Traditional Publishing, the Casino that Only Wants Self-Harm Gamblers

Recent discussions about publishing have drawn comparisons to gambling. I’ve written about it myself. People who say querying works are no different from those who claim to reliably win at slots because “I have a system.” They’re wrong—for a brief spell in the 2010s, I did game design for an online gambling company; I know how easy it is to make someone feel like they are winning when they are slowly losing, and my own aversion to insidious losses is why I prefer to ignore such people rather than defeat them in argument. In any case, gambling and game mechanics recur when one studies publishing and, the more I learn, the more I am convinced that traditional publishing might be more pernicious than casino gambling.

Gambling is a hard vice to rank, because its harm profile is so uneven. Drug abuse ruins nearly everyone who does not stop, but the corruption is gradual. No one becomes a junkie in three days, but nearly 100 percent of people who use serious drugs regularly will get hurt. Gambling, on the other hand, is done by millions of people at low stakes and does no real harm to most of them. The vast, vast majority of people who play poker or blackjack do not fall into debt, alcoholism, violence, or suicide. But when gambling does break lives, it can do so in a few hours. Additionally, it’s impossible to rigidly moralize about gambling because it, like eating, is something we must do every day. We constantly make decisions under financial, physical, and social uncertainty. Driving is a gamble, but we do it. Stock traders “provide liquidity” and top-tier card players “provide tutelage” and employees deciding whether to risk their jobs by looking for new ones are “advancing their careers” and none of this is wrong but all of it is gambling.

In the gambling world, there tend to be three kinds. The first are the casual gamblers, who are the overwhelming majority. They expect to lose. They set limits; if they run out of money, they stop. They would not think of going into debt (for most of the twentieth century, what we call “no limit” poker was called “table stakes” and “no limit” truly meant no limit; for this reason, it was seldom played, except in movies) to see out a hand of cards. The second are the professional gamblers. They track their wins and losses, play the skillful card games at which reliable winning is possible, and tend to prefer low-stakes games for their income, treating the high-stakes ones and tournaments as entertainment. It’s not a glamorous life. On the contrary, it’s tedious and it can be dangerous, not due to gaming losses but the environments in which pro gamblers often find themselves. Most professionals keep spreadsheets and know their win rates and variance per hour; the job also requires keen auditing of one’s own emotional state, because a slight drop in proficiency can turn a slow winning grind into a quick loss. There are probably only a few hundred true professionals in gambling; high-tier casual players who win in skill games more than they lose, but not enough to live on, are more numerous. The third set are the problem gamblers, also known as self-harm gamblers, who reliably spend money they can’t afford to lose. They exist for every game—slots, blackjack, lotteries. They don’t intend to lose money (no one does) but they are driven by compulsions so strong, and delusions so seductive, that it becomes impossible to stick within their limits. Wins and losses both make them play more. None of them believe they’re destroying their financial futures; they’re all, in their minds, one lucky night away from salvation.

Casino executives say that it is not their job to distinguish, among the “whales” who lose tens of thousands of dollars in a single night, between the wealthy patrons who consider the losses an entertainment expense and the self-harm gamblers destroying their lives. They would have a point; the problem is that they know so much about their customers’ histories that this argument becomes untenable. Card counters—skilled blackjack players—are identified within minutes and ejected, and this was true even in the 1990s. It is hard for an industry possessing the most extensive commercial surveillance technology in the world to claim credibly that it does not know to stop self-harm gamblers.

To be clear, card counting is not cheating. It’s simply playing well. Casinos could easily change their rules to make it unprofitable. For example, blackjack tables could set fixed wagers, as the edge fluctuates but favors the house on average, and it is only by varying the bet size that a player can profit. The reason they will not make these changes is that they want players to have a sense of autonomy. Slot machines used levers for decades longer than they were necessary, because the physical action gave people a sense of influence over a result that had in fact been determined by a computer. Gambling houses insist on total control over the customers they choose; they want the ninety-nine amateur card counters who will lose their edge under casino conditions, but not the one whose skills hold up.

I have probably made it clear that I am cautious about, but not rigidly set against, gambling. I used to play poker at a high-tier amateur level, and I see the issue from both sides.

Publishing is gambling. That doesn’t mean it’s bad. Predicting the willingness of a stranger to buy printed text written by someone else is difficult. You can spend $200 on Amazon ads and not make a single sale. You can hire a $5,000 editor for a book no one will read. You can spend $100,000 on the querying process and still not get read. Few people have the stomach for this kind of variance; most writers don’t. Institutions claim they are here to help. They tell readers they select and publish the best texts so they can buy reliably good books. They tell authors they ensure career-worthy publicity and tenured teaching spots for anybody who writes well. They tell the public that deserving work is made visible, because they exert the effort to find and distribute it. And do they deliver? Ask any writer. Ask any reader. The consensus is that they do not. The game still runs, though, because there is prestige associated with being a published author—a famous author, a bestselling author—that is worth more money than you have to people who have a thousand times more. The high rollers can afford losses and write them off as the costs of prestige casual gaming. You and I cannot.

Last week, someone reached out to confirm much of what I’ve been saying. She’s been published by a “Big 5” house at a lead-title level. During a recent round of negotiations, she was told she’d not have a dedicated publicist for her next book, but should hire her own because “it’s what career authors do.” The standard retainer for a good book publicist is about $10,000 per month, and there’s usually a three-month minimum—sometimes six. These numbers are out of reach for most people. Authors are often fired by their editors and agents for being unable to take two or three weeks off work around a book launch. Traditional publishing’s view is that anyone who isn’t willing to put the day job at risk isn’t a real writer. Sometimes these rules are made explicit, and sometimes they are left unspoken, but they are ruthlessly enforced. Agents and editors, when they are not in the company of authors, refer to those who use their advances as income rather than investing the funds into marketing, as having “eaten” their advance; as far as accusations go, this is almost as serious as plagiarism or fabrication, though there is no rule against it. Novelists who even mention their non-writing jobs (nonfiction has different rules; in some cases, a career can provide topical credibility) to their agents or their editors are typically ghosted for the breach of protocol—it is a serious offense to identify as anything but a writer who absolutely must become a career author and will destroy himself in the attempt, for no other life has value. This is how cults work.

Traditional publishers despise the subsidy presses (“vanity presses”) that charge for the service of publication. To be clear, some of those outfits are predatory. I won’t defend the ones that mislead writers about their prestige (they have none) or services they offer. This said, traditional publishing’s claimed moral high ground is suspect, as becomes clear when we examine the history. What we call “traditional publishing” has only existed for about a hundred years. Before that, authors had to secure funding, editing, printing, and distribution services in separate places, navigating a market in which they had little knowledge and no leverage. Quite a number of authors took interest-bearing loans from their printers and died in debt. The book industry was, like the gambling industry today, a seedy business in which unapologetic predators and opportunists thrived. This made it hard for people of position to get involved with books. In this light, I call the early 20th century the First Respectability Crisis; what we call “traditional publishing” was born to resolve it.

The old system of cutthroat business and operational chaos was replaced by the one-stop shop model we know today, wherein authors only need apply for the grant (what a publishing deal, in essence, is) and the editing, printing, and distribution will come with it. “Money flows to the author,” we are told. Seedy gambling halls were replaced by alabaster institutions. Of course, it had a lifespan. Readers and writers began to view the preferences of these organizations as oracular—if a professional editor judged a book as not worth anybody’s time, why should we bother second-guessing?—and every could-be author wanted into this new system. Submission pipelines became congested, and it became impossible to get editors to read, and the so-called vanity presses made a comeback because the rising generation of writers was increasingly pushed to rely on them. This Second Respectability Crisis peaked in the middle of the twentieth century, and publishing resolved it by reinventing what had, until then, been a niche role: the literary agent.

Before about 1995, anyone who wanted a literary agent simply went and got one. If you could write five sentences without making a grammatical error, you flew to New York, entered the office of the literary agent you wanted, and were signed by 9:30. The catch is that no one admitted to using one. “Real writers” were good enough to rely on direct submissions—this wasn’t the truth, but the myth held—and keep all of the proceeds, instead of offering a 15-percent cut in exchange for certain acceptance. “Real writers” need help to get in. You didn’t admit to having an agent until you were at the point where everything you wrote got read, at which point you could truthfully say that the business needs of your operation had become a distraction from your writing and this was a sensible service to hire.

In the old days, having a literary agent guaranteed both less and more than it does now. In 1986, any literary agent could get a manuscript read by any editor in the nation, but none could guarantee acceptance. Some work didn’t meet the cut; back then, text mattered, and there really was a cut. Having one’s work seriously read and rejected was—as it should be, because not everything is worth publishing; I’ve written tons of stuff I will never share for that reason—a real possibility. In 2026, almost anything an agent or editor seriously reads will be published or, at worst, put into one round of light development, but very few people have the social status or leverage to demand a reading. There are about ten thousand people calling themselves literary agents; most of them are lucky if they have one junior editor in the whole industry whom they can make read. Laura McGrath’s findings suggest that the number of literary agents who can actually force enough reads to get a book deal worth taking is… about 25.

In the First Respectability Crisis, those institutions able to muscle their way into positions of prestige and important relationships had the financial runway to pay speculative advances, establishing the divide between what we now call traditional publishers (“money flows to the author”) and those disreputable vanity presses. In the Second Respectability Crisis, the industry used an information barrier. If you couldn’t get read by an editor, you were supposed to know that you needed an agent, not a vanity press. If you put that money into a subsidy publisher instead of a plane ticket and a two-night stay in a New York hotel, that was on you. This worked reasonably well until the Internet arrived. In the 1990s, the unwanted masses discovered that literary agents existed and that the real way to get published was through them; as a result, literary agents are even more overtraveled than editors were in the worst of the last bad old days. Instead of $2,000 for a trip to New York, the cost barrier is… about $25,000, with wild variance, because that is the nature of stochastic toll roads.

I’ll tell one more story. I know an author—we’ll say her name is Kathy, but her real name isn’t Kathy—who writes what would, in a prior era of publishing, be considered prestige midlist material for her refusal to dumb her work down, but the treatment she experienced toward the end of her career is more like midlist-as-euphemism. She had a series of strong book deals in the 1990s and into the 2000s, but her tour was cancelled at the last minute due to consequences of the global financial crisis. Rather than skip the tour entirely, she decided to self-fund a smaller tour. Self-funding a book tour isn’t remarkable in publishing—it’s expected, so it neither worked for or against her—but she became known for the way she traveled. She arranged the most inexpensive travel she could, and became known to her editor and agent as “Kathy in Coach.” From thereon out, in discussions about marketing budgets, or about which books were worth calling in favors to secure media coverage, she was Kathy in Coach. Nine novels; it didn’t matter. She couldn’t escape, in the view of the people deciding her literary fate, that uncomfortable chair. She quit publishing a long time ago. I wonder if she still writes.

There’s no doubt that we’re in publishing’s Third Respectability Crisis. The reading public is well aware of the decline in quality of traditionally published literature. There’s probably more good stuff out there than ever before, but the institutions that promise to discover it are instead obscuring it. No one is surprised by the fact that in (for example) Hollywood, it is basically impossible to get a screenplay read without major nepo. The public has never demanded that ABC or Miramax find the absolute best writers and actors; so long as the people they hire are good enough to produce an entertaining product, and they are, most viewers are satisfied. Books are supposed to be different. They’re supposed to reward the increased cognitive effort of staring at black marks on white paper for hours. Writing is supposed to give a voice to the voiceless. The quality of the text is supposed to be an important factor—the main factor—in the decisions publishing makes. None of these expectations are met, and real efforts are not expended to do so. Commercial publishing has very profitably reinvented itself as an entertainment industry and there is no reason to believe it will back out of the decision it has made. It arguably has the right to do all this, but it does not have the right to keep lying about how it actually operates. We see publishing in the same state as casino gambling, hung by its own inconsistencies. No one can take seriously the gambling industry’s claim that it cannot be expected to stop self-harm gamblers when it reliably ejects skilled blackjack players, and no one should expect the book industry to maintain the public’s respect for operating like an entertainment business while refusing to admit it has become exactly and only that.

Self-publishing might resolve the Third Respectability Crisis, but there are real threats. AI slop and algorithmic dominance are serious issues. Self-publishing relies on an enshittifying Internet; trade does as well if it wants to achieve sales, but its lingering prestige gives it something to say for itself when it does not. No one would seriously deny that self-publishing is gambling. It’s a skill game, to be sure, but most of the skills it rewards do not correlate strongly to textual merit. And I hate saying this because it’s what traditional publishing would want me to say. They don’t want self-publishing to die—it suits their financial interests to have the risks and losses of unprofitable ventures absorbed by someone else, leaving them to cherry-pick the properties that have already found market success—but they will not stand for it to compete against them for respectability. Still, I can’t deny that, in 2026, the gambling aspect of the self-publishing business has not been removed, and that institutions do not exist that scalably find textual merit. At the same time, I must also say that the same are true of trade publishing; they simply hide it better.

Self-publishing is like online poker. You’ll probably win more than you lose if you take the time to master the skills, but it’s a grind. Some days, you win. Some days, you lose. Some days, you break even and wonder where the hell the time went. There are cheaters, but you can win without cheating, and you can cheat and still lose. Over time, the sevens of spades and the aces of hearts and the red and purple chips all blend together. Your monthly swings inspire strong emotional responses. Your annual win rate suggests more stability, but might be a pittance. Your friends all ask why you are “wasting time” on $10/$20 games rather than the prestigious no-limit events with huge pots and impressive bluffs.

Traditional publishing would like for you to believe they are a money bridge club that only a select few know about, a place where sharp players and educable patrons come together for mutual benefit and the stakes are meaningful but always reasonable—£1 per point per partner; £2/point with consent that is usually granted but seldom asked for. A place where you meet lifelong friends, not adversaries. In truth, though, they are as ruthless as the corporate casinos, albeit without the same degree of efficiency—largely, in traditional publishing, because the need to preserve relationships forces them to hire so many inefficient people. Publishers are finely tuned for extraction; their whole industry survives on the false hopes of querying authors all over the country, because selling author services (that is, selling introductions; becoming a referral editor) is the retirement plan of every agent and editor in case the current gig doesn’t work out.

As I mentioned, most gamblers fall into three categories: casual players, who view their losses as the price of entertainment; professionals, who can earn an income if they’re disciplined and skillful; and the self-harm gamblers that everyone hopes will be rare, but whose money is seldom refused. Casinos, when facing resentment or regulation, remind the public that the vast majority of their clients are casual players who fly in, lose a few hundred bucks in a weekend of play, and leave.

When it comes to publishing, though, the two low-harm classes of gambler are systematically excluded. A writer who takes the casual gambler’s approach will not spend tens of thousands of dollars he cannot afford on the query process, he will not quit his day job to chase an unreliable dream, and he will not self-fund a 14-city book tour or hire a personal publicist to save a book that got a $15,000 advance. Traditional publishing’s view is that such a person is not a serious writer. They might be worth a small book deal in exchange for perpetual rights over a thousand hours of labor, but they’ll never get the support an author needs to have a real chance in today’s crowded attention market. After the first or second book, they’ll be dropped for sales. The only reason the casual gamblers are tolerated by traditional publishing is that every lead title needs a field of preselected losers in the catalog, so the chosen properties benefit from the appearance of a larger competitive field.

What about professionals? They too are persona non grata in publishing under a different theory that is confusing for how it perverts language. Publishing is a money game that you’re not allowed to treat as a money game.

One of the first things authors are told is never to have their contracts reviewed by attorneys because “lawyers kill deals.” Think about this. It is an admission by publishing that the typical book contract is so unfavorable to the author that enlisting a legal professional, hired to represent the author’s interests, to read a legal document will result in a case being discovered that the author should not accept it. Literary agents, instead, are supposed to be the arbiters, and even though they get paid by authors, they often work on the editor’s side because an agent who loses a client can just get another one, whereas an agent who can’t make editors read is extinct. Traditional publishing uses the language of “professionalism” but it is always one-sided and the inconsistency is the point. You are “unprofessional” if you call or email your editor asking why the marketing team isn’t doing its job, because you’re supposed to be doing this whole thing for the love of writing. You are a bad human being if you treat writing like a job you actually need, because you were supposed to know that publishing and literature exist only for those who do not need jobs. So now take this deal with the $5,000 advance and no marketing, and don’t come back unless you sell 10,000 copies. You must go through this process on spec for the love of the written word, but if your sales drop for any reason, you cannot expect them to publish you for that same love. It all goes only one way.

If we rule out casual players and professionals, who’s left? There are the established authors who got into the system in the 1970s when things still worked. There are institutional favorites whose family publicists found top literary agents, or who got in by stroking a professor’s ego and maybe something else. The good deals go only to them, and there are—to estimate on the high end—maybe two thousand slots in the whole country. You and I didn’t get one. Still, simple research shows that there are more than that number of traditionally published authors, so where do they come from? You guessed it: The self-harm gamblers. They’re the ones who don’t get the hint that the query system is supposed to convey—that this is something you’re born into, and you weren’t, but here’s a time-wasting exercise if you need to cool off—and instead spend five- and six-figure sums chasing the social status or leverage that will get literary agents to read. They’re the ones who put their careers on hold to make an editor’s deadlines and, at their day jobs, end up on the list if there’s a layoff. They’re the ones who, when they’re told they must hire personal publicists because the house no longer believes in doing its job, say “Yes sir,” and take out a second mortgage. They get one golden hour when they walk into a bookstore and see three copies of their book spine-out on the bottom shelf. They get a favorable review in a trade periodical that the public never reads. Some fail utterly, lose their jobs and families, and end up kissing a barrel. Some earn out their mediocre advances and, if they don’t piss anyone off, the reward is to do the same thing again for another mediocre advance. The result, almost always, is that more money goes out than comes in, thousands of hours come to nothing, and the author is stranded in midlife with a stalled career. The roads fork and there is an illusory sense of setting one’s course, but almost all paths in traditional publishing go absolutely nowhere because the somewheres were allocated at least a generation ago, and either your family’s publicist did not show up to grab one or—and this is quite common, but you must never admit to it if you want to succeed in traditional publishing—you never had one to begin with.

Traditional publishing only wants the self-harm gamblers. It only wants the people who will put time and money they cannot afford into promoting a book the house will not bother to properly launch. It extracts so much value because, even when a title fails in obscurity, it benefits the lead titles for them to appear to have won in a more competitive field, and the flops also provide free market research. It will never stop turning people’s writerly dreams, as much as we may criticize them for being impractical, into personal ruin at a scale measured in thousands of destroyed careers and millions (possibly billions) of dollars lost, because there is still a lot of money in this game—it just isn’t for you. On the other hand, if you’re willing to pay $0.15 per word for a referral editor (ex-agent, ex-acquisitions) and maybe get read somewhere, you can become the money, and that means a role at the table exists.

If you’re not born into privilege and access, a happy ending typically means cutting one’s losses before the job and family are lost for good. You leave the table sober. You go somewhere to recover, far from New York. Maybe Vegas.