/lit/ - Literature

Idk, what does your grandmother think?

>>22928815
the market shrank immensely over the past 2 decades, 90% of readers are women. if the jeditors that run the industry thought white males sold worth a fuck, there'd be more spots available because all they care about is money. Ironically, the state of women writing in some genres is worse than it was in the 30s, so everyone is fucked.

If you’re not in the East Coast or Iowa MFA club then it’s pretty damn hard

>>22928832
Iowa MFA has been shit since 2015

>>22928834
What happened in 2015?

>>22928928
Change of faculty and the type of writing the faculty prioritized. Absolutely mediocre white women and faggots who heinously imitated Bernhard dominated the faculty. Up until 2019, it was just whingy self-indulgent narcissists who can’t think and can’t write churning out iterations of The Loser, but it’s always about well-read American women living in Europe who constantly think about Celan etc. Then in 2019 and now, they started inviting blacks to teach

>>22928934
Sounds like something publishers would eat up though.

>>22928942
That’s the whole point of the MFA industry — to appease publishers who went to the same program. Doesn’t make it good writing

>>22928815
The entire arts world has been taken over by the woke.

>>22928815
You hear a lot of "a friend of mine in the industry" stuff so it's all hearsay, but use your eyes. Who gets deals, in spite of horrible sales and legitimately bad writing? Who gets articles written about their work? Who is being pushed in libraries and Barnes and Noble, etc?

It sure as shit isn't the white men, and really men in general get kind of ignored now. It's female dominated and the combination of Gender/Racial desire for some sort of "correction" or "retribution" means you'd better be some combination of woman, gay, black, and or immigrant. Strongest possible position you could be in is to be a lesbian Ghanaian female immigrant.

But the fact that people are starting to "talk" about these preferences, and the fact that they just aren't fucking making money, means a shift will likely come relatively soon. The overt racial preference system is coming out of fashion all over, it just remains to be seen if publishing will lead or lag in the shift. So for right this moment, it's pretty hard to get published as a white guy

>>22929011
Look up the award winners in 2023 for the Writer's Trust of Canada. The biggest prizes went to blacks for stories by blacks, for blacks. I'm glad those people could win and enjoy those cash bonuses, but there are absolutely no clear paths to success as a straight white male author in 2024 if you have any sort of attitude. I'd gladly tell somebody's mom to fuck off, which makes you ineligible for 98% of the pathways in life!

Don't give up though. Keep going. Those 6 sales a year still feel damn good.

>>22928815
very.

>>22929031
We're going to start selling big time because /lit/ users are going to become a new age guild together. Just watch.

>>22928815
>Especially as a white male?
Getting published is simultaneously really easy (tons of garbage gets published) and really hard (getting your foot in the door the first time).
If you're being honest, most people who want to be published don't just want to be published, they want to be remembered as great writers. With that in mind, think of the most popular fantasy authors right now. You probably thought of a list composing entirely of white guys. How many POC/Women have broken through pop culture barrier in the fantasy genre? Le Guin, Robin Hobb, Octavia Butler who are all oldfags. Newfags? Umm... N.K. Jemisin, Ken Liu, R.F. Kuang? That's 3 current writers compared to Sanderson, Martin, Rothfuss, Abercrombie, Erikson, Riordan, Bakker, Tad Williams, Guy Gavriel Kay, John Gwynne, Nicholas Eames, Jim Butcher, the list could go fucking on.
If you think that great writing shouldn't be political (Divine Comedy lmao) then put your money where your mouth is and write a normal fucking story without shoving your cringe-fest pseudo-philosophical bullshit agenda you ripped straight from fucking 4chan.

>>22929151
Dork alert