Real writers abandoned readers seven decades ago and sold out to the
Publishing Welfare Complex
This isn’t a conspiracy. It’s an incentive structure writers and readers are forced to live in.
It’s our literary culture, built by the institutions that don’t need readers to survive.
Schools and universities that shape and flatten our taste.
MFA programs that credential “creative writing” and turn it into a career track.
Grants and fellowships that subsidize the culture and promote prestige.
The gatekeepers: agents, editors, judges, publicists, and sensitivity readers who decide what gets amplified.
When writers don’t need, or no longer have, readers to write for, they write for the machine, the institutions that can elevate them.
When the committee becomes the audience, the committee becomes the style.
What has this new culture given us?
Zero literary celebrities in the 21st century.
Is George Saunders our new Ernest Hemingway?
Is Ocean Vuong our new Robert Frost?
Is this the best the machine can manufacture?
Where are the transformative pieces?
Is Ottessa Moshfegh going to write the next transformative masterpiece that will activate readers who want to believe in modern authors again?
Thank god authors like Pynchon, Murakami, and Vollmann are still alive, but who will rise up, independently, and make people care about reading again?
Who will be our hero? Our villain? An anti-hero that will have people talking about books all across the world.
Even with billions of dollars in government funding for writing, we lost the artistic culture war.
Music, film, and the visual arts have had nowhere near the support, and have figured out how to create independent artistic celebrities without the support of studios, record companies, the government, or the academy.
Modern literary writers don’t even know the first step of activating readers.
That’s because the machine replaced readers with the institutions, which told us
with this new freedom, you can write whatever post-modern matrix novel you want, you don’t need to make people care anymore, push the limits of literature, because we got you, there will always be a safety net.
Now the money has run out.
The lack of literary culture and books that can activate readers has produced a post-literate group of bad readers.
Even worse, it gave rise to our dark shadow, BookTok.
A literary dopamine revolution that trained readers to care more about vibes than transformation.
Many of the independent bookstores that represented us are gone.
We gave up our distribution pathways, our worldwide web of literary advocates
for Amazon.
We were tricked into a fantasy, and ended up killing the most valuable artistic medium ever created, long-form written stories.
Who wrote those transformative stories in the past?
Sell-outs who didn’t rock the boat? Team players? Writers who kept their mouths shut and followed orders? Thinkers who worried about an HR department analyzing everything they wrote? Authors who fit into a neat political box?
Quite the opposite.
In the past, this wasn’t the case, but we’ve flattened the entire Publishing Welfare Complex only to allow writers who fit the traits above in.
The Literary Renaissance is here to change that.
If we don’t create the new pathways for our work to find the hundreds of millions of readers that want to believe in modern writers again, we’re toast.
Music and film had a streaming and equipment revolution. High-quality independent work was no longer gatekept by a lack of access to a studio or insane camera.
The artists who succeeded with that new freedom didn’t do it by sitting on their ass and waiting for an algorithm or publisher to make it happen for them. They had to go on tour, promote their work, make merch, raise money, network, and grind insane hours. Oh yeah, and make music.
Did they complain that self-promotion was killing their creative energy like writers?
Or did they get out there and make it happen?
Other artistic mediums have created thousands of niche independent celebrities and masterpieces in the 21st-century.
Writers have done nothing with the Internet revolution. Sitting on your ass and hoping that Tumblr, Substack, WordPress, or whatever will get your 20,000-word stream-of-consciousness short story out to ravenous readers is beyond dumb.
But that’s what we’ve collectively decided to do, because we were never allowed to take the training wheels off in this new artistic reality.
We don’t have unlimited time to solve this problem.
At some point, all the readers will be gone, or too nihilistic and doom-coded to believe.
You can already see this happening in the culture.
We don’t need more literary ambition.
Literary readers don’t want another Gravity’s Rainbow.
Difficult writing will never be able to replace writing that touches the soul.
We need to push the limits as independent writers, but we aren’t in the academy anymore. You don’t get an A or a grant for being the most brilliant writer in the room.
You get readers by balancing transformation, entertainment, and complexity so readers stay motivated enough to finish.
We’ll rebuild a new culture and have our literary renaissance when we reprogram our minds to stop writing for institutions and start writing for readers who want to believe in something.
Readers who will spend hours of their time and mental energy reading your novel or back catalog.
They will only start believing when we stop treating them like a faceless rubric we can manipulate and get a 96% on.
If you are a modern author, you aren’t Walt Whitman writing to ‘the people’, you are writing to a specific reader, who wants a certain energy to help them transform.
I’m not writing nature poetry for NYC lit bros. When I think of my titles, live recordings, promotion, Instagram posts, and the vibe of what I am putting out, I am making it for readers who love nature and silence, and want what they feel in their favorite spot, translated to words.
What the Publishing Welfare Complex prevented us from doing, half a century ago, was becoming more than just wordsmiths.
It kept us stuck in the old model.
The overthinking writing community believes that if we take a step toward something more than just writing, we’ll be sell-out influencers.
There’ll be a literary renaissance meme coin pump-and-dump next week.
Do you think that your favorite niche musician, filmmaker, or artist is an influencer?
No. But that’s because they offer you an integrated experience.
You love their art, but you also love what they stand for. You love their idiosyncratic behavior, the way they present themselves, and the entire package. You love that you’ve been supporting them since they started, or are now on the bandwagon, and can watch them do art during their peak.
As writers, we have an inherent advantage over every other artistic medium because we are masters of language, of storytelling.
But all of us are refusing to tell our story and create a story that our audience can be part of.
We don’t need permission. We don’t need Harold Bloom to tell our story and put us in the Western Canon.
The publishing industry will not be resurrected. The Publishing Welfare Complex will lose more money and attention each year.
What will remain are the writers who are willing to champion their work, their readers, and do their small part in creating a new literary culture.
Ian! What I like about you is that you force me to look in the mirror and admit I am not doing nearly enough to make this dream a reality. Thank you for everything that you do!
Beautifully written, thank you. I read something along these lines some time ago, and I’d like to underline a few ideas.
I’m convinced there’s a category of truly talented writers who will never make it. I’ve seen some of them falling inexorably. Unfortunately, there are several obstacles that I can’t fully unpack here in a comment.
The problem for writers is that our art isn’t "instantaneous" or fast-food style. With music, you make a track, publish it on social platforms, and it takes less than ten seconds for a listener to decide whether they like it or not. The same goes for painters, photographers, and other visual arts — they’re easier for the mind to register quickly.
But what do you do when you’ve written 400 pages? How do you convince a reader that your work is worth their time?
A reader’s attention span is extremely short. It’s easier to rely on trends, because they’re accepted formats — familiar, ready-made, easy to follow. But imagine being an unknown writer who has written a masterpiece. You’re trapped.
To put it briefly, I’m here on Substack to begin what you call a Renaissance-like revolution — and I’ve been doing this for a few years now, so I’m with you.
The problem is that people are now clinging to the gurus of How To and AI.
Maybe the real revolution is simply going back to bookshops and talking to people. Maybe... we should stop feeding the algorithm and play a different game this time. I'm wrong?