Your Entitlement is Wild
You’re not owed an audience or riches because you call yourself a writer. Focus on what you have and what you can control.
By all accounts, I should be lamenting. I should be flipping tables, screaming into pillows and swallowing the feathers. I worked in book publishing, networked into oblivion, built my socials, and spent two decades publishing essays, short fiction, and two books with traditional publishers — yet, here I am. A career on life support. Agents wincing over my second book’s numbers (perhaps you should abandon fiction?). No editor clamoring for new work. My royalty checks might buy me a cup of bodega coffee — if I’m lucky. When I was younger, I was a hot commodity. But with the passing of time and many mistakes made, I’ve become a nobody.
I could be whining. Until I remembered that the results of my work have nothing to do with the caliber or quality of my work. Or who I am as an artist. I’m not lesser than because my recent Bookscan numbers are an abomination. There are many factors to success — some of which are in our control, many of which are not. Algorithms, gatekeepers, an eroding attention economy and the ubiquity of video — we may compose the most beautiful words but we only have so much control over how many people see them.
