i think the book publishing industry is uniquely terrible now compared to days of yore (10-15+ years ago) but i also think that it is as difficult to get Good Storytelling and Good Prose published as it has always been, relatively. my suspicion is that Good Writers (objectively, whatever that means) have run up against barriers of being sellable and marketable forever, and that every generation of artists becomes newly demoralized to their fresh unique circumstances of getting caught between that day and age's pincers of Keepers of the Writing Status Quo (MFA adjacent establishments), and the demands of the market and ITS status quo keepers (idk, TikTok?). hence, like clockwork, regular crashouts over not being able to publish My Good Prose and Storytelling, while "their" sugar diet trash sells like hotcakes
hasn't getting traditionally published always been about being a shrewd businessperson? it sucks and it's understandable why writers, artists, do not want to do this. "i could be making bank if i was just a sellout and wrote to market and cranked out 2 shitty romantasies every year" well 1) why don't you? something tells me it's not as easy as it looks, and definitely not as easy as it looks to make yourself write in a way that's unlike you 2) when i see a demoralized author resort to nontraditional publishing avenues because they shopped their novel around to literary agents as "written like an academic text with citations" or "a dense slow-building adventure that unfolds over 10 books" in today's environment and got told no - i can't say i'm terribly surprised by that, susan
there is an audience for these books, but you have to get past the censors. you have always had to get past the heist movie laser grid of what publishing houses are selling, what literary agents think publishing houses will accept, and what the market is loudly and proudly saying about writing and taste. that comes down to some (not total! some) capitulations on the author's end in story structure and pitching. defeatism from authors over stuff like this irritates me because no author today is the first author to have had to duck and weave bullshit in order to get published. sidestepping the laser grid altogether is honorable and a choice in and of itself, but while it is a different game, it's not like you suddenly have to become a businessperson to do it; you have to be one in traditional publishing too, or else you're going to have your destiny written for you
if it was only about getting published because Storytelling Good or Prose Good, then the masses of objectively forgettable lit slop wouldn't exist or get praised endlessly by the powers that be. as someone pointed out recently, The Sound and the Fury didn't win the Pulitzer, a probably okay book that is now largely forgotten did, so it's all noise you have to ignore and you have to find a way to not crash out when your work doesn't get the red carpet treatment, or even! decent treatment
i will always remember grrm talking about sex drugs & rock'n'roll and i'll always remember the entire concept of simmons' Hyperion and there's always the lessons of - idk - a tastemaker, a guard of craft, like le guin to undergird a Good Writer's efforts. i don't think simmons focused on the book's lament over the state of art and commercialism, or on the philosophy of Keats, in his pitch to publish the book. he probably focused more on the mystery and the space battles and literal sex drugs and rock'n'roll aspect to get it to sell, which is, ironically, what Hyperion is meta about. if you read A Game of Thrones' blurb, there isn't anything there about commentary on the state of fantasy as a genre, or on fantasy and historical fiction's tendency to valorize a past that never existed in order to blindly accept ideologies that have oppressed the marginalized for generations, but that is what the series is actually about. neither of these works read as "politics as a horse pill wrapped in bread" because the books' themes are not the goal of the literal plot, but a "close" read isn't necessary to glean these ideas either
even in the bottom-of-the-barrel circumstances publishing houses are forcing authors into now with tacky marketing and not providing editors, i still think the answer is to flip the slightly Machiavellian switch in your brain and adapt to the circumstances and learn to negotiate, think about why the slop sells, understand the similarly terrible circumstances of our artist predecessors and support fellow authors above all instead of being tempted with crabs-in-bucket mentality, which is the worst case scenario that the author world succumbs to on a large scale every few years instead of unionizing or making much of a solid community at all. rip author!twitter, no one misses you. i think i basically just said "git gud" in several paragraphs lol