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About a year ago, when my child was a few months old, he started refusing to nurse. It was devastating in ways both mysterious to me and not, but I was determined to keep trying. My lactation consultant couldn’t do much for me at that point except tell me to wait it out, but she did recommend another LC in the area in case I wanted a second opinion. This new-to-me consultant had an Instagram account—a popular one. As soon as the algorithm figured out that I was pausing for longer on her videos than I usually do while scrolling, I saw every new post, every new reel, every new event she was promoting. Her content tended to be reassuring and educational, centering parental mental health alongside babies’ needs, and I learned a lot about things I never imagined I’d find fascinating.
I was also impressed with her hustle; she often used TikTok trends and other mimetic video formats to share bite-sized information which she then expanded on in the captions. I could never, I always thought.
I promise you; this is not actually an essay about babies or lactation. It’s an essay about capitalism.
Ursula K. Le Guin’s 2014 speech accepting the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters is mostly known for this one incredibly quotable line: “We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings.” It’s a good reminder, certainly. But when I came across the speech recently, what stood out to me most was the middle, where Le Guin called out the publishing industry and the writers who capitulate to its whims:
Right now, we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximise corporate profit and advertising revenue is not the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship.
Yet I see sales departments given control over editorial…And I see a lot of us, the producers, who write the books and make the books, accepting this —letting commodity profiteers sell us like deodorant, and tell us what to publish, what to write.
I was nodding furiously at my computer screen when I read this. But in writing this essay, I kept coming back to this idea of writing to the market, and thinking about how difficult it actually is to do. Lincoln Michel pointed this out in his newsletter, recently: “Writing effectively to formula is a skill. Most authors fail. Indeed, it’s worth remembering that most ‘commercial fiction’ flops commercially. The majority of works aspiring to ride the buzziest trends disappear into the same dustbins of literary history as everything else.”
Plus, there’s a world of difference between being sold and being told to sell yourself. On the surface, anyway, being a writer whose publisher is selling them to the world seems pretty great—the implication here is that your publisher would be doing a lot of the work, putting marketing dollars behind you, and you’d just have to show up and do what they ask of you. But the reality is that most writers are not really sold—they’re told, implicitly or explicitly, to sell themselves.
So, we try to do just that. Some writers are able to make their income from writing books, but the vast majority of us—the ones who feel the need to sell ourselves–do not. An Author’s Guild survey of 5699 writers found that the median income full-time authors made from their books was $10,000 in 2022; with other author-related income (defined as “editing, blogging, teaching, speaking, book coaching, copy writing and journalism”) it came to some $20,000.
Most writers are not really sold—they’re told, implicitly or explicitly, to sell themselves.
I found these results interesting, in part because I don’t really consider myself a “full-time author” precisely because most of my income (which has fluctuated over the years, but which aligns pretty well with the survey’s results in aggregate) does not come from writing books. For six years, while I was in graduate school, part of my income came from my stipend, and the rest came from freelancing, which was what I was doing before as well; since then, it’s come from my freelance work as a book critic, the very occasional teaching gig, copyediting for an infrequently published magazine, and editorial clients. According to the Author’s Guild’s definitions, then, I have been a full-time author with author-related income since I graduated in 2023; I have hustled, and hustled, and hustled, and yet my cobbled-together income is well below living wage for an adult where I live, and teeters rather closer to poverty wage territory.
So while we do, of course, need writers who know the difference between writing to produce something marketable and writing as an artistic practice, they will—unless they’re independently wealthy—have to spend a lot of their time making ends meet. Such writers have needs too—they need to be able to keep a roof over their heads, clothes on their backs, and food on their tables. They need to have the time, space, and means to expand their horizons and enrich their imaginations via whatever methods they choose. They need, in other words, an income.
When I’m writing fiction—especially when it’s going well—I’m not consciously producing a market commodity, but rather practicing my art. At the same time, though, I’m not not producing a market commodity. The hope, as much as I wish it didn’t need to be, is to make money off the damn thing at some point down the line.
And in order to do that, I feel the ambient pressure to sell myself like deodorant.
When I actually booked an appointment with the lactation consultant with the 100k+ Instagram following, she turned out to be unhelpful. We met over Zoom, and her main conclusion was blaming my mental health meds (prescribed by a psychiatrist who specializes in reproductive health) for my baby’s sleepiness and frustration at the breast. She suggested I visit further specialists (an occupational therapist; someone who did “bodywork,” whatever that is; an ENT) to determine what was going on with his oral motor skills and airways, none of whom would have been covered by insurance, and whom my pediatrician determined were likely unnecessary. I was back to square one.
Like so many confused and frustrated nursing parents, I turned to Reddit. I was just about ready to give up when someone on r/breastfeeding who’d gone through similar struggles recommended a third lactation consultant, one based in North Carolina, which meant that I would have to see her over Zoom as well. I was wary, but reached out anyway, and detailed our struggles so she’d be able to tell me if there was any point in meeting. The next day, the LC wrote me back—she was warm, encouraging, and incredibly hopeful; she even had her scheduler find an earlier time slot for me. She turned out to be more or less a miracle worker, and within a month, my baby was back to nursing enthusiastically (and has, in fact, not yet stopped).
This LC’s practice has a simple and somewhat janky website, and an Instagram account with 209 followers as of this writing, which is updated once every week or two to little engagement.
When I started trying to find an agent for my first not-terrible novel right after I graduated college (spoiler alert: I failed), I was already on social media, of course, and had been for years, but in the mid 2010s we were just rounding a corner (or so it felt to me) into a widespread proliferation of Twitter and Instagram within writing, publishing, and media circles.
It was also the era of the Personal Essay Industrial Complex; a whole bunch of media—both glitzy startups and legacy publications sleekening their online offerings—seemed to be cashing in on the confessional writing that people had been enjoying for years in the more anonymous blogosphere (think Livejournal, Open Diary, Blogspot, and WordPress). Like many writers getting their start during this era, I did my time bearing (and shaping) my soul for $50 a pop in the queasy hopes of going viral and maybe landing a regular writing gig in the aftermath, or (in my wildest dreams) even a book deal. And like the vast majority of my peers, that didn’t happen for me. I had to keep toiling the old fashioned way, writing a second novel I felt good enough to send to agents, and then a third, and then a fourth.
But throughout that time, even though no one said so explicitly, it seemed clear that if I ever wanted to publish a book, I’d need to try to be public in a certain kind of way, likeable (or, if unlikeable, at least funny as hell) in a certain kind of way, marketable in a certain kind of way. No one ever told me what that way was. I learned by example—by watching other people as they interacted on social media, mingled at New York City bookstores, and jumped through hoops while making it look like they hadn’t needed to train a day in their life to do it.
I’ve never been good at self-curation, though—I was and remain someone who can be cringe and sincere on main—so although I kept trying, I always felt like I was failing.
I’m certain on a gut level that there’s a difference between making art and producing a market commodity, but I don’t know how to parse it.
Now, between the growing wealth gap, hustle culture, and our collective inability to create (so far) a reality outside of capitalism, those of us who want a career in the arts, and who are trying to at least partially support ourselves with our art, feel even more pressure to market ourselves, to be visible online and off. Of course, having a social media presence doesn’t guarantee sales. How readers discover books is a murky and mysterious process. Yet when people ask, as they often do, “Do you need social media to sell a book?” and receive the resounding answer “No, you don’t!” there’s always an asterisk: No, you don’t, unless you’re trying to publish a memoir or an essay collection that relies on you being a known and marketable quantity; no, you don’t, but depending on your publisher, you might not get much in the way of publicity or marketing if you don’t do it yourself; no, you don’t, except how else do you expect all the people you don’t keep in touch with IRL but who might remember you well from school or that job or that family gathering to know about your book and pre-order it?
I’m certain on a gut level that there’s a difference between making art and producing a market commodity, but I don’t know how to parse it—whenever I try, I end up getting lost in the nuance, adding caveats upon caveats. What I do know is that I want to be read, and I want my books to touch people, to mean something to someone, to make others feel the way I have felt when reading literature I’ve loved. And in order to reach readers in my current time and place, and with the status I have, I need the apparatus of publishing to help with editing, copy-editing, designing, typesetting, printing, distributing, and marketing my books, most of which are things I don’t know how to do. In other words, I need help turning my art into a market commodity—and I need to sell myself like deodorant alongside it—in order to be able to continue making art at all.
The lactation consultant with the Instagram following is a brilliant content creator. She is incredible at marketing her services and using her skills to educate her audience. But she did not, ultimately, counsel me very well. I don’t mean to say that she was bad at her job (in my case, anyway) because she is a good content creator; she might have behaved the same way with me regardless. Yet I wonder how much the time and space necessary to be an influencer, even on a small scale, might take away from the reasons she became a lactation consultant in the first place. Maybe it’s a good tradeoff for her, but I’m curious why she got into this content creation aspect of her job (and it is, clearly, now part of her job), and whether she felt she had to in order to distinguish herself from other consultants or in order to make a living. Then again, maybe the content creation brings her more joy than consulting ever did; maybe she likes being able to speak to a broader audience and educate them about lactation and all its weird, wonderful glory.
The LC in North Carolina is not a content creator. She doesn’t, as far as I can tell, market her practice at all outside of being listed by The Lactation Network. I discovered her via word-of-mouth, and I have, since seeing her, recommended her to at least a dozen other people. She is a brilliant listener and communicator, and wonderfully counsels her clients. She might well have been all of this even if she spent hours of her week planning, shooting, editing, and captioning videos. Maybe she would have found it fulfilling to do so. But there are only so many hours in a day, and something would have had to get shorter shrift, whether her clients, her home life, her hobbies, her exercise, or her sleep.
What I’m trying to say is that there are two very different skillsets at play here: There is the work a person chooses to do, and then there is the need to market themselves as a person who can do that work. Being good at one does not mean being bad at the other, but it is possible to be good at both, neither, or only one of these things.
I am a writer; my artistic medium is language, preferably written down. I have also, from time to time, made content, and in the leadup to my book’s publication, I’ve amped up this aspect of my life; I do not, however, have the stamina to (try to) be a professional content creator.
Every few months, it feels like, discourse arises in one social media venue or another about the difference between art and content. I think some people use the terms interchangeably, while others use them to denote a stratification between so-called high and low culture. I am very aware—having thought about it at length—that my own discomfort with being associated with the word “content” comes from my perception of it, largely, as a produced market commodity.
Content, as I understand the term, is trying to sell me something: a product, a lifestyle, a way of thinking, a way of doing. Sometimes this is direct, sometimes it’s indirect, and sometimes it’s as subtle as creators who make money because the platform hosting their videos pays them for how many eyeballs land on their page, in order to put more ads in front of those eyeballs.
Art, on the other hand, may be for sale—under capitalism, artists often must sell their art in order to make a living—but artwork you buy (or rent, or receive for free) is not, itself, trying to sell you something.
I want to be clear: Content creation is labor, and I have no interest in demeaning it. Plenty of times, the line gets blurred anyway, and what we view as “content” could well be considered art. But art that isn’t viewed as content is also a labor of its own, and it is labor that is deeply devalued. It’s become so devalued, in fact, that writers are expected to turn themselves into content creators, into brands, in order to market themselves. In a recent essay for LitHub titled “None of Your Business: Why Writers Shouldn’t Feel Obligated to Share Too Much,” Debbi Urbanski wrote: “I think it’s time to question what we ask of authors, particularly new authors, in exchange for paying attention to them. Everything I wanted and needed to say is in my stories. So why then am I even writing this piece?”
She wrote that piece because she had to create content; she had to, she writes, talk to “her publicist a few months before her latest book came out to brainstorm angles for opinion pieces like this one that subtly promotes the new release.” But Debbie Urbanski—like, I suspect, the majority of writers—would rather use her voice in her art than in service of its marketing.
Why am I writing this piece, you may ask, especially if you happen to know that my new novel, Beings, has just come out, and that Electric Literature itself recently published an excerpt of it in Recommended Reading (with, coincidentally, an introduction by Debbie herself)? It started by texting with a friend about art and content, who said I should write an essay about it, and by the time the pitch was accepted, I realized I was only six months away from my book being published, and asked if we could time the essay to correspond with that, more or less. So here I am—I wanted to write this piece anyway, and I hope I would have, but now it’s become part of the work of marketing my book (please go buy my book).
As long as we live under capitalism, making art should be considered labor and as such be fairly compensated.
A lactation consultant isn’t an artist (though I’d argue that there’s an art to helping people), and nor should she need to be a content creator. The profession can exist without the trendy hashtagged trappings of content creation and marketing and social media influencers. But, as with many professions—especially those requiring people to essentially operate their own business whether they’d like to or not—marketing one’s self is ambiently expected. If three decades ago you were expected to have a business card, and two decades ago you were expected to have a website and a publicly available email address, and one decade ago you were expected to have social media accounts… now, it seems you’re expected to not only have all of the above, but to also churn out content in order to remind people that you exist, you exist, you exist, and you do a thing. How will anyone know about you if you don’t post? is an ever-present, if rarely directly spoken, undercurrent.
But bankers or hedge fund managers aren’t expected to go viral in order to make money. Doctors aren’t expected to have a platform in order to do what they do. Content creation is often seen as an alternate route, a way to make a living without being a doctor or a hedge fund manager, and the way to become one is, often, by professionalizing one’s hobbies or skills that may or may not fit into other professions. It’s hard to do, and it’s hard to succeed, just like it’s hard to succeed as an artist. Expecting artists to do both means expecting us to add yet another job to all the other ones we already have according to the Author’s Guild survey.
I firmly believe that as long as we live under capitalism, making art should be considered labor and as such be fairly compensated. But thinking of art that way can feel queasy, unhip, or even just totally anathema to the spirit of the thing, the mysterious magic of following one’s muse. And it’s true that the more time we spend trying to hustle for work and market ourselves, the less time we have to actually devote to the practice of art. It’s no wonder we’re all so tired.
Le Guin added a couple postscripts to her speech, one of which included this line: “There are a lot of us ‘people of the book’ who aren’t willing to define value only in terms of salability, or to become grateful fiefs of the market lords, but who intend to write and publish as we see fit and get a fair price for it.”
I am one of those people who is unwilling to define value only in terms of salability; but whether I and my peers will be able to write and publish as we see fit and get a fair price for it? That remains an open question.
