It’s Time To Burn The Ships In Publishing

I still have a few readers out there who have zero concerns over entertainment industry blackballing issues. They’re firmly planted in the “it can’t happen to me” mentality, where “it’s okay” because “Trump supporters are mean!” or some nonsense. This is where most people would talk about fascism, but that word is losing all of its meaning these daysl, and that’s not actually fascist behavior in that instance. It IS communist totalitarian behavior, however. Which is in a lot of ways worse, as that form of government killed a lot more people, but for some reason we don’t talk about that in internet rants.

Before I get too far off topic dissecting different forms of evils that you don’t care about, I’ll get back to one you do: I learned that there is an author who had a manuscript rejected because multiple agents said this person “culturally appropriated” and that the author “doesn’t have the authority” to talk about this project.

That’s right. The piece was good, it would have been fine, but the problem is it would have had to come from a non-white author. 

The agents actively discriminated against an author because they are white. A white writer was told to censor what that person writes and that it’s not welcome in the industry because of solely whiteness.

Before you think this is an isolated incident in the entertainment industry, let me refer you to a couple of matters of blackballing that I’ve already uncovered in my personal experience and my investigative journalism. It’s constant. Conservatives cannot get jobs in the entertainment industry. Men now have problems getting jobs in publishing (to the point where I know several who have taken female pen names to get ahead, and it’s worked) and now apparently whites are unwelcome.

And this has been talked about a lot recently. Look up “cultural appropriation” with sci-fi authors and you’ll see the usual suspects of big name writers virtue signaling about it while doing whatever they want in their own writing. They want to shut you out and hold onto their status by lecturing you, even though half of them are hacks who only got there because of politics. It’s like the big Hollywood actors who go nuts about global warming, then guzzle fuel on their yachts and private planes. This hypocrisy happens in writing too.

But the end result of this “cultural appropriation” craze is that there’s no place for a white writer. I’ve been told by several editors to change names so that it has a “more diverse representation”. In essence, I’m told that I can’t put in a western civilization caucasian culture through names (of course, as a Hispanic writer, I may be culturally appropriating that now that I think about it…). If you can’t write that, and you can’t write other cultures, the logical conclusion is you’re NOT ALLOWED TO WRITE.

This is crazy in the land of the free, censoring what can be said and told only by certain segments of the population. It’s gotten so far out of hand that I’m to the point where I’ve advocated against gatekeepers before: but I think it’s high time writers write-off all traditional publishing. If this is the end result, you cannot create what you want, you cannot think the way you think, you cannot have been unfortunate to be born with a certain skin color, you cannot worship God and be outspoken about it, you cannot vote the wrong way and have it be known. That’s a lot of cannots! And that mentality is squashing the pool of artistic talent out there, as well as killing sales. Readers don’t want to be told what’s appropriate for them to read either.

I talked to an agent the other day about these issues and how for the simple crime of speaking out, there’s only one publisher who is ever even remotely likely to pick my work up at this juncture, and the agent didn’t disagree. What troubles me is that the agent didn’t seem to think that was a problem. For a debut novel, I actually had sales pretty respectable by traditional publishing forms. Last week I had an article that hundreds of thousands of people read and enjoyed. I should be on everyone’s radar. Reviews are all positive, and there’s a lot of them. Readers like my fiction and even more readers like my thoughts and journalism. One of the latest articles on LED lights usage and design excited a great interest among the readers.

So why would a middleman go against their best business interests like that?

It all comes down to blackballing again. And here’s where I call to you writers: burn the ships and don’t look back.

By which I mean get rid of these middlemen and gatekeepers who have this mentality. You don’t need them. You don’t need the contract they offer you to be legitimate in the world today. Amazon, evil corporate monopoly that it is, has leveled the playing field and gotten rid of all barriers to entry. A “real” publisher won’t market you anyway — they don’t spend resources on new writers, only established brands. You’ll be left in the wind there as much as you are on your own, but without control of your own product, and receiving a lower percentage on every sale for your work. There is literally no benefit to these middlemen’s existence. They are only there to tell you what you’re allowed to write and what readers are allowed to read. Their opinions might not even match up with readers at all. 

You are a real writer. If you’re getting good feedback on your work, don’t hesitate. Put it out there. That’s the only way to get ahead: especially if you’re white, male, Christian, conservative, any or all of those things. They gatekeepers hate you for who you are, and it doesn’t matter how good your work is. Stop giving those Christaphobic racist, sexist bigots validation by seeking yours through them.