be sold and promoted again. So, the more you’re in people’s feeds, the more the algorithm promotes your work, the more people buy your product, etc.…
What does this mean?
The market has standardized the speed of creativity. And you will literally break your neck trying to maintain that speed. And when has speed ever truly been conducive to creativity?
If the market has standardized the speed of creativity, then that means that the SNLT, or socially necessary labor time, i.e. how much your art will be worth in the eyes of the market, is going to match the fastest product with the most returns. For example, your indie film about the existential experience of childbirth is going to be worth the same as a made-for-Netflix movie like Nonna’s, that’s very cheap to make and can be released quickly to keep users engaged and always watching TV. So, it will be harder to get the funding for your film because it’s competing against the standard of Nonna’s.
Also, in true Marxist theory, art used to fall into a different category called “unproductive labor.” This means that it doesn’t produce surplus value for the capitalist class. But, if you sell your book to Penguin or Netflix and they take a cut of your work and then heavily market it for increased gains, they’ve turned your art into “productive labor.”
I believe that in 2026, the algorithm is the new Socially Necessary Labor Time. In 2026, a book’s value is no longer the time it takes to write, but the frequency with which it must be ‘fed’ to the platform to stay relevant.
Writing and craft have been replaced with content generation.
TLDR:
So you might have started this essay thinking that it is theoretically possible to sell your work (your labor time) to a publisher and generate enough money to buy yourself some more time, but, in reality, unless you are one of the lucky few (and I mean 50 out of hundreds of thousands), your work will either:
Have no value to the market, or
Be valuable to the market, but to remain valuable, you will have to continue delivering content at a steady pace to the capitalist beast that is the platform industry.
And most importantly, when you sell your work, you might get an advance, and if you’re lucky, a share of the profits, but you won’t get ownership. Which means you still don’t own the means of production. Which means that, even after all of this, you still must exchange your labor time for money. You are still exactly where you started.
To be continued next week.
