The seven cognitive distortions behind every bad publishing take (and PS, you probably struggle with them too, and they might be destroying your career)
Just [grunt]...let me [grunt]...get my codependent mitts inside your pretty little problematic skulls before you all give me an actual heart attack.
I. “Things would have gone better for me if I had been born in The Golden Age of Publishing.”
“Do you feel like you were born in the wrong time?” my therapist asked me. We were parsing my thing for necromancy: why I take such melancholy pleasure in metal detecting, mudlarking, and book collecting, caressing possessions and pen marks of the long-forgotten dead.
I thought about it. I mean, yes: given my enthusiasm for psychoanalysis, flair for earth tones, and personality that sort of lends itself to getting tanked with Charles Nelson Reilly on The Match Game, I do suspect I would’ve thrived in the 1970s. On the other hand, I know that had I lived back then—or any time—my heart would’ve fixated on other ghosts, other pasts. For me, the artifacts aren’t the point; the aching is.
It’s the point of writing, too, isn’t it? Like many of you, I long to rescue, remember, redeem, be redeemed; to have matter, hold matter, matter; to escape the death sentence of being human. Here on the page as in the woods and on the riverbank, I am doing unto the dead as I would have them do unto me.
But of course, the dead can’t respond. They exist purely in my imagination, which is precisely what makes them so compelling. They’re dolls in my dollhouse: incapable of validating the meaning of my life, but also incapable of denying it. Tracing Bennett Cerf’s name with my fingers in my inscribed first edition of Shake Well Before Using, I’m confident we would’ve been BFF because he’s not here to prove otherwise. He’s me!
Why didn’t I see it before, the way so many people who write about book publishing play the same game? Publishers don’t support literary fiction like they used to. Publishers don’t support authors like they used to. Publishers don’t celebrate white men like they used to. Authors don’t make a living like they used to. The past is recoverable, it is available, but only to the right people, The Best People.
I’ve read these articles, baffled, and thought: how on Earth did these people get publishing history so wrong when it’s a 5-second Google away? How are they so lazy? As if I didn’t know the answer: nobody wants to open the dollhouse door. Nobody wants to face the vast, unfamiliar real world, where the chances of annihilation are so high.
No one wants to pay what it really costs to keep going out there: the agency, energy, grief, uncertainty. No one wants to find their own way in the dark, even if that’s where the living are.
II. “I’m the main character in other people’s thoughts.”
No one wants to leave the dollhouse, the ballroom—least of all me. I’m not judging, or at least not judging any more than I judge myself. Real life is exhausting. Accommodating the living and all their spiky insecurities? Exhausting.
In the Year of Our Lord 2025, it feels all but impossible to work, parent, process the news, and give every other person we meet an adequate space in our psyche—a comfortable guest room for their own subjectivity, upholstered with our grace and open-minded curiosity. It’s easier to just cram them onto the floor of our own.
But of course, such cramped circumstances are the pretext for many a comedy of errors. We panic that the avoidant, underfunctioning publicist is mad at us when we are in fact mad at them. We ascribe our generalized feelings of loneliness to our editor’s deliberate neglect. We write essays in which we criticize young literary people in New York for being whiny about their finances and moribund cultural prominence as a thin pretext for whining about our own.
Projection, as I wrote the other week, might not be the worst challenge facing the publishing industry, but I do think it’s the worst one that happens to be individually preventable. It adds so much unnecessary shame, blame, resentment, anxiety, and confusion to the proceedings, which are already complicated enough.
Remember: whether hero or villain, loser or winner, we only really play the main character in our own mind (and life). Other people simply don’t think that much about us, which is a wonderful blessing if we can ever get out from under our own egos to treat it as such.
III. “I’ll get power by doing what the powerful want.”
People-pleasing is another dangerous game in the dollhouse of the dead. In your family of origin or toxic former workplace, it might’ve been an effective survival strategy. In book publishing, it’s the opposite, in part because nobody really knows what they’re talking about.
Chasing the short-term favor of authority figures is an escalator to the abyss in this place. Just ask everyone who went all in ~15 years ago on the idea that publishing would be all or mostly digital by now. Most of them no longer work in the industry—or if they do, they’re now rather plutonically far from the epicenter.
Here’s the thing: imitation, like nostalgia, is not growth or strategy. It’s an attempt to end-run the hard work of each in a bid for short-term gain, material or emotional. And an industry like publishing, which operates in the long term, prioritizing short-term comfort is reliably disastrous. (My colleague Yahdon Israel, Senior Editor at Simon and Schuster, gave a great interview about this in January, calling publishing a “wine business, not a milk industry.”)
There’s a reason why agents’ Manuscript Wish List (MSWL) suggestions almost never result in successful book deals. Books, as I’ve written elsewhere, are like moss: they grow best organically and in situ and generally die when transplanted. (Just ask the brown wasteland in my side yard that was—for a brief, sciatica-inducing summer—my hand-constructed “Zen garden,” featuring $3000 of Hypnum imponens from an online moss retailer. God, what a metaphor.)1
The same principle applies to careers. There’s a reason why editors and junior agents who stay in one workplace forever—if such things are even possible—almost never become partners or senior management. Even if influential people wanted to hand equal power to you—and to be clear, most of them don’t, no matter what they say—they probably couldn’t. For the most part, durable power and influence must be seized or manufactured from scratch.
It also applies to editorial development. There’s a reason why book proposals often stagnate for years in editorial development when authors get caught in what I call “frenzied rabbit” mode—a kind of anxious procrastination that involves instant turnaround and mindless parroting of editorial suggestions vs. rigorous, authentic integration of the same.
There’s a reason why even the best ChatGPT-generated copy is just sort of “meh.” Genius cannot be made up of other people’s thoughts, and I’m not even talking about moral “shoulds” here, just practical reality. It’s moss; it doesn’t transplant.
Finally, there’s this: publishing is such a slow industry that chasing a trend is tantamount to falling for someone you see through a telescope in a distant star system. No matter how committed or quick you are in rocketing their way, they’ll probably be dead by the time you arrive.
IV. “My feelings are facts.”
Your jealousy of that other author who published in your season does not mean that they are “doing better than you” by any objective metric, e.g. book sales.
Your feeling that you’re a failure does not mean that you’re failing.
Your insecurity is not the same thing as other people’s doubt. Your loneliness is not the same thing as other people’s disinterest. Your status anxiety and mortality dread, which you may or may not have once subconsciously expressed by bringing animal bones to the office, is not quite the same thing as a commercial vision, although I do strongly identify with both impulses, seeing as how I’m typing this two feet from a squirrel vertebra nailed to my wall.
V. “Rejection and struggle are for other people, not me. If *I* experience rejection and struggle, something’s wrong.”
I understand that you won every writing prize possible in your tony private high school and have won many more prizes since.
I understand that you got an 800 on every writing or language-related standardized test you ever took.
I understand that you went to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Oxford, or Cambridge before getting an MFA at the University of Iowa.
I understand that in your observation, you are a far better writer than most of the published authors you’ve met or even read.
I understand that for many years, people—including people in book publishing like me—have been saying that you should publish a book.
Believe me, I understand. And I’m sorry to say that even you—yes, YOU—are going to hear “no” from the majority if not all of the gatekeepers you encounter in life, now and forever. Most of the top agents you query will pass on working with you or just never respond. Ditto most of the editors and media people to whom publicists eventually pitch your work. Most of the people you have a crush on won’t like you back, either.
Even if you do make it through some of the industry’s tougher gauntlets, there will always be moments where you disappoint yourself, readers, editors, family members, lovers, children, pets, and/or friends—and in turn, they disappoint you. One or two of your eras will be Evermore, if you know what I mean, but most will be Life of a Showgirl.
Yes, I know you can name many successful peers who don’t appear to struggle with their life or loneliness at all. I know you harbor fantasies of belonging with those people and terrible shame that your real life doesn’t match this fantasy. If it’s any comfort, the other people in your fantasy—those people you envy—are just as fictional as the plot, but I doubt you believe me on that front.
You don’t have to believe me, it’s fine. Just PLEASE believe me on this: your brittleness about rejection, your bitterness about it, subtracts far more from your overall career potential than any amount of writing talent could possibly add. Remember that. Remember that, and get over yourself as a matter of professional urgency.
I couldn’t relate more to these feelings, but come on—we all have to admit that they’re embarrassing, beneath us. Behind at least 80% of bad publishing takes, after all, there is the bitterness of exceptionalism denied, and when we recognize it there, we cringe. Leah Abrams puts it best in the delightful piece she wrote this week for The Cleveland Review of Books: “The question underneath the question, ‘Where are all the white male novelists?’ is a much sadder, more embarrassing one: ‘Why not me?’”2
VI. “I’m behind on a timeline that is objective and not at all made up in my head.”
Clear and predictable timelines just don’t exist in publishing—even when you’re under contract, I’m afraid. It’s all uncertainty all the time—sometimes simmering, sometimes boiling over. You’re never too late; you’re never too old; and it’s never, ever the right time to write or publish a book, which is both terrible and wonderful news.
Geniuses are nothing more and nothing less than people who figure out how to dance with uncertainty—to exit the dollhouse and make their own way.
VII. “Happiness is a hot potato I must forever throw about 50 feet ahead of me up the road, or else my hands will burn.”
All of which brings us to the final delusion, the one that underwrites all the others. It’s not about publishing per se—more about being human.
Golden ages, ghosts, bad takes, withering Zen gardens, people-pleasing, projection: these are all strategies. They’re strategies employed by a certain kind of person, a very common kind in our field—someone who doesn’t quite know how to recognize or handle happiness, or where to find it. When it lands in their hands, as it occasionally does, they throw it away like a hot potato, almost as if it’ll burn them.
Friends, colleagues, enemies, all of you, please know this: Happiness is not a hot potato. Happiness is a baked potato served at a reasonable temperature. It’s humble, relatively inexpensive, and not hard to come by for those looking (especially in an atmosphere of relative economic privilege).
Baked potatoes are portable but fleeting. You’re supposed to enjoy them by eating them, after which you’ll feel full and fulfilled for a couple hours until it’s time to find more food.
Baked potatoes are not dangerous. They’re also not flawed or offensive for disappearing after you eat them. Disappearing is kind of the whole point of organic matter, after all—disappearing and then reconstituting itself as something new.
It’s frightening, I know. But everything alive cools eventually. The work is to notice what’s warm while it’s in your hands, to eat what you can of it before it’s gone, and to let the rest feed whatever comes next.
You’re in the only real golden age there ever was, babe, at least for you—the one where you’re still here, and it’s still warm.
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MSWLs, truth be told, are really just marketing copy for agents themselves.
Bless you, Eve Ettinger, for sending me this!!
I cannot believe how insightful this was. This article applies so far beyond publishing - anyone could apply these concepts to their industry/their way of looking at things. I'm simply stunned Anna! You are a wise potato.
I’ve been living in the ’70s since 1970. I inherited my parents’ 1976 “ranch house” after caring for them for seven and a half years, so right now I’m sitting in a room with wood paneling and a stone fireplace and what used to be known as an acoustic ceiling, now sometimes vulgarly called a “popcorn ceiling.”
The 1970s were the first decade labeled “The Decade of Diminishing Expectations,” and it’s been rather disheartening, over the past half-century, to watch every succeeding decade plagiarize this title. The ‘70s didn’t seem like much at the time, but for a member of Generation Jones, it’s interesting to watch the era grow in stature—especially among people who weren’t born yet.
Was it a better time? The ‘70s were great in the way that anybody’s teenage years might be considered superior to the self-involved blandness of—what—a midlife crisis? The disappointing complexities of adulthood?
We listened to 8-track tapes, which loudly went CLUNK when changing “programs,” and one time I was making out with my girlfriend and the music went CLUNK and we thought my parents were coming through the front door, and we fell out of the chair because we were scared. This innocence differs significantly from the two-way paranoia of your parents scrolling through your phone.
There was no social media, so unless you were Norman Mailer or Zsa Zsa Gabor, it was impossible to self-dramatize in front of thousands of people, and if you were going to be bullied, it had to happen on playgrounds or the streets, and you could identify who was doing it.
In 1976, Jimmy Carter and Jerry Ford ran against each other but soon became good friends. Politics wasn’t nasty. Nixon was nasty, but even his own party and the Supreme Court agreed that he was a criminal, and they forced him out of office—he enjoyed no “immunity for official acts.”
Fast food was relatively new—it tasted good and it was edible—it wasn’t generally known as fast food, though it was fast and it was food. The interiors of Burger King and the International House of Pancakes (not IHOP) were sort of fancy-looking, not generic like they are today, and it was kind of special if your parents took you there on the weekend.
There was a strong environmental movement, and unless you lived on Love Canal, the planet wasn’t killing you yet.
There was a strong feminist movement—women were getting more rights without more backlash. After 1973, safe and legal abortion was actually available in all 50 states.
College and housing and automobiles were much more affordable than they are today, though everyone in the ‘70s complained about inflation.
People didn’t walk into schools or churches or grocery stores with guns and start killing other people.
I could go on and on, and still be more factual than nostalgic.
Even in an immense city like Los Angeles, you could walk down the street to the railroad tracks, hand-in-hand with your girlfriend, and walk across them into the multicolored flowers on the other side. Now there’s a wall in front of the tracks, and homeless people live there.
The ‘70s weren’t perfect. But you might have liked them, Anna.