I Refuse to Support My Friend’s Crappy Self-Published Novel: Am I the Asshole?

That’s right, you know what time it is!

We’re back for another wild installment of everyone’s favorite drunken advice column, Am I the Literary Asshole?, the place where your questions and my answers come together to make a perfectly boozy baby. I’m your host, Kristen Arnett, and I’m happy to be back in the saddle again (the saddle in this instance would be a keg of your preferred brand of beer). It’s May, which means it’s officially spring, and all the flowers have burst into bloom. What better way to celebrate all this gorgeous weather than to hunch over our screens and contemplate some juicy gossip together?

Since I’m riding the keg, I may as well get a drink while I’m here. How about a keg stand for every question? Saddle up buddy, we’re off to the races:

1) Hi Kristen. My friend and I have been writing buddies (sort of) over the past few years, but our paths diverge. I take courses on craft, worry about adjectives, write a first draft, second and third, and she… self-publishes.

Her newest book has recently been self-published on Amazon and a friend is having a release party. Everyone invited has given the book five stars. It is not a five star book (obvi) and I cannot fathom attending this party without feeling like a total shit.

Ugh. I have not reviewed the book—because—it’s awful. (Awkward!) What’s a friend to do? I have my own reputation as a writer. Am I the asshole? Should I support my friend, even though she’s an obvious hack?

Hello, friend. Thanks for writing in about this!

I suspect I’m not going to give you a satisfying answer. I’m assuming you think I’m going to tell you that your friend has gone about this in the completely wrong way, that your method of publishing is superior, so you should avoid their celebration lest it taint your own writing career.

Buddy, that’s simply not how friendship works. And it’s not how art works, either.

If you’ve read any of my previous columns, you know that I am of the very firm opinion that writing happens—and publication occurs—in many different forms. Some people choose a traditional path when it comes to a writing career (and by that, I mean getting an MFA, writing a draft, finding an agent, and submitting that work to various publishing houses). Not everyone does this, though. I’m one of those people who doesn’t have an MFA, though I do have an agent and eventually acquired a publisher via that route. There are plenty of people who don’t have agents, smaller publishers who don’t require them at all, those who write books and never show them to anyone other than their friends, and yes, there are also people who choose self-publishing. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.

I’m going to be straight with you: there’s no one right way to write a book and there’s no correct way to publish one, either. I would imagine you would never tell this friend to their face that they are a hack, because it does not seem like a very kind thing to do. You have said that they are your friend and that at one point you were writing buddies, so I have to imagine you got something from this relationship. What they’ve written is not your cup of tea, apparently, but it doesn’t mean that it’s garbage. We read for a variety of different reasons. It’s completely possible their writing simply isn’t for you.

You’ve also stated that you “take courses on craft, worry about adjectives, write a first draft, second and third” and then follow this up by announcing that your friend self-publishes. These two concepts aren’t mutually exclusive. You can self-publish and still do all those things. Unless your friend has specifically told you that they don’t, who’s to say they aren’t publishing draft number 15; one where they worried incessantly over adjectives?

Also, I think it must be said: Friends do things for each other all the time without needing to put on our critic’s caps. We attend concerts, go to gallery showings, poetry readings, plays, dance recitals, performance art displays. We are not critics in these instances, we are comrades. We aren’t there to place a value judgement on what they’ve made. We’re there to support and celebrate the fact that they have made something in the first place. Unless this person has reached out to you specifically and point blank asked you to give their self-published novel a five-star rating, I’m not sure I see what the actual problem is here. Maybe the people who have rated this book five stars actually believe that the work merits that ranking (perhaps not—but I’d also like to remind you that plenty of people go online and hand out whatever ranking they’d like, including bad ones, simply because they felt like it in the moment).

Now, if we want to unpack this further, I could say that it would be completely reasonable for you to not support someone publishing via a platform that is undercutting independent booksellers. There are lots of places to self-publish that don’t feed into a platform that is taking money away from small businesses and giving it to wretched, scum of the earth billionaires. If that’s your gripe, there are ways to have this conversation and still maintain the friendship.

But if the issue is that you don’t like the way they’ve made their own art, I’d ask you, gently and with love, to consider why it is you care so much? Sometimes being a friend simply means supporting a person by letting them make art in the way that’s right for them. It means showing up. You keep writing how you’d like; let them write how they’d like, too.

I’ve never needed a keg stand more in my life! Prop me up, buddies, and let’s drink before unpacking our next question:

2) Lately I’ve been reading everything with my writer’s hat on, which means I find myself not really enjoying reading like I used to. Is there a way to shift my brain so that I can get back to settling down with a good book or am I doomed to read this way (constantly clocking clichés, wondering about sentence structure, judging POV choices) forever?

Woof, buddy I think plenty of us understand this feeling.

Some of it just comes from overall life fatigue. It is hard to be a person and alive on this planet. To think that we’re able to open up our brains and enjoy something pleasurable when the world is on fire around us is asking a lot.

There are only so many hours in a day, and if we’re allotting some of that time to writing—and we care about it, and are passionate about it, and think about it to the exclusion of all else—then quite naturally this inevitably bleeds into our reading time. Some of it could come from the “work” aspect coming into direct focus. Writing, though pleasurable, is also something that becomes its own task with its own set of rules and restrictions. For those of us that read for review and for blurbing—stacks of ARCs piled up around our respective houses like towering Jenga blocks ready to topple at any moment—it can really make reading for pleasure become an unnatural chore.

I can’t fix it for you entirely, but I can tell you what I do when I find myself scrutinizing clunky metaphors instead of enjoying a book. The first thing I do is take a reading break. I think the initial impulse can be to power through it, when really what our brains are screaming for is a moment of rest. If you need to stop reading for a minute, that’s totally fine. Another tactic can be to shift to a different mode of reading. Maybe listen to an audiobook, give your eyes a break and ingest the narrative through a different channel. Or even watch a movie, TV show, comedy special. Take a walk through an art museum. Go outside and enjoy nature. Do something that’s going to remind you that life and art is more expansive than examining everything on a line level.

It’s going to be okay! You’ll enjoy a book again, solely for pleasure. I promise.

One more keg stand and that’s it! All the blood is rushing to my head! Last question, callers, let’s get it done:

3) What going on with every single website needing me to become a member and requiring money for access/putting things behind a paywall? Does it make me an asshole if I think that sucks?

It’s called capitalism! And we’re living inside of it! So, yes, it definitely sucks. But there’s a reason for it.

Many places that we love and frequent are getting less and less money, which means that they are unable to pay the writers, which means that they have to shut down if they don’t get the funding that would require them to make the work. It’s as simple as that. You may have noticed that grants are being taken away from nearly everyone under this administration which limits funding even further. If we like things, and we want to keep enjoying them, it also means that the people making the work have to be paid.

Of course I understand that we can’t fund everything. But if we’re frequenting a place on the regular, and we know that the work is crucial to us, then it’s worth considering whether we want to keep them around. Like this very site! Why not become a member? It’s community. We have to support the things we feel most passionately about.

And that’s all the time we have, friends. Join me next time when I read even more of your questions and we try to find love in a hopeless place! CHEERS!

Fatherly,
Dad

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Are you worried you’re the literary asshole? Ask Kristen via email at AskKristen@lithub.com, or anonymously here.