A woman from England wrote me with questions about my book. This in itself was suspicious. From the internet most either want money, validation, or directions to the bathroom. She seemed genuinely interested in my writing. I answered her questions. She replied with more. We went back and forth and I enjoyed the exchange. There is always danger in this. The business world is full of people who understand artists are lonely mammals and curiosity often is just a free sample. Eventually she revealed she worked as an editor. This caught my attention. I happen to need an editor for the new book. The universe appeared to be offering popcorn for my movie. But when I asked about hiring her, she redirected me toward a friend. He was, she explained, more professional than her. This sounded noble. Also suspicious. I wrote him anyway. He turned out to be real. I Googled him. He had a significant job. The internet trained me to assume everyone is a Russian bot. He replied warmly, said flattering things about my writing. Artists should never trust compliments. We are descendants of dogs. Throw us a bone and we follow you into traffic.
Then came the referral. He recommended another person precisely because he liked my work. She is specialized in developing authors for their publishing house. I wrote her. She responded promptly with her fees, somewhere between six hundred and twenty-five hundred dollars. Suddenly the entire experience acquired the faint smell of a casino. Not an evil casino. A tasteful literary casino that apparently nurtured creative voices. Still, the sound of coins dropping into machinery seemed unmistakable. At this point I could no longer determine whether I was witnessing the ordinary mechanics of publishing or being herded, albeit slowly, through a beautifully mannered extraction process.
Everyone was sincere. No one was wearing a cape or twirling a moustache. Perhaps these people genuinely help writers every day. Perhaps I am merely suffering from the accumulated paranoia of adulthood. Still, I could not shake the feeling that somewhere along the journey from reader to editor to editor’s friend to author-development specialist, I had wandered into something suspicious. The truly remarkable part was everyone seemed perfectly nice. That is how the best systems work. Nobody appears to be manipulating you. They simply keep opening doors until eventually you find yourself standing in front of a cash register wondering how a conversation about books turned into “that will be $2,500 please”.
That’s when I abandoned the idea of hiring strangers from the sprawling Author Development Industrial Complex and decided instead to conduct a more dangerous experiment. I asked myself: who do I actually know? Who among my friends, who possesses intelligence and sufficient emotional instability to tell me the truth? Not publishing-industry aromatherapy. Not the literary equivalent of a chiropractor saying my manuscript merely needed better alignment. I wanted the people who would approach the book with a crowbar and a flashlight. Someone capable of saying, “This chapter is excellent,” followed immediately by, “This section reads like you were trapped in a room with your own metaphors for three consecutive days.”
What I needed were the dangerous ones. Smartypants. People with functioning bullshit detectors. People willing to identify a lazy sentence, a pretentious flourish, any of my writing that wandered off into the woods and never returned. Don’t spare me besides, criticism from somebody I respect lands differently. A stranger can reject your work but remain abstract. A friend whose intelligence you admire can point to a paragraph, “Bob, what in God’s name were you thinking here?” and suddenly the heavens part. The diagnosis arrives. It hurts in a useful way. Like discovering the noise in your car isn’t a transmission, just a clogged filter. That kind of honesty is worth more than all the professional encouragement money can buy.
That’s when I shared the whole mess with Magali. She possesses a useful superpower largely absent from my own operating system: skepticism. She Googled the email addresses, after sixty seconds announced the verdict.
“It’s a well-known publishing scam.”
A publishing scam? I stared at her. You mean I wasn’t engaged in a charming transatlantic literary exchange with thoughtful editors who had become captivated by my prose? I had been corresponding with a sophisticated harvesting operation designed to identify writers suffering from the common occupational disease known as Hope? The realization hit like a falling piano. My God. They had complimented me. They had asked intelligent questions. They had directed me toward other apparently intelligent people. Somewhere a machine figured out that the fastest route to my wallet is through the ego.
Even more disturbing was how willing I had been. Not completely. Cautiously willing. Like a raccoon cautiously willing to investigate a shiny object beside a highway. I wrote them all. I informed them they were criminals and parasites. Then I blocked them. Gone. The silence afterward was magnificent. Like throwing a cult out of your living room. I sat there enjoying the righteous indignation. For a brief shining moment I was not a confused author seeking guidance. I was a homeowner with a broom chasing raccoons off the porch.