Writers Should Never Be Packaged, Peddled, and Productized

The success of our art should be what we create, not how we preen and perform on social media.

Photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash

Years ago, I sat in an airport holding a newspaper in my hand. Blubbering my way into a corner. It was a scathing review of my book and while I’m open to constructive criticism, the essay felt more like an indictment of my character. A vivisection of the choices I made instead of the story I wrote about those choices.

This was in 2008, a time when you still couldn’t say you didn’t love your mother. No one in the right mind would title a memoir wishing their mother dead and have it launch on the bestseller lists. Back then, mothers were still sacrosanct and I’d written a story of my life growing up her and then letting her go. I’d written the line: you make it impossible for me to love you because it was the last words I said to my mother.

The review boiled down to: this would’ve been a better book had you loved your mother more. It was the first time it occurred to me that my work wasn’t the product — no, no, I was equally held up to scrutiny. The writer no longer has the luxury of being distinguished from the work she creates. They are bonded in some sick siamese formulation that I still can’t manage to understand.

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I have this recurring dream. In the dream, my former best friend and I are jettisoned back to 1997. We are the women we are now but we exist in our former bodies. Before the panic that rivaled Chernobyl wondering if we were dead, undead, or if this was a collective psychosis, ensues we stare out ourselves in the mirror. We are young. We are fit although the world would forever want us to whittle down to a negative integer clothing size. My former friend feels for the stretch marks and scars that won’t exist for many years time. I sift through the forest that is my hair searching for the grays that haven’t bloomed.

We sit in our old bedroom, across from one another while our roommates outside toast English muffins and wonder if we were going to the drink-up tonight. They knock on our door. Why are you guys so quiet? How the fuck are we going to tell them, I hiss at Liz. We most certainly are not telling them because it sounds crazy. And we are not crazy.

But I open the door and hold up the iPhone I’ve managed to smuggle with me and tell them we’re from 2024. Are we high? It’s fine, but during the day?

We are not high. My former friend is apoplectic, on the verge of frenzy. She dials numbers in her phone and I yell those people — her husband, her children, her friends — don’t exist yet. And we spend the next few hours on the floor with our friends trying to unpack madness. They marvel at this miniature machine. Wait, so you can have all your music on this? So, you get taxis that aren’t taxis, and you feel safe with that? You can deposit checks to your phone — pause, no uses checks anymore? And when we show them social media apps, their faces are drained of all color. The light in them from the morning, the possibility of the day, has extinguished.

We’ve just compacted the last 15–20 years into a bomb when we lived through the slow, subtle ticking all this time.

Our friends don’t understand why we hold onto our phones like appendages. We say our lives on this and they laugh and say it’s a trinket, a machine, a toy and a tool, and why would we give over the whole of our lives to a world we can’t truly touch, taste, see, hear, and feel?

When we explain 2024 to them pity washes over the face. It’s too overwhelming, it’s too much. What’s been gained but at what cost? And this is how you live, they say, tethered to a machine that knows everything about you? It sounds absurd when we defend it but we didn’t have those bigger questions back then because technology unfolded slowly, and the behavioral shifts followed. But even then we were romantic in thinking that some parts of our lives will be sacrosanct.

We will still have privacy. Parts of our lives will wholly belong to us. Our work will stand alone and we won’t need to whore ourselves out to bring it its attention. Little did we do know…

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Today, I was moved by Jess Row’s incisive LitHub essay, “Generation Franchise: Why Writers Are Forced to Become Brands (and Why That’s Bad)”. In the early 1990s we started to see the packaging and commodification of art at scale — mostly in music — and the bands that sought to break brands and build something real, honest, and new even if it wasn’t pretty. Kurt Cobain’s voice was beautiful, his lyrics were haunting, but his pain was not pretty. But we were still sweet frogs being lowered into the cooled pots.

We never guessed the heat would flicker and fire. We never believed the water would boil.

And while much of the essay centers on the autofiction debate, much of which I do and don’t agree with, the parts that remained with me are the commodification of self in order to commodify a product. The package makes the package and packages themselves and the art into one neat little package for the world to consume or choke on (whatever you fancy).

“In a recent piece for Esquire, “Why Are Debut Novels Failing to Launch?”, Kate Dwyer (paraphrasing Kyle Chayka) pinpoints the point of absurdity social media marketing for writers has reached, when most of the content has nothing to do with books at all:

Connecting an artist’s biography to their art — or, by another name, creating a parasocial relationship between readers and authors — has long been an effective marketing strategy. But for debut authors, it now goes beyond writing personal essays and includes becoming a bona fide social-media influencer…These days, “in order to get exposure, you have to make the kinds of content that the platform is prioritizing in a given moment,” Chayka says.

On Instagram, that means posting videos. Gone are the days of the tastefully cluttered tableaux of notebooks, pens, and coffee mugs near a book jacket; front-facing videos are currently capturing the most eyeballs. “A nonfiction author at least has the subject matter to talk about,” Chayka says. (Many nonfiction writers now create bite-size videos distilling the ideas of their books, with the goal of becoming thought leaders.)

But instead of talking about their books, novelists share unboxing videos when they receive their advance copies, or lifestyle videos about their writing routines, neither of which convey their voice on the page. Making this “content” takes time away from writing, Chayka says: “You’re glamorizing your writer’s residency; you’re not talking about the work itself necessarily.”

As a marketer and a writer of experimental fiction, I want to linger here because I felt this deeply and it’s been most of what I’ve wrestled with for the latter part of my adult life.

In my 20s, I was a hustler. I hustled for deals, connections, favors. I worked tirelessly and knew that when one publishes a memoir, one wants to see the face behind the writer. Back in 2008, it was more of visual connection. I was never expected to be a product selling the product. I wasn’t expected to create videos and soundbytes and podcasts (although I did all those things before they were considered cool) because the book was what mattered. Readers would cultivate a relationship with a story and if they knew a little bit about you, it was a bonus. It was the icing on a three-layer cake.

But after I have a major and rather public breakdown in 2019 (read: major depression episode), I shuttered all my social media because I’d realize that talking into a camera made me feel more alone. I was spewing but I wasn’t healing. I wasn’t connecting with another human in a way that felt real. And so I stepped away from all that.

For the first time in decades, I wanted privacy. I wanted the majority of my life to be lived off-line, and I wanted people to connect with my stories instead of connecting with me first. If we form a friendship because of the art, cool, but the objective for me has always been let the writing stand on its own quivering feet. I don’t want to be famous or well-known. I don’t want to go viral — I’m allergic to all of it.

All I’ve ever wanted was my work to mean something to someone else. That’s it. My wants are faily small compared to the bombastic desires in the world we live.

Because this is what I fear most:

“[A]rtists (like everyone else) would do well to start thinking about the values of privacy and opacity, or what in European Internet law is called “the right to be forgotten.” I don’t mean shutting off all of our social media accounts and moving to (what’s left of) Greenland; I mean thinking very carefully about the extent to which we confuse our personhood and our work. The statement if your books aren’t successful, it’s because you failed to be an interesting public personality is only a hairsbreadth away from the statement if your books aren’t successful, it’s because you’re not a worthwhile person. Both imply the same thing: it’s really you, not your art, that’s being sold.”

I fear the strange, neurodivergent awkward me has to be a preened TikTok star to hock my wares and I never wanted this. I am not a product — I’m a human, a complex one at that and although you may not like my company or my politics, that won’t necessarily mean you won’t enjoy my books. Because books are that rare magical thing that allows you to get lost in a story. It gives access to a portal where time feels stilled.

I never want to package what my books are about because my work is about so many things and the joy is having my readers approach me with how they’ve internalized the work, how they related to it, how it moved them, how it made them think. Me, myself, I’m the interloper, the interruption, the person who shouldn’t crowd the room.

The more I dive into how I’m watching people embodying The Truman Show in real time, the more I see how far someone is willing to go to build their brand and sell their products, sawing off pieces of themseves, bit by bit, bone by bone, it frightens me.

I have so much I want to share with the world. Stories I want to write. Essays worth sharing, but I often feel the tug of Felicia the brand when all I want Felicia to do is lie on the floor and shut up for five hours. Let the writing do the work for her.