How To Blow Up Your Writing Career

It’s rarely good when Author Drama makes it to NBC. Once your shit hits the national news, you know you fucked up real good.

And yet, here we are — the tl;dr of this is, an upcoming debut author decided to take it upon herself to apparently create a series of sock puppet Goodreads accounts and use said accounts to both

a) boost herself

and

b) trash other books (ostensibly other debut authors, most or all of which were by BIPOC / queer authors)

aaaand then try to cover it up by making up another fake person maybe in order to pin it on, which was immediately called out as nonsense and —

You know, I dunno, it’s a lot. Point is, the author, Cait Corrain, finally claimed responsibility for it in an apology. In this apology, Corrain said it was down to, basically, a nervous breakdown due to substance abuse.

(The apology is on The Website Formerly Known As Twitter, and I prefer not to link to it, but if you wanna find her account, you should at present find the apology still up there.)

I think the… let’s call it easy, maybe even lazy takeaway from this is, hey, it’s messed up to view your fellow writers and authors as competition. They are, at their best, your community, and at worst, a non-factor. Lotta books out there, lotta authors writing ’em, and they’ll be a mix of friends, acquaintances, and people who you simply don’t know. (Okay, fine, you’re allowed one nemesis. Just one! Make it good and choose wisely! This is your nemesis for the duration of your writing career. If they die, another will be selected for you by The Council.) Other writers will lift you up and share wisdom and also share your books with their readers and it’s great. Further, you can do this in recompense to them and also for other authors — we leave a light on, a ladder out, maybe a little cheese plate in case you’re hungry. Authors love books, and as such, we tend to love other authors, too. I mean, no, not every writer is going to be amazing to you (certainly the subject of this entire post belies that notion), but pound for pound, most of the authors I’ve met have actually been pretty great? I like ’em? They’re good eggs.

A book that comes out is not competing with yours. I mean, okay, fine, in a technical sense there is the general problem of money being finite and books being practically infinite and so a reader must make some choices of what to do with their limited money (and time) and so maybe your book makes the cut, maybe it doesn’t. But this isn’t Thunderdome, they may come back for yours later, and books live on the long tail (if publishers allow it) — and, hey, this is why Book Jesus invented libraries. Lotta books there.

And guess what?

They’re fucking free! Rent one for zero dollars and enjoy.

A slightly more nuanced conversation about this is, you know, we live in this sort of deranged hustle-culture capitalist fuckscape world where all our engagement is driven by an algorithmic alchemy of clicks and looks and scrolls and outrage, and we’re all in a box screaming to be heard, and certainly places like Amazon and Goodreads and social media only encourage us to YELL LOUDER and BE BOLDER and GET ATTENTION however we must. Publishers, too, can encourage this when they don’t put their back into marketing a book — when it’s all on the author, the author might start to feel like a frenzied weasel in a box, gnawing for egress. Certainly the GET ON THE STAGE AND PERFORM action is not always the healthiest for authors, nor a skill we are practiced in or have prepared for, and as such, maybe that can crack our shells. We’re good eggs until something chips our shell, and then our mess spills all over the internet.

Thing is, and here’s the real point, ultimately none of that really suggests you should go out and sandbag your imagined authorial rivals in a bigoted push to be the Highlander of Books. What happened here, in this particular situation, definitely feels like some racist shit and I don’t think “engagement farming” or “seeing writers as competition and not community” entirely explains this truly bizarre situation. It definitely seems like a soupçon of mental health issues coupled with some active (or at least poorly-concealed and realized) racism had to be in play. This was a book, after all, that had from what I can tell a pretty good amount of buzz — it had a deal with a big publisher (confession: my own publisher, Del Rey), it had reach, it had a nice cover, it had an Illumicrate placement and —

I mean, the book was going to be fine, maybe even blow up and do pretty well, and now it won’t, because it blew up in a different, and worse, way. The book is gone and I’m not sure the author will easily recover. Again, they’ve apologized, and it’s not on me to decide whether that’s a good apology or a bad one — that’s only on the aggrieved. (And here it’s gotta be worth the mention that you can support the authors targeted and victimized: Bethany Baptiste, Molly X Chang, KM Enright, Kamilah Cole, Frances White. All but the last of those are Bookshop.org links where you can preorder the books — the last is Goodreads, as I couldn’t make Bookshop give me a link for that one, but I’m sure it’ll manifest at some point.)

There’s no real good lesson here — outside of obvious things like, “Hey don’t be weird and do racism and bigotry against your fellow authors?” I want to say, again, be aware of your fellow authors as community rather than competition and try not to fall prey to the teeth-grinding hustle-culture “don’t gotta run faster than the Obscurity Bear just gotta run faster than the author next to me” attitude but mostly, it’s the “don’t be weird and creepy” thing. Be good to other authors, be good to yourself, don’t make it weird. I’m not sure it gets much more complex than that.

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