It's painful to imagine how many stories have been lost to what is basically just capitalism. (long post ahead).
I'll start by saying this: my choice to self publish came from the fear of my work being censored.
I write a lot of very political themes in my work. There are things in virtually everything I write that I know not everybody will agree with; that I know could spark immense backlash from the wrong audience. There are things in my work that I know would make some publishing companies try to change my work or even turn away from me entirely to preserve their reputation.
I do not want my work to be changed on behalf of sales, or to preserve a company's reputation. So I ruled out that option almost immediately when it came time to publish.
Self publishing, however, brought me a whole new challenge: money.
Just one ISBN number costs 125 dollars, and you need one for every format of your book that you wish to sell. That's just for them to even be considered for the shelves, too. It's even more for extra copyright protections, printing the physical copies, and so on.
I am lucky enough that when it came time to work on publishing Mercy Is Dead, I hadn't moved out yet. I still have my parents to lean on for shelter, food, water, and other basic needs that are unfortunately behind a paywall in the United States, where I live.
Last month, I accepted a job as a part-time sales associate to earn the money I will need to publish Mercy Is Dead. I've since been able to get the ISBN number I would need for the eBook, and will next look into buying extra copyright protections that I might need.
I'm not only lucky to be able to put that money directly towards my publishing instead of to basic necessities, but I'm lucky I even have the job at all.
Imagine how many people cannot publish their work because even one of those things are different for them. Maybe their family is poor and their paychecks pay for their meals. Maybe they couldn't find a job that would accept them. Maybe they live in a country where their life is constantly at risk. The list goes on.
And what if these people have a better story than me?
There is always, of course, the internet. But even that seems to be punishing artists lately: Instagram's terrible algorithm that constantly changes, TikTok shadowbanning artists permanently with no explanation (source: it happened to me twice and I since have stopped trying). WEBTOON is hard to get big on because it prioritizes weekly updates (which is REALLY hard to maintain), Wattpad essentially functions as another publishing company in the way it amplifies what's currently making them money and ignores what isn't. Left and right, good cartoons get cancelled (Inside Job, cough) because the streaming companies care more about the money than the art. Don't even get me started on how the AI boom has hurt every single creative, no matter their medium. It's all a mess.
And I'm sure this isn't a new problem. Creatives have been punished for centuries: women having their work stolen and then being locked up in asylums, political creators being punished by fascist governments, so on. But it doesn't become any less painful when I remember it's an age old problem.
The silver lining to this is that there is an added beauty in the work that creatives put in just to be creative anyway. The hours hiding behind the customer service voice, or whatever job they did to survive. The torture they endured in those old asylums, and that they still endure in prisons. The fighting against AI and algorithms, and society and bigotry, and so much more. The strength in the face of adversity is what makes us so powerful, and is ultimately how we are and will be remembered in history. So I suppose it's not all grim.
All I wish is that we would learn from that history, and make life easier for those who wish to make art.
