You’re special, but not special enough

A note on the book industry's most painful, common wound -- and who's learned to exploit it.

How strange that there isn’t a word for a grief intimately familiar to most writers: that of feeling special but not special enough, special and marginal at the same time.

I’m just going to make one up: sparginal.

Sparginal is what you feel when the brilliant, powerful man who likes you—you!—turns out to be a sex addict on the make with at least a dozen other women. It’s what came with the “handwritten” postcard you got from your hero, nearly bringing you to tears, until you looked closer and realized the card was written in junk-mail ink. It’s what you inherited from the parent who met all your material needs and bragged to people about your straight A’s, then reacted with indifference or even hostility to your inner world—that is, everything that made you you. It’s what lingers after you spend any meaningful time in an organization led by people who shit-talk everyone else to your face and you to everyone else.

In sum, sparginality is the pain of demi-election, of somehow being picked and ignored by the same people at the same time. And it’s wildly painful; it rends one’s self-concept in two.

By the time they write a book—hell, by the time they become literate—I suspect the majority of authors already have bone-deep sparginal experience. To the walking wounded, book publishing calls out like the Statue of Liberty: Bring me your huddled masses who intellectually grasp that they have value but on some deep level also know that they’re garbage. Bring me everyone who’s ever believed that if you just figure out how to explain things well, someone will finally listen.

Feeling simultaneously picked and ignored might be the single most common pain anyone in book publishing ever feels—and as we know from Freud, traumatized people can rarely resist a little repetition compulsion. No wonder so many people plagued by sparginal melancholy find their way here.

This is a recipe for disaster: a real and distressing state, common in our industry, for which there happens to be no name.

This makes sparginal injury exceedingly difficult for anyone to recognize, let alone address. The injury thus festers in our subconscious, affecting our behavior in ways we don’t realize.

There are, for example, two big publishing conversations rotating rotisserie-style on social media this year, and both of them are basting in spargarine. Viz.:

1. The recurring rage on Substack, Threads, and Reddit about perceived malice, incompetence, and unprofessionalism in “trad publishing,” particularly with respect to PR and marketing; and

2. Authors’ struggle to contend with the deluge of AI-generated scam emails from “book clubs,” “publicists,” “marketers,” “editors,” “producers,” etc.: an already-horrendous problem getting worse by the day.

Neither of these problems strikes me as particularly intractable or complicated. (Neither are kidney stones, though, yet they still cause agony.) One could substantially ameliorate both with the same banal things that have safeguarded human relationships forever: clear communication; courage to say hard things, risking relational rupture as well as simple error; less avoidant busywork, more focused attention; performing less, connecting more. Things could improve, in short, with unconditional love as a business practice.

And yet, as with kidney stones, the agony of each problem renders its passage unimaginable. Eavesdropping on these online discussions feels like listening to a good friend cry through the latest iteration of familiar misery in their love life, not yet able to see all the straightforward things they might do to disrupt the pattern.

Put simply: I think sparginal trauma leaves many of us confused and vulnerable and indeed causes the entire publishing industry a lot of wasted time, money, and pain.

Let me explain.