Trad-Pub vs. Technology: Never Bet On What Cannot Improve

Why technology and self-publishing, for all their flaws, are still a better bet for literature than traditional publishing

You decide to go to the beach. You lay in the sun and the ultraviolet radiation reddens your skin. You wade into the ocean and the waves crash into you. You eat a hamburger and some potato salad that was in the heat a little too long, but the beneficial bacteria in your gut hold strong, so you suffer no ill effects. You were exposed to the elements all day. Cells died and were replaced. You might do the same tomorrow; it’s a vacation.

Repeat this with a corpse, and you get putrefaction. There is no cellular self-repair. The skin falls apart. The blood turns acidic. The delicate equilibria of bacterial societies collapse. Waste gases build. Innards explode. The beach smells awful. If your dead body is submerged in water, it is dissolved and washed away. The elements win. We bury or cremate corpses because we do not like to see this.

This observation resolves the debate, on the locus of literature’s future, if it has one, between traditional and self-publishing. Never bet on what cannot improve.

No honest person will say that self-publishing solves all of literature’s problems. On the contrary, self-publishing is in a sorry state, due to Amazon’s centrality and the general enshittification of the Internet on which it depends. Technological capitalism is, in fact, evil; what it is doing to literature is unlikely to land among even the top hundred of its crimes. Generative AI is a menace. Platforms are a menace. Social-proof algorithms, which encourage manipulation and reward ragebait in the name of “engagement,” are a menace. In this context, self-publishing has an uncertain future.

But traditional publishing has none. Why? Because it is constitutionally incapable of self-improvement. What is its major innovation of the past half-century? The query system. Instead of getting read, you now send groveling pitch letters in which you beg middlemen called “literary agents” for scraps of attention. That is the one innovation. That is the one thing they’ve changed for us in the past fifty years; given that, we should expect no other changes in our favor. The odds are overwhelming that you will not get read, unless you pay a substantial sum of money—more than you’re likely to ever get back—for introductions because nepotism, unlike the poor door called the query system, actually works.

Technology generates new things, some of which are good and some of which are bad. Traditional publishing has generated one new thing, and it’s fucking query letters. Technology wins because its batting average is better than zero.

It is unsound to bet on traditional publishing. It is bad in 2026. It will be worse in 2027. It will be worse than that in 2028. You will eventually need a second-degree agent, an agent-for-agents, to get a literary agent. Arguably, you already do: a professor at a top-5 MFA program, or your family publicist, or someone you pay $0.37/word for a “manuscript assessment.” Nothing will get better, because there is no incentive to make anything better. Consider what would happen if publishing started selecting better writers. The personal friends given book deals would look worse by comparison. Publishers know better writing is out there. They don’t care. The privilege of listening only to themselves is what they’ve worked so hard for.

I used to work in venture-funded technology; no, I’m not proud of this. I spent most of this time in New York. We called it Silicon Alley—cringe, I know. The funding environment for loss leaders and consumer plays only exists on the West Coast, so we had to know the business world, and we learned the types. Finance was full of greedy smart people. Local government, in the Obama era, had a lot of idealists who were often just as smart, but never pedigreed. Fashion people, contrary to society’s image of them, were often level-headed and interesting. Management consulting had a mix of verbally fluent midwits and stealth-smart risk-averse family men. Lawyers were sharp but bitter. If you’re waiting for me to say that publishing people were the lowest of the low, then I’m sorry to disappoint you, because they weren’t. That distinction goes to real estate, although it does take a certain reptilian intelligence to succeed in that game. The people in publishing—to be clear, I’m talking about the upper management; I’m not going to slag editors making $40,000 per year—were pretty close to the bottom, though. If your startup hired a management consultant as its CTO, you knew the best programmers would trickle out over the next eighteen months, but it was not an immediate crisis. If your company brought in an executive from publishing, the time to freshen up on those binary-search-tree algorithms was right the fuck now. The 30th-percentile Ivy grads did two years in eye-wanking at Goldman Sachs and then went to Harvard Business School. The 20th-percentile Ivy grads got certified in that Agile Scrum bullshit and became the product managers torturing us spergs with 31 flavors of status meetings. The 10th-percentile Ivy grads ended up in media and publishing, and the ones who made themselves most socially pleasing to their superiors are now the people trusted to run this nation’s literary culture. Whoops.

To be clear, I do not apply this judgment to everyone who works in publishing. If that industry has a talent inversion—dumbasses on top, smart people at the bottom—it wouldn’t be the only one; I’ve seen it in dozens of companies. I am certain there are non-idiots in publishing. I just don’t know how one goes about finding them. The good people are gate-kept by shitty people. Someone somewhere is probably writing a very frustrating PhD thesis on how come somebodies end up trusting nobodies to connect them with other somebodies and, in the 2% chance that this person actually graduates rather than giving up and becoming a plumber, we may get our answer.

No one knows the future. No one can say for certain that self-publishing is the future, or that it will deliver a future for literature that anybody wants. We know what traditional publishing will offer us. More query letters. More throuple memoirs. More influencer novels that get six-figure deals while writers capable of real text go unread. Past performance is not indicative of future results, but sometimes it sets a convincing upper bound, and for publishing, even the ceiling is unacceptable. I would rather bet on technology, because it has some chance, than hitch my fate to what has none because it refuses to improve.