The rusted gate

Creative freedom is finally in our hands — though we still find it hard to grasp.

Ever since I was a kid, I wanted to have a book published. Hard covers, a spine, my name on it.

The process, as it was described to me by English teachers and publishing guides, sounded punishing. You mailed out unsolicited manuscripts with self-addressed stamped return envelopes and waited.

Mostly, you waited …. to be rejected. If you were lucky, you waited for years to get a reply. You paid your dues in postage and silence, and one day—maybe—you got chosen.

When I was in my 40s, I finally got a book published, which made it easier to get a second book published and to get an agent, and so forth.

I had my club membership card at last.

The publisher took 92% of the list price, and in return, I got my words on paper and available for sale somewhere in my local Barnes & Noble.

For a long time, that felt like the only legitimate path.

Sure, there was always “vanity publishing,” but it carried real stigma. It was shorthand for self-delusion, or at least that’s how it was talked about. For people whose work wasn’t good enough to be published, so they had to pay to see it in print.

The message was clear: if a publisher didn’t choose you, it didn’t really count.

Wrestling, as I often do, with impostor syndrome, I absorbed the belief that legitimacy came from being selected. That publishers were the imprimatur.

Without them, you weren’t a real author.

Over the years, I worked with half a dozen publishers. Some were staffed with kind, thoughtful people. Others were faceless, global corporations. The deals were generally the same. I did most of the work. They took the lion’s share of the revenue.

Early on, there was some promotional support. I was interviewed on NPR radio shows. Once, I was even on CNN. But over time, those opportunities faded. Increasingly, I was expected to bring my own audience, maintain a social presence, and promote relentlessly.

Production, distribution, promotion—the things publishers were supposed to handle—were quietly shifted onto my shoulders.

The editorial process offered little value. Most of the feedback I received amounted to typo fixes and minor grammatical corrections. The golden age of legendary editors like Maxwell Perkins was long gone. I wasn’t being edited so much as processed—my files moved along inside a large corporate system.

I designed and illustrated most of my books, which meant I had to deliver a finished product, all ready to print. Another expense quietly shifted from the publisher to me.

I liked making my own books, but more and more, it felt like I was paying with my time and labor simply to remain inside the system.

At the same time, I was watching something else happen. People were publishing fan fiction, ebooks, crowd-funded projects, and deeply specific niche work that traditional publishers had no interest in—not because it was inferior, but because it didn’t fit a mainstream economic model. These creators weren’t being supported or discovered. They were going to their audiences directly.

The more I watched this, the clearer it became: publishers weren’t helping specialized authors reach hungry readers unless the authors did all the work themselves.

The gate was still there. It just wasn’t doing much.

The power and promise of publishing, as I see it, is the ability to say: I can find readers for this. I maintain the appro­priate network; I possess the appro­priate influence. Of course, that promise was only ever par­tially true … but nowa­days it is simply: not. Which isn’t to say books don’t find readers—obvi­ously, they do—but I don’t believe any pub­lisher presently feels they can manage the process with confidence; with the snap of a lever. Nowadays, it’s all raffle tickets—all pachinko flow. — Robin Sloan

The moment that finally clarified things for me was when my latest publisher went bankrupt and was absorbed by Penguin Random House. I had always thought of both Penguin and Random House as the crème de la crème of publishing, so I was quite excited—like I’d gotten a back-door entry into the hallowed halls.

What I discovered instead was indifference. They did a careless job with How to Draw Without Talent. I meant nothing to them. They contributed almost nothing, despite taking an enormous share of the royalties. And my book languished.

Decades after I first sent those envelopes into the ether, it had become possible for anyone to print a book with the click of a button and make it available directly to readers.

Technologically, everything had changed.

Psychologically, I was still laboring under the old rules.

The lingering belief that doing it yourself made the work lesser. That legitimacy came from outside approval. That success meant passing through institutions with their own priorities and agendas.

Those expectations weren’t just psychological. They were physical, too. What a real book was supposed to look like: a jacket, a certain size, a certain weight, printed on paper, or released as an audiobook. All of that made sense when the goal was to move units through bookstores. But those things aren’t requirements if you’re working directly with readers, listeners, or viewers. They’re conveniences to mass production, not creative necessities.

Once you step outside that system, the form itself loosens. A book can arrive in installments, in email, in PDFs. It can live alongside videos or drawings or audio. It can be something shared quietly, or slowly, or as the reader watches you write it, livestreaming on YouTube.

The shape doesn’t have to obey the old rules anymore.

We no longer need to measure what we make by standards designed for someone else’s business model.

We have the tools to make incredible things.

We can share them widely, narrowly, or not at all. We can publish them ourselves, or keep them private, or give them away. And we can stop looking at our work through a prism of success inherited from people with very different goals.

Setting our own rules—about what we make, how it looks, and how it reaches others—puts the power and the possibilities back in our hands.

Your pal,

Danny