The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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Freddie deBoer points out that:
but when you point out the obvious inference of the former two points (namely: that publishing more books by women and minorities means publishing fewer ones by white males, and consequently that it has never been harder for a white male novelist to get published), people tend to scoff and roll their eyes. It's just basic mathematics: if you don't increase the total number of books published (and there's no evidence that this has happened), then publishing more books by women and minorities logically entails publishing fewer books by white males.
Despite being a white male and an aspiring novelist, I am not completely opposed to the trend towards publishing more books by female novelists. Although the proportion of Americans who claim to have read a book in the past year has fallen dramatically over the past fifteen years, women have always read more than men, and this remains true today. All things being equal, I can imagine a female novelist having an easier time writing a novel which would appeal to female readers compared to a male novelist doing the same thing. It follows that the drive to publish more novels by female writers might be a fundamentally sound business decision. It's the same basic argument as to why I could never get too bent out of shape about female underrepresentation in video game development*: PC and console gamers are overwhelmingly male, and all things being equal I imagine a male developer would have an easier time designing a video game which would appeal to men than a female developer would. Note that this argument does not apply to the drive to publish more writers from ethnic minority backgrounds: white Americans read far more books than every other ethnic group (including Asians, to my surprise).
But my question is this. As with any affirmative action-adjacent argument, the drive to publish more books by women and minorities logically implies that, for the last ~decade, literary agents and publishing houses have been optimising for something other than literary quality and/or commercial viability**. Has this resulted in any concomitant decline in revenues? Are revenues from publishing meaningfully lower now than they were ten years ago, controlling for inflation? And consequently, is there a potential gap in the market for a new publishing house to announce "at $Publisher, we don't care about a writer's identity markers and only care about how good the book is?" Or is publishing such an effective oligopoly that this isn't a viable option?
*Not to mention another more, uh, prurient entertainment industry.
**Spare me your "always has beens": I'm not completely naïve. I don't think it's controversial to say that the publishing industry is loudly, conspicuously announcing its decision to optimise for something other than commercial viability for the last decade in a way it wasn't before.
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